UNDERSTANDING MY CHARACTER
Choosing to play the part of a man didn’t seem a big deal to me even though this character I was to play was a king. I thought I could easily relate to the character even though I am not a man but during my character development process I started finding it more difficult to get into the role. I decided at this point that if I was going to play this character properly I would need some help and practice. My character Creon comes across as a very strong character and quite arrogant to a certain extent. I thought to get an insight into my characters personality and mind set I would put myself in a higher position than everyone else, I would act as if every one around me were peasants. I tried to do this for a couple of hours at first I did get it right and I managed to carry myself graciously but lost it after a wile. Later in the evening I was watching TV and then it occurred to me to find a movie with a king in it and watch how he acts. I watched the king and I and I tried to pick out some of the king mannerisms his body language and typical gestures. The way he stood when he was addressing his subjects and this really helped. In terms of my vocal presentation I had to make sure that my slight American accent wasn’t going to be a problem so I constantly tried to speak in a proper English accent. To represent a king vocally I thought wouldn’t be too difficult as I would expect a king to speak with dignity and definition. His body language I would expect to be stern and authoritative. Trying to tackle this with my very high pitched voice isn’t going to be easy. My gestures are also very different from that of a king as I have girly hand gestures and I almost sort of talk with my hands which is an unlikely thing for a king to do.
TEXT ANALYSIS AND REHERSAL PROCESS
Our first ideas about the play within in the group was to have a God father type theme and Creon the king would be the God father which would be relative to the part of the king i.e. being sovereign which the God father was, a king is the head of his kingdom and the God father was the leader of the Corleoni family and the Mafia. After much research we scraped the idea because we couldn’t do the accents.
4th November – after reading the text through as a group we tried to get into the feel of the characters. We decided to split up into mini groups in order to start actually acting and getting into the swing of things. This was a very slow process and almost seemed like a drag. I rehearsed my scene with Antigone first. The opening speech by my character was very long and I think I might have a problem remembering it. I think I might actually cut the dialogue. I also thin quite frankly that the structure of the text is quite odd especially the chorus it is hard to get a general idea of what the chorus is saying.
11th November – Have been reading the text trying to learn my lines, I have recorded all of the play on tape I got my family members to play all the different parts and I hoping this will help me with learning my lines. While recording the dialogue I had all these ideas about how I was going to lay emphases on some of my characters words, how I’m going to gesture when a particular line was said etc.
Creon
“I know how loyal you are to Thebes and now that etoclese is dead for his sake and for the sake of Thebes you will be loyal to me”
that phrase I think really defines Creon`s character he is probably trying to remind the people of how loyal they were to Etoclese and he is almost demanding in a nice way that they give him the same respect and would not accept anything less.
18th November
In today’s lesson we continued the rehearsal process. We focused on getting the chorus together. We decided to choreograph a series of movements to illustrate the text. We decided that we were going to use very much exaggerated gestures as they did in a Greek chorus. An typical example of how we did this is when the line “a life of luxury and love”, when deciding how we were going to put across this line we decided that in order to show luxury we could have gestures such as drinking champagne or flicking money with pompous and almost sort of snobbish facial expressions and then for love we decide that we would all sigh in unison and look up towards our right placing our hands on our hearts and looking up dreamily. By the end of the lesson we had managed to choreograph a whole movement piece for the chorus we had chosen.
25th November
I’m not sure how much more rehearsal time we are going to get once we start work on frog spell seen as we no longer have classes on Monday as a result of our frog spell preparations. Well in today’s lesson we didn’t really do much we tried to do the blocking of the piece but it didn’t really work that we as we kept loosing focus and getting distracted. I rehearsed my scene with heamon today and it seems every one is gradually learning their lines. I think I have also made steady progress in my attempt to learn my lines.
Today both groups had to show jo what we,ve done so far but as in real performance conditions. Well we had a couple of group members missing and we barely knew our lines which wasn’t good enough. She was less than impressed and told us all off. After the lesson we decided that in ordeder to get our work up to scratch w were going to have to get together for extra rehearsals out the lesson time. Well compared to the other group it seemed like we had been wasting our time as they had all their lines memorised and their performance was excellent compared to ours.
FINAL PERFORMANCE
Well our final performance today weren’t pretty well, we all knew all our lines and the acting was good. I was a bit nervous about it but once I did my first scene I was fine and more confident. The chorus didn’t go as well as it could have but it was ok on the whole. As for the other performers in the group they were all on top form everyone knew their lines and it went smoothly. While watching the other group performed their piece I noted a few things like the creon in the other group was very monotonic through out and I made a note to my self to make sure I don’t have the same tone of voice for every scenario as some scene were rather low key while the others which were more confrontational would have been a bit more aggressively toned.
