Applying Acting Styles

Bertolt Brecht

His full name was Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (February 10th 1898-August 14^th 1956), and he was born Medieval City of Augsburg, in the Bavarian part of the German empire. Baravia remained his place of living until 1924.

Bertolt’s mother was Sophie Brecht (Née Brezing) (1871–1920), a devout Protestant, whose influence meant that Bertolt knew the bible, and at a young age was exposed to Luther’s German translation. Sophie also suffered with breast cancer for much of Bertolt’s youth. His father was Berthold Friedrich Brecht (1869–1939), who was Catholic, but persuaded to have a Protestant wedding to Sophie when they wedded in 1897. Berthold worked at a paper mill at which he became managing director in 1914.
Bertolt had one sibling, a younger brother named Water who was born in 1900, and their family was middle class.

As a child, Brecht suffered with a congenital heart condition as well as a facial tic. For the purpose of relaxation, he was sent to a sanitarium. His health had another turn for the worse at age twelve when he had a heart attack, but he made a good recovery and was soon able to resume his education.

He had a good education, attending a Protestant elementary school Volksschule from the age of six, and then at age ten a private school; The Royal Bavarian Realgymnasium (Koeniglich-Bayerisches Realgymnasium).
There he was schooled in latin, humanities, and later learnt of philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche. It was during his time at school here that he began his writing, co-founding and co-editing “The Harvest”, a school magazine. By the time he was sixteen, Brecht was writing for a local newspaper at this point.
At age 18 Brecht was almost expelled from his education for disagreeing with the popular view that it was necessary to serve for your country in the war, but the threat of being expelled never came to fruition, and by the time he was nineteen he had left school anyway as he was employed doing clerical work in the war, the reason he was kept to clerical work being his health conditions.

It was in 1917 that Brecht resumed his path of education, now attending Ludwig Maximilian Universitaet in Munich, studying medicine. By the time Brecht was studying medicine here, his mother’s cancer was escalating to the point where she had to have heavy doses of morphine.
It was whilst attending here that Brecht wrote his first play, “The Baal”, which he wrote on the subject of the life of C.D Grabbe , after having read Hanns Johst's “The Lonely One” and insisting that a much better play could be written on the same subject.

Brecht’s studies were interrupted yet again in 1918 when he was drafted into the war to serve as a medical orderly, but 1918 was also the year that saw Brecht write his second play “Drums in the Night”, a tale of a soldier who, on returning home from war, discovers the woman who was is fiancé is now engaged to a war profiteer.

In 1919 Brecht joined the Independent Social Democratic party, and thus began his involvement with communism, which would continue for the rest of his life.

Subsequent to his to his interest in socialism, he began to write theatre reviews for an independent socialist newspaper, by the name of “Volkswillen”.

1919 was also the year which saw Brecht become a father, as his girlfriend at the time Paula Banholzer gave birth to their son, Frank. But, in 1921, he took his second trip to Berlin, where he met the actress and opera singer Marianna Zoff,  who he soon married and had a daughter with; Hanne Hiob, who in fact lived to become a famous German actress.
Brecht’s love life was far from the conventional and monogamous kind, as even married to Zoff and having a child with her, he was in many affairs throughout their marriage, one of which ended up bringing about their divorce. The said affair was with actress Helene Weigel, who had his son Stefan in 1924 and who he ended up divorcing Zoff for in 1927. Weigel and Brecht married in April 1929, and the year after their marriage, the couple had a second child; a daughter named Barbara. Interestingly, Barbara as well as Brecht’s other daughter Hanne, became an actress.
It should also be noted that in 1944 Brecht had a child with Ruth Berlau, but sadly it did not survive.

Brecht’s fuel for passion and sexual experience did not only extend as far as marrying several women, but it is also thought that Brecht never had ”no fewer than three mistresses at any time throughout his adult life”[1]. Moreover, from the young age of sixteen Brecht is also known to have begun regularly visiting a brothel for the purpose of gaining sexual experience.
Brecht was also no stranger to homosexuality, as he used to invite artistically minded male friends to his home on weekends to read “erotic compositions”[2], and in his diaries contained loose reference to his need for both males and females to satisfy his sexual desires.

