Week Two

Posted on February 17th, 2007 by tilly26.
Categories: Theatre Journals for 100.

Wow, only week 2, and already it feels like we’ve been at it for ages. Though I must admit I’m feeling a little concerned about the fact that we’re behind on the rehearsal schedule already. We’re supposed to have done Void #1 and Alex’s Memory #1 by now and we’re not even through the first void scene. I think the issue behind this may be over-blocking. Because of this it seems every action and word is directed exactly, not leaving the actors much creative freedom and taking up a lot of time. I think it’s still too early to be getting into such fine detail for now, and we shouldn’t get too hung up on the little things and just let the actor explore what they think their character should be doing.

I think part of why it’s being over-blocked is because we don’t know our characters too well yet so it’s hard for us as actors to take control and say “in this situation my character would react like this…” It would have been good to have just the actors in before we started rehearsing and just develop our characters. This would have been valuable not only for the quality of the play, but also for time saving, as the rehearsals would move along a lot faster then. I’m not sure whether or not I’ve brought this up with Mr Cooper yet, but I would really love a session (possibly at a lunch time some time this coming week) for the actors to read over the script again, trying to extract clues about how their characters are written to be and the embedded direction within the script. We should also do some character discovery exercises like we used to do back in the day with our year 10 monologues. I thought they were a bit weird then, but looking back I found them vital in the discovery of my characters and giving them contexts. As well as these things, the actors should all be doing their characters backgrounds/contexts/histories. I’m not sure if anyone has done that yet, if they have it hasn’t been showing up in rehearsals. I know I’m guilty of not having done that yet either. Perhaps after the five main actors have done this they should present their info to each other, so as we are all on the same page. Nia and Alex especially need to decide on their history together. And maybe in these actors discovery sessions we could improvise scenes from when our characters were alive,

eg. –>Nia and Alex shopping for groceries or having an argument
–>Sophie’s morning routine of waking up and how she gets to work or a conversation with her mum in hospital
–>Ketu telling his wife and kids about one of his discoveries (not the ones mentioned in the script) or hunting
–>the moments leading up to the guide’s death or her first time in the void

Get what I mean? Any way these are just thoughts that I had that would help me personally and may help other actors and move the rehearsals along faster. This would also create a lot more for the actor’s folios.

I was also thinking about accents. I’ve been over the script a few times now and from what I can gather Nia and Alex are French. At first I didn’t think anything of the French commentator until I realised there was no other reference to any other country or location for Alex and Nia. It’s pretty clear that Sophie is from London and Ketu is from Africa. So the question is do we try for accents? French accents would be very difficult but still achievable, and an English accent would make Sophie a lot more authentic and shouldn’t be a difficult task for Gemma. The Guide could be from any where, and would probably have a universal accent of superiority, similar to Lucas’ in Fame.

That’s about all of the spilling my guts will do tonight =p
So until next time…

3 comments.

Week One

Posted on February 5th, 2007 by tilly26.
Categories: Theatre Journals for 100.

First week back of theatre, good clean fun. We learnt how to use this vineblogs crap, which is craptastic. Though I may just be down on it becuase I can’t seem to get the “trisexual” background happening. Blast. Anyhooo.. I was looking at the preproduction roles we have for acting for 100, which i think need to be done before we start rehearsing. There are two points that we need to cover:

  •  actor’s annotated rehearsal schedual and/or initial script annotations.

I’m not too worried about that one as we haven’t made up a rehearsal schedual or talked about the script much yet. It’s the next point that makes me think I may have actually do some work terrifying thought).

  •  actor’s research notes as influenced by the playscript and the initial concepts.

Ummmmm…. what the hell? Yeah… may have to look at that one at some point =s

So I guess I have to start looking at what other companies have done with it for the research stuff as assistant director, and how other people have played the guide as acting is my other stage craft. Yeah that’s right, I’m the guide =D Cooper told me this a few hours ago while waiting for my dad to pick me up from Fame rehearsals, as my parents evidently don’t love me.

We read over the script in class, and I’ve gotta say I was hating the thought of it from how it had been described to me previously (some kids with bamboo sticks acting out different memories), it all sounded very year 9 drama to me. But upon reading it I’ve found that it’s actually really interesting. It has some very interesting characters, a lot of mystery about it, and combines light and shade with a sense of urgancy and even some nice humour (“and I thought: what a great shag”). I’ve read reviews about it and people seem to rave on about how much it makes the audience reflect on their own lives and think what memories they would choose in that situation, but honestly I’m not real big on reflection, and this play didn’t make me think about myself once. Actually no, thats not entirely true, I could really relate to Sophie. But it wasn’t like I thought “Oh if I was in that situation, being similar to Sophie, what kind of memory would I choose?”. So we may have our work cut out for ourselves to create that point of reflection for our audiences.

Oh and yet another year of kick arse theatre student. It’s really not the same without the ones who left last year, but our four newbies are heaps of fun. I think they may still be ajusting to how different theatre is to everything else, its really fun to watch them watch us haha. Welcome to the four new Theatre Girls Joshy, Jordy, Gemma, and Teigan =]

 

Theatre Girls 06 Fo’ Life!

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