Scene 1 - Today, I think scene 1 went quite in terms of individual performances - everyone seemed to have a much better understanding of their characters and it was clear that people had been reading their script in their own time to familiarise themselves with their lines and trying to learn them (me included). I have been working individually to improve on my physicality because sometimes I look a bit hunched over and don't really embody the character in terms of physicality, so to work on this I had researched my character further and watched national theatre and university productions of Mother Courage to see how the actor who plays Eilif incorporates physicality to the character so I could get ideas and inspiration, but also mix this with my own interpretation of the character so that I'm not just copying someone else's performance because that wouldn't really help me to improve and progress in ALL areas. From this research, I had observed that Eilif's general look is very confident (perhaps too confident, definitely traits of arrogance) - when he walks he uses strong and confident strides (as a pose to small and awkward steps and stumbles) and when he is not moving around specifically, he is still mainly (a few wonders around in a small space - possibly out of boredom); most of his movements are big and confident - so this means, for example, when I say "Swiss Cheese too, he wants to be soldier too!" I really stretch my arm out onto his shoulder and pat it fairly hard to bring the attention to Swiss Cheese, instead just a simple point which would a) not do very well in terms of bringing the attention to Swiss Cheese because it is such a small gesture, and b) not embody the character well because, again, it is such a small and awkward gesture. I think to further work on my physicality, I need to analyse more of my lines and figure out what they mean in terms of subtext and then use this to make a decision on how to incorporate some sort of movement/physicality to that line and make sure it serves it's correct purpose.
Scene 2 - This scene was pretty average today, it was clear that a few people are still cite reading their lines, which really doesn't help because it takes that pace and flow away from the dialogue and it hard to keep fully in character properly because it makes you think "why hasn't he said his line yet" or "he's/she's saying the line slowly and there is an inconsistent pace in his/her voice" - you start to critique them in your head and then you loose character; the inconsistent pace in the dialogue also makes it hard in terms of characterisation because it takes away that conversational element of the dialogue, thus the lines sound very unnatural. This is simply just a case of people familiarising themselves with their lines. Because I have a lot of lines and chunky paragraphs in this scene, I felt it was best to work focus on voice when doing this scene (of course, still including my ideas about my physicality), because I still struggle with my Scottish accent and the chunky paragraphs really challenge me here. Aside from the accent, I think that is very loud (confident kind of loud) and very over top (mainly when he is telling the story about killing the farmers) because he wants to be noticed and he wants the attention.
Scene 3 + 4 - I'm not in this scene so I took it upon myself to use his time to annotate my script
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