Back to Brecht’s career however, it continued to blossom as in 1920 he became chief advisor on selection of plays at Munich Kammerspiele, and continued with writing his own plays; his works in the early 1920s being In the Jungle of the Cities (1923,)Edward II (1924,)The Elephant Calf (1925), and Man Equals Man (1926).
Drums in the Night was the first play of Brecht’s to be performed however, premiering in 1922 at the Munic Kammerspiele and winning Brecht the Kleist Prize. The first performance of Baal came the following year.
The flourishing success of Brecht’s writing throughout the 1920s was partly due to a move he made to Berlin in 1924, which he was insistent was a necessity to his writing career. In the years following the move Brecht also published his first ever book of poetry, named “Hauspostille”, which also won Brecht a literary prize. In 1924 Brecht also became a consultant at Max Reinhardt's Deutches Theatre in Berlin.
Though Brecht’s work was going so extremely well, it was actually politics which was fast becoming a large interest in his life, and his political views and opinions fast began to influence his work and became apparent in it. It is fitting then, as where there are opinions there is inevitably a counter argument, that some discord and unpleasantness slowly began to erupt around Brecht’s work.
In 1930 Brecht’s opera “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mohagonny” opened in Leipzig and caused a riot.

Two years later, a political film by Brecht named “Kuhle Wampe” after a place in Berlin were unemployed people lived in shacks, was apparently too controversial,  as after premiering in Moscow it was banned from theatres in Germany.

Despite the backlash against some of his work and his political position, Brecht persevered with both a literary and political lifestyle, writing even more plays such as He Who Says No (1930),The Measures Taken (1930), and The Mother (1932), and continuing to let his beliefs shine through in his material.

But, as 1933 dawned, Brecht began to fear for his very life. Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, and Brecht fled with his family, living in exile. Brecht’s work was then banned in Germany, and in 1935 he was stripped of his German citizenship.
During his years of exile Brecht wrote Mr Puntila and his Man Matti (1940), Mother Courage and her Children (1939), The Good Person of Szechwan (1941), and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Uri (1941), whilst living in many places such as Vienna, Zurich and Prague, until he eventually gained his Visa and went to the USA in May 1941. However, in 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee called Brecht into questioning to testify about his alleged communist activities.
Fortunately Brecht managed to outwit those investigating him, but fearing that something else might happen due to politics in America at the time, he quickly fled the USA, flying out to Switzerland only shortly after his testimony.

One year later in 1948, Brecht’s long exile came to an end and he returned to Germany.
Once back in Germany, Brecht and his work were recognised and appreciated by the Communist cultural establishment, who happily provided Brecht with the opportunity to direct Mother Courage and Her Children at the Deutsches Theatre. Soon Brecht founded his own theatre company, the Berliner Ensemble, and in 1954 he was awarded his very own theatre; Theatre am Schiffbauerdamm, which he accepted, despite his differences with the type of Communism the German Democratic Republic practiced.

For the last few years of his life Brecht wrote few plays, the success and fame of which didn’t match that of his earlier plays. However, during these few years, he did write many of his most well-known poems, including Buckower Elegie. In 1955 Brecht was awarded a Stalin Peace Prize, just one year before his death. He died of a heart attack on August 14^th 1956.

For me, researching Bertolt Brecht’s life and contextualising his work and theories has really helped me with understanding what informed his views and opinions, especially politically, and how this affected his plays and the messages he was trying to send.  As Brecht was so politically minded I can see how he developed many of his theories and techniques such as Alienation in order to really get an audience to think, and through this try to make a real difference to society.

Also while working on Mother Courage I have been considering the time it was written in, what was going on in his life and how this impacted the actual content of the play. This has been really helpful for me, to think about the themes and social points of Mother Courage in relation to Brecht’s personal experience of war, and to develop an informed understanding of what Brecht wanted to do with this play; produce a war story which instead of glorifying war, sent out very anti-war messages and highlighted the corruption within war times and the ultimate futility of it.

I think for me as an actor working on and performing Mother Courage it is really important I’m able to understand what Brecht wished to achieve with the play, and by learning about him, his background and upbringing, his life and views, I think my interpretation of the play has strengthened and I also find it much more accessible as a result of this.

Epic Theatre

A concept primarily introduced by Bertolt Brecht, Epic Theatre is a way of viewing theatre which moves away from the norm. Brecht suggested through this that an audience viewing a piece of theatre should not be sympathising with the characters and being immersed in the story, but should rather be analysing, looking at objectively and even critiquing the actions and characters. Through this method of consuming theatre the audience should then reflect upon themselves and the real world in the same way, being able to look at things objectively and think clearly about morals, politics and external actions and relationships of and between people.
Brecht encouraged his actors to distance themselves from their characters, and to use their roles as a means of portraying how different characters behaved towards one another and as indications of social relationships. He told his actors to do this, not to think about their characters inner monologues and thoughts and feelings. Part of using the characters as symbols for different types of people is that when playing Brecht's characters, actors are often encouraged to use things like stereotypes and gestus (which I discuss in the below rehearsal diary) to tell an audience clearly what that character is like and what they represent quickly and easily without the need for deeper exploration of that character's psyche. 

