week 2

Monday 18th September

Lesson 1 & 2 - Rob

We started this session by playing a few walking around the space games. At first we got in-tuned to walking around light and flowy/ heavy and stiff. This also changed our persona as an character. Light = laid back, heavy = anxious.

In this lesson, our first exercise was to practise our projection. To do this we thought of a line from the play and practised saying that line to different areas of the room. The first was an imaginary candle we held in our hand, this was to practise our stage whisper. The second was towards a chair in the centre of the space, the last was to the back of the room. We then did the same exercise with a partner. The feed back I got from that exercise was that my voice can be heard but it comes more from my throat than my diaphragm, this makes the line sound more rough than it actually is. To rectify my mistake I will be using voice exercises to train myself to use my diaphragm more than my throat.

The next exercise we did was to create a character and introduce ourselves as that character to other members of the ensemble. this exercise was to help us to create background characters for the party scene in Romeo and Juliet. The 4 main things we had to come up with was a name, age, occupation, and skill. this was the profile of my character:

Name: Reontè

Age:18

Occupation: full time trapper

Skill: pulling out the skeng

Then we did an exercise to simulate the party scene, two of the ensemble were chosen to be the couple (R&J). Everyone else had a job to separate the couple while still acting in a party manner. The boys were to stop the Juliet character, and the girls went after the Romeo character. This was to help us simulate the party scene and what we may be doing for it.

Tuesday 19th September

Lesson 1 - Sharon

In this lesson we worked on Fighting techniques so we can build our believe-ability on stage. at first we talked about any experiences anyone had with stage fighting. We also talked about how to make the fight scene more believable and fun for the audience. We talked about modernising the fight scenes by using guns or lethal fist fights (knuckle dusters etc).

We then got into lines and and fought the person across from us in slow motion in cannon, slowly moving towards the middle where we all met. After this we split off into groups and each person in the group came up with 3 movements that the others had to react to. My three moves were: A punch to the stomach, slap a punch away and lastly grab and throw a kick.

We the merged those 2 activities together so that after the cannon line we drifted to our groups and also cannoned the groups.

This concluded our session for the day.

Wednesday 20th September

Lesson 1 - Sharon

In this lesson we played some more ensemble building games (such as wink murderer and grandma's footsteps etc.). We then went over what we did the last lesson. Most of this lesson we just spent re doing what we had done the previous day. I feel that this practise was needed because it helped us to make our fight scenes more believable.

Thursday 21st September

Lesson 1 - Rob

This was our first rehearsal lesson. In this session we talked about character intentions (why they come into the scene) and we looked at tone and personality, so that we may look at how the characters would act on stage. we decided that the whole ensemble should be on stage as much as possible, this makes the stage look more lively. We also said that the scenes should move on as fast as possible, as in as one goes off another comes in.

We started the Session by doing some vocal warm-ups. At first we did some breathing exercises. In this one was to breathe in for a certain amount of time, hold it for a certain amount of time and then let it out as a low humming sound until one had no breath left. this was to help us control our use of our diaphragms so that we are able to project for a longer period of time without stopping for a breath.

We then did an exercise that taught us to throw our voices towards the audience. This is what it looked like:

This exercise helped us to learn how to project our voices more from our diaphragms than from our throats, This was much help for me because in previous lessons I was told that my projection comes from my throat making it sound much more scratchy.

After this Rob gave us our roles from Romeo and Juliet. I was given the role of Romeo which I was very pleased with because that is the character I wanted to be from the start. We started building intentions for characters and then rehearsing scenes 1 - 5. Here are some pictures: