Triple - Naturalism & Realism - Blog 5 - 19/09/16

Today, we had Tom come in and work on our viewpoints to help with our monologues. After working with the national theatre over the summer, he had a lot of insight to show us.

Viewpoints is, "a technique of composition that provides a vocabulary for thinking about and acting upon movement and gesture."

Below are the areas we focused on:

• Voice:
• Pace
• Tone
• Repetition
• Pitch
• Volume
• Accent
• Gesture (vocal gestures like stutters, ers and ums, and sneezes)
• Movement:
• Time
• Gestures
• Repetition
• Touch
• Proxemics
• Shape
• Eye contact
• Audience
• Architecture

We then were asked to stand in a diagonal line and showed how to highlight each other using movement viewpoints. This would be used to show a range of different relationships and scenarios and we experimented with this for a while to create more relationships and scenarios.

After this we wanted to implement these into our current monologues from the play "Eight". However, Tom suggested that as we weren't very familiar with these monologues yet, so we decided to use our monologues from our Auditions for Actors unit in Double.

After performing mine, Tom had the following notes:

• Good body language and movement
• Tone was nice but could be varied more
• Great eye contact maintained throughout.

For my second performance, Tom wanted me to remove my movement and focus on just sitting still and only gesturing with my hands. I found this rather tricky as this monologue is quite emotional, but Tom thought as I was directing my monologue to the audience before, I should try directing it to myself. This lesson was very helpful at evaluating my own performance and how to focus on all viewpoints at once.