This entire concept of theatre is very contrasting to that of Konstantin Stanislavski, who we studied in year one, whose whole theory was about the psychological aspects of theatre, an actor truly becoming one with their character, understanding their feelings, thoughts, personalities and empathising with them, and the situation on stage appearing as real as possible. 

“Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it” means what?

This quote could be interpreted to mean many different things I’m sure, but what it means to me is something very clear and, in my opinion, exceptionally relevant to any form of art or media.

When you read a book, when you see a play, or hear the lyrics to a song, you can be inspired. What you read, see or hear can affect you quite incredibly, even if somewhat subconsciously.
Our opinions, as individuals and as a society, are susceptible to influence from all around us, whether it be from the people we speak to, the goings on in the world, or the art we consume on a daily basis. What we absorb from all of this informs our views, opinions and ourselves as we evolve, and as we are always able to learn more and grow more, these things are able to affect the way we think and feel and our growth as a person or as a larger community.

And so when somebody or something is given a platform, a voice, it should be used to do well, to discuss important matters, express opinions, and inspire change for the better, because anyone that platform or voice reaches can be impacted by what they see, read or hear.
Now, what better platform could there be to speak from than a stage? What could be more expressive and inspiring than art; paintings, theatre, dance, music, film, television, poetry?
People do, and we as a society do listen to what is conveyed to us through the art we choose to surround ourselves with, and so, simply through spreading thoughts, ideas, and views through art to people, we can shape the world. An artist of any kind really can make a difference through their contributions.

Art is not something which simply shows us exactly what we see in our lives and in this world; it’s something which can display endless possibilities.
Sure, art can imitate life, much of real life is used in art, but then it is expanded, or analysed, even questioned, and what comes out of it is something more than just what went in, it is something which exposes and explores life.

And from this, this fascinating process of communication, sharing and influence through an infinite number of creative outlets, we find that art really can be used to shape the world and the people in it, and that it can be true; life really does imitate art.

I find this quote extremely relevant to our work in Mother Courage, as this play was intended to send out very strong messages, specifically anti war messages, and it is our responsibility performing it to keep in mind the influence our work could have and do the best we can to convey the social and political points the play makes.

Mother Courage and Her Children

This musical was written during the peak of WWII, during Brecht’s exile.
An important Brecht motto relating to this play is “war teaches people nothing”, the play is very anti-war and breaks past the tropes of normal war stories and plays, it portrays war as having no heroes and no possible positive outcome.

Synopsis

The setting is Seventeenth century Sweden, during the Thirty Years war of 1618 to 1648, a war between different European countries, in which they battled in an attempt to make one another either Protestant or Catholic.
Mother Courage (whose real name is Anna Fierling) is running a war time canteen. 

It is a wagon, which she carts around after the armies, selling stuff to local people as well as providing brandy to the people and soldiers. With her on the wagon, are her three children: her eldest son Eilif, her second son Swiss Cheese and her youngest, a girl named Kattrin, who doesn't speak after she was mate mute by an incident with a soldier early in her life. 

The children help their mother to run the wagon business.

We learn that Courage has travelled up north from Germany to make money off the war, and that the reason her children are helping her with the business is that she doesn't want them to be in harm’s way. She is stopped on the road however by a sergeant and a Swedish army recruiter, who recruits Eilif and takes him away with them.
Courage comes across Eilif again briefly as she passes through Poland following the army. During this encounter, Eilif is being commended by a Swedish general for fooling locals peasants and successfully stealing their cattle.

Courage continues her journey trailing after the army. Swiss Cheese becomes a paymaster, whose job is to carry the army’s money in a money box. We are introduced to one of courage’s friends, a woman named Yvette who works as an army prostitute. Mother Courage, the general’s cook and an army chaplain find themselves casually discussing politics, but they are abruptly interrupted by invading Catholics and are all taken prisoner. The group decide to pretend to be Catholic and blend in with the other side, and Swiss Cheese, fearing being caught with a Protestant money box, hides it in the river. But he is caught hiding it by S.C Catholic, and is apprehended and arrested.

