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.

Triple - Naturalism & Realism - Blog 4 - 15/09/16

Today, we began working on our monologues in more depth and creating a character profile!

We started off by creating a character profile about our characters to help us get a better understanding of them. At first I found this rather difficult as I was unsure how to lay this out and what to actually draw from the monologue but after a while I got the hang of it. The layout I chose was similar to that from my London Riots character profile where I drew a gingerbread man and filled it with the emotions of my character and link them to the outside which are the given circumstances from the monologue.

Below is my character profile:

Next we were asked to focus on our first couple of lines as a strong start to a monologue is very important and should catch the audience's attention. We quickly learnt the first lines then performed them to the class and we made notes on how we could all improve.

When I performed my monologue, the class felt that, for a gay character, I hadn't portrayed him very camp. Although I didn't want my character, André, to be too camp as I feel it would've been too stereotypical and less entertaining, I needed to "camp it up," it a bit. At first, I found this immensely difficult but after changing my voice slightly and sitting my legs crossed more femininely, I could pull it off. I will need to work on this ready for next lesson.

Triple - Naturalism & Realism - Blog 3 - 14/09/16

Today, we begun our work on proxemics; the branch of knowledge that deals with the amount of space that people feel it necessary to set between themselves and others.

We started off by acting out our scenes again, keeping in mind proxemics, but this time without actually speaking. This tested our ability to portray our speech through actions whilst still focusing on how close we are to our partner and where our body is directed. Charlie and I found it difficult at first to perform the scene without speaking however this allowed us to focus on our movement much more meaning we made more progress with perfecting our proxemics.

We then added the dialogue back into the scenes now that we were better with our proxemics.

At the end of the lesson, I received my 15 minute (approx.) monologue which I didn't get from last lesson due to absence. Mine was about a 28-year-old gay art gallery owner whose boyfriend had just committed suicide.

Next lesson, we will look at these in more detail.

Triple - Naturalism & Realism - Blog 2 - 08/09/16

This lesson, we spent a great deal of time determining the difference between Naturalism and Realism. This was very confusing for me as until this lesson, I always thought that they both meant the same thing. But after this lesson I realised how wrong I was!

After collating ideas as a class, these are the thoughts we had:

• Realism is set in real situations with real characters who the audience honestly think are real. This usually doesn't take place in a theatre as the stage/lighting/sound makes it less believable.
• Naturalism showcases believable characters in far fetched scenarios but the audience don't mind this as it's much more interesting than realistic events. Naturalism asks the audience to suspend their disbelief in order to fully appreciate the play.
• An example we came up with is in the TV show "The Only Way Is Essex," the situations the characters face are very believable as are the characters, however in soap operas such as "Eastenders," the characters may be believable but the scenarios they encounter are very far-fetched but this seems much more entertaining for the audience.
• The way I liked to look at it was that in Naturalism, actors are performing and the audience is around them watching as the plot is very dramatic and centralised so it's more entertaining to watch. However, in Realism the actors are around the "audience" and they don't recognise it much as drama as it is extremely realistic and to some it may seem dull so it's not looked upon as much as Naturalism.

After learning these differences, we were asked to devise a piece of Naturalism. With no stimulus at all we assumed our imagination would take advantage of this freedom but we weren't sure at all what to do. Our first thoughts went to the ages of our characters and we thought it'd be best to stay with our own ages as this made them seem a lot more believable which led us to wanting to set our piece in a school where people of our age usually congregate. After attempting to write out a script, midway we felt stuck for ideas. We were then given a major event to base our piece around. We were told that there was a dead body in our living room and we had just found it; we were also told to improvise as we would find it a lot easier. After this stimulus, we found it only too easy to generate a piece based on it. Below is the video of the piece (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa2zif3oTlY):

What went well:

• We all kept in our roles very well.
• All of our characters were believable.
• The piece was realistic but just far-fetched enough for the audience to suspend their disbelief.

How to improve:

• Lorna's name didn't stay the same throughout the piece.
• As Ollie forgot the staging we had in place, he tried to call Lorna and I through a wall whilst we were supposedly outside.

Triple - Naturalism & Realism - Blog 1 - 07/09/16

Today we were split into two pairs (Ollie & Lorna/Charlie & Me) and asked to read through and give our perceptions on our scripts and the characters.

Our focus for this unit is Naturalism. With Stanislavski being a fan of the ideas of Realism, we decided to focus on his history and the way he liked to do things, keeping in mind who he collaborated with and the practises he uses to train his actors. Stan's "system" is a systematic approach to training the Russian actors in the 20th century and some actors in theatre and film swear by it to this day.

This system featured three main sections:

• Mind: This would refer to getting into the mindset of your character and this would require tonnes of research into the character whether this would mean reading the play that the character is from and drawing facts about them or if it's an original character, decide these facts for yourself.
• Feeling: This section depends on experiencing a characters emotions. This requires jumping into the mindset of the character trying to personally experience their lives first hand. Most actors don't take this so literally and simply imagine how it feels to be their character and link back to their own personal memory; for example if a character were to feel very angry, an actor would link this back to a time where they were equally angry. However, some actors, including the likes of Heath Ledger, Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro, take this to a whole new level and fully immerse themselves into the lives of their character. Whilst Heath Ledger was preparing for his role as The Joker, he locked himself away in his hotel room in London and played around with the voice and laugh of The Joker and kept a diary written entirely as the character of The Joker.
• Will: This part refers to taking into account the given circumstances of the character and his/her scenario. These circumstances are given to you within the play and means you won't have to assume these things but at times there will be details you will want to know about your character that aren't mentioned. This is where Stan's "Magic If" comes into play. Thinking objectively like this makes you asks questions about your character and you get to decide the answers. If you're wondering what your character's favourite animal is and it's not mentioned then you can make that assumption yourself. Also, you can make assumptions as to how your character or how another character might react to previous actions.

After establishing this, we read through our scenes and we wrote down our thoughts on the characters in the scene. Charlie and I were given a scene from the play "Punk Rock". Below are my opinions on the characters:

• I feel the relationship between Chadwick and Will is very forced
• Will is a burden on Chadwick
• Will is a liar
• Chadwick relishes in telling Will about Lilly - But then feels sympathy as he realises its hurt Will's feelings
• Will hasn't got good social skills
• Chadwick is uncomfortable with Will
• Will wants to get closer to Chadwick
• Chadwick ignores Will at first

After reading through the script and combining our thoughts, Charlie and I blocked and performed the scene.