Focussing on subtext - 8/11/16

In today's lesson our main focus was subtext - subtext is basically reading between the lines, understanding what the character is saying and why they're saying - and we performed the first scene, but every time we have a meaning underlying our line, or a line that isn't what they actually feel, or in reaction to someone else's line, we clap and say what we really mean but still in character. For example, on my line "The war doesn't scare me." the subtext behind this is that he is actually quite scared of war but he is always trying to prove that he's tough and fearless - his egotistical nature always gets the better of him. This really helped me understand the first scene a lot more because I understood the reasoning behind my lines and I was able to think of what my character thinks about what others say and my reactions accordingly, thus it was easier to act. I think subtext and understanding/ interpreting scripts is one of my main problems within drama so I definitely look forward to doing more work on this because this lesson really helped me on it.
After this, we each chose a scene that our character is in and we annotated it, referencing subtext. This also really helped me because I was able to breakdown each line bit by bit in my own time so I was able to understand it fully to the best of my ability. I will be doing this to all of my scenes because this really helped my understanding of not only the script, but also my character too. *insert photo of annotated scene*
As our plenary, we had to come up with a controversial quote that describes our character - for example for mother courage we was given "Courage is a business woman because of her children. Courage could not be a business woman because of her children." Essentially, this means that Mother Courage uses her children to put in positions of trade but they also drag and slow her down in the profession. My quote that  I came up with was "Eilif's downfall: His ego or his mother?" His ego brings him down because he thinks he's tough and a 'big man', and because of this he gets himself into life threatening positions - like the war. From what I've analysed so far, his mother
 likes to big up Eilif (as mentioned in detail in my previous blog entry) and doesn't really help his egotistical ways, it just makes him think himself even more tougher than he is and again putting himself in more dangerous positions that he cannot survive.