Courage plans to sell Yvette her wagon in an attempt to make enough money to bribe the Catholics into letting Swiss Cheese go, but she is apprehensive as she realises this would then leave her with no money. She is not quick enough to make the decision, and sadly Swiss Cheese’s fate is sealed. He is shot eleven times. On being presented with his body for the purpose of identification, Courage pretends she does not know him.

Courage’s wagon is trashed by the Catholics and she is also fined, and she is going to complain to a catholic colonel, but decides against it after discussing with a soldier that there is no point fighting against the injustice. Courage does not give up entirely however, she follows the Catholic army along the road to Germany. On the journey they come across some injured peasants, who Courage reluctantly offers some of her shirts to use as bandages.

A little later on, at a Catholic general’s funeral, the chaplain tells Courage that the war will go on forever, and that she should stock up on supplies since there are low prices at the moment.
Courage does so, sending Kattrin to buy some supplies. On her way back, Kattrin is attacked by a group of soldiers and is given a gash on her face.

Due to stocking up as suggested, the canteen business reaches a height of success. However, it is just now that the Swedish king is killed, and subsequently peace is declared. Courage fears for the negative impact this will have on her business.
Yvette returns after being gone for a long time, and now her life is quite changed; she is widow to a wealthy count. She is unhappy however to come across the cook, who is an old lover of hers.

Courage is forced to sell her extra supplies to make money. Eilif attempts to repeat his earlier action of stealing from peasants, but now the war is over it is a punishable offence and he is taken away to be executed. Courage, busy with business still, does not know of his death, but chaplain does go to give his support to Eilif at the execution.

Only the cook and Courage are left together now as the chaplain has gone, and they are forced to beg for food. In a change of luck for the cook however, he inherits an inn from his aunt. He offers for Courage to go and run it with him, but on the condition that Kattrin is left behind. She declines the offer, refusing to leave Kattrin.

Courage and Kattrin take up residence with their wagon in a peasant town. While courage is out in the town doing business during the night time, the Catholics plan a sneak attack on the town. Kattrin, realising what is happening, bangs on the drums on the wagon to warn the townspeople. The Catholics try to make her stop, but as she refuses, they end up shooting her dead.

All three of her children are now dead, and yet Courage does not give up. She signs a lullaby to Kattrin and pays the peasants to give her a burial, and then somehow finds the strength to continue on her journey. She gets back on the road and leaves to continue her canteen business. 

Themes

• Society and class
• War
• Religion
• Rules and order
• Power and authority
• Innocence and guilt
• Justice/injustice
• Money and war profiteering
• Motherhood and family 

Rehearsal Diary

Wednesday 16th September 2015 

Today we started work on Bertolt Brecht. We watched a documentary called "Changing Stages" by Richard Eyre as part of our research into Brecht, his work, his theories and how he compares to other play writes and theatre theorists such as Konstantin Stanislavski and Samuel Beckett. 

After watching this and gathering relevant information on Brecht, we translated some of the theories we just heard about into practical work and further explored and learnt about Brecht's techniques. 

We looked at his technique called Gestus. 

Gestus is where you do a physical gesture or movement, usually paired with a facial expression, to indicate clearly who or what you are/what is happening. For example, if you were being a cleaner, you might pretend to be sweeping the floor, and simply through this one basic action or pose the audience would be able to immediately guess what you were. It does tend to use stereotypes, which is of course rather problematic, but the reason that gestus employs such a simple way of representing somebody is that Brecht wanted his actors not to be their characters on stage, but display what type of person their character was. 

Brecht did not want the actors to be thinking deeply about their character's inner monologue, nor did he want the audience to be thinking about that, and so by doing something so self explanatory as gestus, the audience are provided with a situation and/or people without the need for even having to know what those characters are thinking or feeling. 

We looked at gestus by a small group of us standing in front of the rest of the class. We were instructed or do a tableau of war. Melody and I sat down, freezing with me attending to a wound on her leg, Katy lay on the floor, Mara crouched over her and miming pointing a rifle into the distance, and Cache and Klodian froze with one of them supporting the other and helping them to walk. 

Just through this, the entire rest of the class were able to guess that we were at war, who each of us was and exactly what situation we were all in. 

We looked at this notion of simplicity explaining a situation by being given a simple environment in which to devise a short piece of three scenes. We were given an office as the setting. 

Working with Klodian, Mara, Didi and Melody we devised a story where two companies which were going under planned to merge with one another to save themselves, but one of the companies planned to let the employees from the other get sued so they could claim any surplus money from the lawsuit. 

