We also tried to use the stage to differentiate between the real and playground scenes. The playground scenes were kept on the stage and the other two slightly off. Of course, for the scene with the piano, we could not move the piano, we could not move the piano on to the stage, as it was too big, therefore we had to act off the stage. We could also have done the garden scene on the stage but it made it more realistic, not to have it in the middle of the waste ground.
Luckily, unlike the other 3 members of my group, I only had one character where as they had two. To help me get to know my character, I did the following ‘Role on the Wall’.
The following pages show clothing and make-up which I got ideas for my characters clothing and make-up from. As you can see, these pictures are pictures of ‘ Grease’. Although the characters in that play are slightly older than my character, I feel it gave me a good perspective of clothing from the 80’s. There is also a photo, which I feel is particularly good for my make-up; it is a close up on the main character, Sandy’s face. I think that this showed well how to make someone look younger than they actually are.
My final choice for make-up is shown and my choice of clothing was majorly influenced by ‘Grease’. When I went to see the play on stage I bought a T-shirt, saying, ‘You’re the on that I want’, I thought that any child in the 80’s would be greatly interested in the film and so I thought this top was a good choice. I then chose a purple tartan skirt to wear with it.
Adopting our Characters
Even after having done the roll on the wall there were still ways in which we needed to help adopt our characters. Again we used hot seating and interviewing although I definitely had an advantage, being that I only had one character therefore, I need not need to switch from one roll to another and therefore was able to maintain the one character more accurately than I would if there were two. However, adopting the character was not as easy as I had not created this character, and so had to work out her inner thoughts etc. therefore making it a lot harder to become the character.
Although this helped me to establish what my character was like, it did not help me to distinguish how my character would react when faced with different situations. For this I had to use slightly different techniques.
Rehearsal Techniques
As well as continually rehearsing, we had to use a number of techniques in order to make our acting ‘believable’. For this, I again used some of Stanislavski’s techniques, including, ‘emotional’ and ‘sensory’ memory. I particularly used this in being a child as a tried to remember what my outlook of the world was when I was that age. I also took time to watch younger children, and to see how they respond to difficult situations. I also tried to look at the way young children move, at the age of nine, they are not really very fidgety any more and they are starting to gain an understanding of life. However, they still do not know all there is to no, and get a little confused from time to time. This is also made evident within the scenes that we act.
Evaluation
Overall I thought my work towards the rehearsals of the play and the performance itself was good. I thought that we rehearsed this play much more thoroughly than the others did and, even so, neither of the performances was better than the other. It may sound strange, but although we rehearsed it well there was a large period of time between rehearsals and the final performance where the play was not practised very frequently. Unfortunately, this meant that when the final performance came some people were unsure of their lines and where they had to stand.
I was happy with the use of light, although in scene 2 we needed to get more light under the piano as it was very difficult to see the actress under there. I think we dealt with this as best as we could as we un-drew the curtains, to let some light in from behind.
I think the use of props was good, everyone knew what they were doing and although some lines were forgotten, overall there were no major mistakes.
Again, my nerves got the better of me and my speech did go too fast, where I noticed it I did try to slow it down a little. However, as we got further into the play, I did think that I got more relaxed, and therefore my lines slowed down anyway.
I know that I made mistakes, which hopefully on the video were not evident. The first of which was the chanting in a circle. We had normally said disobey 3 times but this time only said it two. I thought the others were going to carry on and so ended up singing the last line on my own. I didn’t stop, and hoped that I had made it look as if it were meant to happen and not as if it were a big mistake.
Also, in the first scene two of the other members were laughing, this was not actually in the script, and is probably due to nerves. With two people giggling, it was very hard for me to control my laughter however. I thought that both they and I controlled it much better when the actual speaking came in.
Scene 3 was also difficult to act as the subject was a bit awkward. However, putting this aside, we both just got on with the scene. We re scripted it slightly, as there were certain things in the script that we did not feel comfortable doing.
Scene 8 I had also found difficult as, this may sound silly, but I found it hard to skip and sing at the same time. However in the final performance I was very pleased as I overcame this problem with ease. I am glad, as the skipping rope was a very awkward prop. Another problem with this scene was that we needed a penknife but did not have one, therefore we had o mime. It was very difficult to make the audience believe that we actually had something that was not there.
We also had to do some work on our character’s motives and objectives. What were the characters trying to achieve at any point of time? Each character had a purpose and a motive, what we had to work out was when and what it was.
Not only did we need help structuring the mind of the character but also the body positions, again we used freeze frames which are always useful as they freeze the action which is going on and determine whether the positions of the characters bodies coincides with what is going on in their heads. Also we used character modelling where we all reshaped each others characters as they could see our positions more clearly than we could, this proved a useful exercise as this helped us choreograph the play much more thoroughly.
All in all the play went pretty well. All of the actresses came across problems that they managed to overcome tremendously. I am very proud of all of us and feel that after a lot of hard work the final performance was a great success. I think that the movement and expression in the play was particularly good as everyone had mastered the movements and opinions of children and that was not an easy task to grasp.
