Unit 7 - Assesing Progress and Moving Ahead

 Unit 7

I believe I have grown as an actor coming up to this point. At the beginning of the year I was a novice actor (no prior work outside of school), but since September my skills as an actor and student has grown. some examples of skills that have improved for me are:

• Diction /enunciation
• Projection
• Slowing-down lines
• Line learning
• Being on time
• Improvisation

Time line (Units 1-6)

We started off by studying Romeo and Juliet because we were going to perform it at The Shaw Theatre. I was familiar with the play (in a GCSE English sort of way) so I knew what the language meant which made it easier for me to study the characters and choose which I wanted. I was very glad to receive the main role of Romeo but sceptical because I had never done stage kissing before (or real kissing). So since this play was my first kiss I had to prepare myself both physically and psychologically, because if I didn't the scene would not look as effective. This would be because I would not be able to show affection since I had never been in this situation. To overcome this obstacle I practised with one of my close friends (not the kissing part) so I could learn how to show affection in the situations of Romeo and Juliet.

After Units 1-4 (Romeo and Juliet) we were given the chance to write a one-act play and get it published. The company hat came to work with us during this project was Papa Tango. This project helped us to brush up on our writing and directing skills because after we had written the plays Papa Tango brought in some professional actors to perform our pieces so that we could see how they would look staged. Writing and directing the piece got my creative mind flowing more because I wasn't only thinking about my self and how I would look, I was thinking more about the company as a whole. My group's play was called 'The Unknown Truth'. The play was about a girl who is reminiscing about the moments before her brother's death while she is stuck in a psychiatric hospital. My group tried to make the start and the end of the play link so it seems like Alicia (the girl) has gone through the loop over and over. to do this we repeated the sequences at the beginning at the end. This is the link to the script: HERE

The second play we studied was 'The Three Sisters' by Anton Chekhov. We used this play to explore the theories of the practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski. Again in this play, my role was quite predominant, I played Andrey in act one and two and played Ferapont in act three. Since I had already done the stage kissing during Romeo and Juliet I was fine with that portion of the performance. The hard part was switching from character to character. To start off getting over this problem I studied my characters as best as I could, that meant analysing my characters by what they say and by what other characters say about them.

While we were working on The Three Sisters we also started studying the play 'The York Realist' by Peter Gill. We were to perform our own response to the play on The Donmar stage. The main challenge of this project was the devising part. This wasn't too daunting because when we worked with Papa Tango, I worked on my group's scriptwriting. It was easier to create content after we had really studied the play and its themes. We chose to base our performance on the theme of 'Home' or 'The feeling of belonging'. This drove us to use our own stories to put out the theme of belonging. I feel like using our own stories made it even easier for us to come up with a piece because instead of acting as a character we were putting ourselves into the piece.

My monologue

On the 19th March we were to perform Shakespearean monologues in class. This was so we have a Shakespearean Monologue in our repertoire for auditions to either further education or work placement as an actor. I performed Romeo's monologue describing his feelings about Juliet (starting line: But soft, what light through yonder window breaks). i decided to perform this monologue because i was already familiar with the abbreviated version from when we Performed Romeo and Juliet at the Shaw theatre. My feed back was that my memory and projection was very good but my articulation was a little bit off and I was also told that I move/fidget too much which takes the focus off from my words which could take away from the feeling of my monologue.