Creating this is and watching the other groups' piece it became so clear how so much can be provided to the audience with not much at all. We didn't even think about our characters in depth, only what they were doing and what they were like. Just through these base things the narrative could still be served, the narrative being not a story for the audience to be immersed in, but a situation for the audience to observe and be able to pick apart objectively. 

Through these two exercises we also looked at Alienation, another technique of Brecht's. As in Brecht's work, the audience are encouraged to analyse objectively what they see instead of sympathising with characters or getting emotionally involved, alienation is a way of "making the familiar strange". The actors or a narrator can interact directly with the audience, breaking the fourth wall. The way we were told to use alienation in our pieces was by giving a title to each scene, and subsequently acknowledging that what is happening on stage is not real, but is in fact a contrived situation for you to judge and analyse. 

Brecht's theories and techniques are so interesting and now we've begun to scratch the surface, I'm looking forward to working on them further when we are given our scenes from Mother Courage and Her Children next week. 

Wednesday 23rd September 2015 

Today we sat together as a group and all did a read through of all the scenes we will be doing from Mother Courage and Her Children. We got a sense of the scenes and all had a think about which characters we might like to play. 

Rob cast the groups and assigned us all scenes, and I will be playing Mother Courage in scene two. 

I'm really glad I've been cast as Mother Courage, because I think it will be a real challenge and I'm really excited to have the opportunity to try something different. 

Wednesday 30th September 2015 

Today was the first day we started rehearsing our scenes from Mother Courage in our groups. 

First we had independent rehearsal, in which Cache, Klodian, Ria, Romaine and I read through our scene a few times and discussed our understanding of it. 

Our scene is where Mother Courage and the Cook are bargaining over meat she is selling, meanwhile inside the tent Eilif, the General and the Chaplain are sitting conversing while they wait for dinner. 

Mother Courage and Eilif are reunited, but she is very disappointed with what she hears he has been doing and she slaps him. 

When we worked with Rob, we set out the staging of the scene and went through it trying to add more flavour to it now, as well as taking direction from Rob. 

At the moment we are really just getting used to our scene and characters, and I think we're only scratching the surface so far, but we're definitely making a good start. 

In rehearsal we did look at the relationships between the characters in our scene and how these are supposed to be portrayed with clarity to the audience, and since I have also been reflecting on this while learning the lines. The Cook and Mother Courage have quite a funny, bantering and almost flirtatious relationship, as the Cook has a thing for her. 

Eilif and Mother Courage obviously have missed one another and love each other because they are family, but he thinks she should be proud of him and she is appalled at the way he has been behaving. 

Eilif is in the position of having to impress his superior the General, who is impressed with his service and seems to have quite a liking for him. The General is rather chiding however of the Chaplain, who he claims preaches so much it bores everyone. 

Mother Courage thinks the General is a bad General, which she explains to the cook in a little monologue, and the cook's relationship with the general doesn't extend much further than chain of command. 

Because Brecht wanted his characters used to portray different types of people in our society and how people treat one another, I think it's really important that we understand clearly their behaviour towards one another and how that can be used to make a point about how people behave in real life.

Wednesday 7th-Wednesday 14th October 2015 

Over these two weeks we have had a few more Mother Courage rehearsals. 

At the moment we're in the stage of the rehearsal process where we're stopping occasionally and discussing exactly what we think is going on, and I think this is good because it means we're all working together to fully understand our scene, and we're all striving towards the same goal. 

What we want to do with this really is pick out the messages and statements the text is intended to send out, rather than getting bogged down in things like what our characters are feeling. 

To try and achieve this, we've been looking at what we think Brecht was trying to say through this scene, as his work is so based on making social and political points. He wanted his audiences to be able to analyse objectively what was happening on stage, and so we are currently trying to work out just how to perform our piece that will make the audience think like this. 

The play Mother Courage is very anti war, and we need to try and make a constant connection with the audience, making comments to them on this theme wherever possible and really using our lines and the situation to convey the desired message that war is bad and achieves nothing. 

It really is quite a challenge, because it almost opposes so much we usually do in the process of developing a scene. Usually we would be thinking in great depth about our characters inner monologues and emotions, their objectives and their reasons for their actions. All of this however is very in the style of Stanislavski, whose work and theories were very much based on the psychological, and Brecht's theories and techniques are just so contrasting to this that we're having to learn almost a whole new way of performing. 

To help with this, we've been given the advice to almost make our characters caricatures, looking at using stereotypes and over exaggeration of their base personalities to make points about what their roles are and what people in society they are supposed to represent. 

For the first time we've had the chance to run through our scene in front of the rest of the group, and this was interesting. I found that because we knew they weren't already fully aware of what was happening in our scene because they're all doing different ones, it was a good opportunity to see how successfully we could portray the scene to them, and I feel like it was quite different acting it with an audience there who we could actively try to engage. 

After we all ran through our scenes, we sat down for a feedback session with Rob. 

Most of the notes he gave us to work on were general:

1. Technically, we all needing to be moving our voices a bit more, so as to really bring the text to life and make sure it doesn't sound one dimensional. 
2. There is currently a lack of cause and effect in the scenes, we really need to work on this. 
3. Put into practice more what we learnt in first year, even thought Brecht is different to what we've worked on in the past we can still apply skills we've accumulated so far to the development of this piece.
4. Dig deeper to really find out what's going on, and what the message is. Linking back to what I said before we were told we really need to be communicating these anti war messages to the audience as much as we can. 
5. To really work harder on portraying the characters, make them stereotypical, almost cartoon-like. Rob suggested we may even try playing them in a style of a comedian just to practice making them really exaggerated. 
6. Be much more over the top, as where we are now is not so much naturalistic, but just too flat. 
7. Moreover on this, also go really over the top with the story, make it as big as possible. 
8. There are a lot of large paragraphs in these scenes, but when we have a lot to say, don't throw the lines away or rush through them, really take our time. 
9. Overall, we have also all been told to really think more about how we can make these pieces Brechtian.

Specifically, the feedback I was given was to make my portrayal a bit more guttural. 

All of us playing Mother Courage as well as a few other characters were also told to look at the aphorisms in our lines and make sure we understand what the text implies and what these aphorisms are actually saying. 

Bibliography

‘Biography of Bertolt Brecht’ Grade Saver, <http://www.gradesaver.com/author/bertolt-

brecht> [16^th August 2015]

‘Bertolt Brecht’ Encyclopaedia Britannica, <http://www.britannica.com/biography/Bertolt-Brecht>

[16^th August 2015] 

http://www.shmoop.com/mother-courage-and-her-children/summary.html

Performing with Masks

Tuesday 15th September 2015

Today we started our masks assignment with Sharon. 

The first thing we had to do was learn about the key principles of working with masks: 

• Always have your back to the audience when putting on or taking off a mask, as an illusion has to be created to make the audience believe, and this can be ruined by them seeing you put it on and off. 
• Once the mask is on, never touch it or talk. This also makes it appear unrealistic, not to mention that your vocals would be totally muffled by the mask. . 
• You absolutely have to respect the mask, as a performer you serve the mask, and it controls you, you do not control it. 
• You don't give movements and body language to the mask, it gives them to you. You must let what the mask is channel through you and your physicality rather than trying to assign it a particular personality or character. 

Before we started actually using the masks, we did some exercises to practice what it would be like performing in a mask. 

Because your facial expressions can't be seen in a mask, you have to convey your emotions to the audience entirely through the mask and the rest of your body language and physicality.

When you're performing in a mask, it is also important that no matter what you're doing with the rest of your body, your head is facing the audience at all times so the mask can be seen. 

So, what we did to start working on this was line up at the back of the room and walk slowly towards the mirror. We had to keep our faces neutral, our heads facing forward the whole time, and try moving our body around in different ways as we walked, experimenting with how we could use different levels, turn different ways and make different gestures without turning our head away from facing forward. I found it really quite difficult, I think it's going to take a lot of dedication to learn this way of performing. 

Next, we continued to focus on this but in groups. We had to come up with an interesting way of walking from one end of the room to the other keeping in mind the rules of masks, a neutral face and head forward constantly. Didi, Nuray, Jerome and I were had Didi as the focal point of it, and we looked at how her body language and movement changed depending on which one of our characters walked alongside her. I found it so hard to keep a straight face and try to put across what my role was like and how I was feeling just through my body. 

We learnt that because one of our tools as a performer, our facial expressions, cannot be used, we have to enhance other aspects like gesture and movement. It all has to be made even clearer and bolder. 

Next we went up in pairs, and simply had the task of walking across the stage, greeting and briefly interacting with one another in the middle, and then exiting. The whole time our heads had to be facing forward. I can't believe just how tricky it is to do basic functions while trying to keep your head in one position; it takes so much concentration. 

When we got to actually working with the masks, we took turns doing a solo exercise: putting on a mask, walking across the stage with it on, interacting with the audience a little and then exiting. 

It feels so bizarre wearing the mask, knowing that no matter what you do with your face all that's seen is the expression on the mask. Keeping this in mind, you have to adopt the body language which corresponds to the mask. I found wearing the mask for the first time both very odd and fascinating.

I think it is going to take a lot of getting used to working with masks, but I also see it as an amazing opportunity, not only to begin learning about and understanding a whole new part of performance, but also because I think the skills we'll learn through this will assist me greatly in the rest of my acting. 

I often find that I'm awkward about what to do with my body on stage, I find myself unsure of exactly to do physically, and I think focusing so much on movement, gestures and body language is going to help with this, even in the sense that hopefully it can improve my physical confidence in the stage space.

Tuesday 22nd September 2015

Today we looked more at the elements of mask work we learnt last week, this time exploring them in more depth and also discovering more about working with masks.

What we focused on today was age. Because we can't use speech or facial expressions, it limits the ways we have to convey to the audience what age our character is. Because of this, it is so important that we're able to embody every aspect of our role through our body, including the age they're supposed to be.

To begin, we repeated the exercise we did last week of walking towards the mirror in a line. We had to try and walk neutrally, with no facial expression, and we just had to settle into our neutral and how it felt walking and being in the stage space portraying no story or emotion at all.

From this, we moved into walking as different ages. First, we had to walk around the space as if we were a five year old, but Sharon told us not to immediately start acting as we thought they did off the top of our head, but to think about it, focus on the five year old we were being, and let it channel through our walking. I feel like this is a much more effective way of portraying the age, because there are more layers to your performance when you actually put your mind to it and explore it, rather than just doing a basic movement you assumed straight away might be a five year old.

Then we transitioned into walking as a teenager, which, somewhat ironically, I actually found more difficult. As we weren't allowed to mime props, thereby eliminating the possibility of doing the stereotypical "on their phone", and because there are so many different types of teenagers, I struggled to decide quite what to do. However, the exercise entailed actually changing up the personality or emotion of the teenager every so often, so having the chance to try out a few different things helped.

Next we went back to being five year olds, and we did an exercise where we as that five year old had to find our favourite toy and play with it. We looked at how big and exaggerated we could make our movements to make it clear what we were doing. It feels unnatural putting such emphasis on movements and motions you'd normally hardly even see, but the more we did it, the more used to it I became. Continuing the exercise, we paired up and had to play together with our toys. During this exercise what we tried was each of us being the major or minor focus at different points, as the audience need to know where they are supposed to be looking at any given time.

During this, we weren't allowed to talk to one another, and I found it really interesting how we're able to communicate with one another silently in our work, I think it is a great way to develop teamwork and cooperation.

Our next task was to interact in pairs again, but this time as teenagers, not children. We had to prepare a short greeting/scene as teenagers and then perform it for the rest of the group. In the scene our heads had to be facing forward of course, and we had to try and make clear what our characters were. Melody and I worked together on this, and it was quite a challenge to do this whole greeting and use your body completely without turning your head away.

I feel like this masks assignment takes a lot of concentration and it feels like it is really helping me work on focusing on individual aspects of performance, in terms of physicality.

Working together on this is really good, because in our mask work it is important that we can interact both with people on stage and with the audience, and by practising together we can get used to holding the story on stage together as well as engaging with the audience.

An exercise we did on our own was kind of a development on what we did last week where we just chose a mask, walked across and interacted with the audience in it.
Today, we had to do the same, but there was the addition of two boxes of props in centre stage which we could use.

I really enjoyed this, it gave us enough time to get comfortable in a mask and experiment with the body and movements of that mask. It is a very strange experience being on stage in a mask, it almost feels as if you aren't there as much as you are when your face can be seen.
Something I thought was so striking and effective which people did was just being quite still, being confident enough to let the mask do the work. We observed that having that strong, self assured presence on stage really encouraged a stillness in the audience and drew us in as an audience.
Something I tried to focus on while I was in the stage space wearing the mask was exactly this; taking my time, being confident in not doing too much, trying to maintain a good presence. A lot of these exercises we did prior to this one where we actually used the masks helped, as I felt really quite confident and comfortable in the mask this week, already much more so than last week.

The last thing we did today was another group project. We worked in trios, two acting in masks and one directing. I worked with Didi and Nuray, and I was directing. The task we were given was to create a short performance based around five year old children at their first day at school.
We chose two very contrasting masks; one with a sad facial expression and the other with a somewhat mean smile. Our natural instinct here was to look at the theme of bullying, as that could be the relationship these two masks had with one another.
Nuray was the mean, uncontrollable, rude, bully, and Didi was the nervous, shy, quiet, sad kid.
We worked around it being the first day for both children, but them both having such different attitudes and making such different starts. I think that using the young age of five which offers such specific physicality and having a first day as a setting which is so full of possibilities was really great stimulus to work with.
It wasn't only really great experience to create our own performance and gain experience of working with masks though, I find it just as important to pay close attention to everyone else's work. By seeing what seems to work and what doesn't, then feeding back to one another, I'm starting to build up quite a clear idea of what makes a successful performance working with masks.  

Tuesday 29th September 2015 

Today we looked at centres, and more specifically building a character from a centre. 

The day started with a warm up, in which we did our usual exercise of moving around the space in neutral. However, part way through the warm up, we were given a different way in which to walk around the space. We had to imagine our centre was in our head, and that our centre was what was leading us. Next we tried moving our centre to different places around our body, such as our leg, our knees, maybe our arm. We explored how where your centre is placed alters your movement.
Last week we looked at how important it is to make things clear to the audience, especially where they should be looking and where the focus is on stage. We explored this further through centres, putting complete emphasis on the part of our body where the centre was, over exaggerating our movements to make clear where that centre is.

Once we had gotten warmed up and begun to understand the concept of working from a centre, we did an exercise crossing the stage one by one with the rest of the class observing, and we had to choose a centre and make it clear as we crossed the stage.
We discussed what seemed to work to clarify where a centre was, and it all seemed to be about a combination of timing, stillness and over exaggeration. We also found that comedic value really added to the effect on the audience when using a centre.

Next grouped up into threes and were set the task of devising a short piece in which the three of us interacted all using our own centres. Melody, Jerome and I were in a trio.
We improvised a scene on the tube, and thought about how we could make it clear to the audience where each centre was, while also being able to interact with each other realistically. In the scene, I was a pickpocket, and it was based around me taking things from Melody and Jerome without them noticing. I think we were effective in achieving our goal, as the audience seemed to understand where our centres were as well as the narrative. 

Now we were well acquainted with how to use a centre in our performance, we combined it with our mask work. First, we took the faces of different masks and applied a centre to them which fit the face and character we felt that mask had.
Then we moved on to actually using the masks, doing an exercise where we crossed the stage in a mask using a centre, interacting with the audience as we went. We could choose any mask, but what was important was that our chosen centre informed the character and attitude of the mask, and it all came together to portray a clear role.
We all did this exercise twice, the second time trying to really emphasise and focus even more on putting this across. It is quite difficult applying a centre, because even though it helps build your character and add to your performance and physicality, you have to keep in mind all the principles of mask work and using a centre at the same time, and you have to do your best at both things simultaneously, not allowing your focus on one to take away from the other. With a lot of concentration it can create a really full and comprehensive character, particularly in terms of movement.
We worked together also in masks using centres, as we began to enter the stage space while others were already on, crossing paths and interacting with each other as new characters we created using a new mask and a new centre. Again, this added even more to work on, and it was actually really fun to push yourself into working in a mask, with a centre and other performers all at the same time.
Our work with masks is developing at an exciting pace, and all the time we're accumulating more and more we can use in our pieces when we devise our final performances for this unit.

The final thing we did today brought back in the major and minor work we did last week and added that to everything we were already doing.
Mara, Jerome and Romaine took part in an exercise which the rest of us observed, in which they had to use masks, centres, interaction and major and minor performing. Sharon gave them different points at which to change between who should be acting in major and who in minor, and we all watched the way the whole narrative was effected just by who the focus was on. In a sense I find that whoever is acting in major, we as an audience get a chance to sympathise with and see things from their point of view, as they are who our attention is on and therefore we see the scene taking place almost through how they see it and how they feel. It is very interesting what a huge difference using major and minor acting makes, and I also think it really helps to clarify the narrative and prevent the stage from being too busy with action and the scene appearing messy.

Putting together all the different techniques we've been learning over the last few weeks in this lesson was really great, I feel with all these different skills we will have a strong foundation for our performances. 

Tuesday 6th October 2015

Today we were put into the groups for our final performance with masks and we created our pieces. 

I was put into a group with Cache and Jerome, which is fantastic, as we're working together really well and make a good team. 

The first thing we had to do today was come up with ideas for our piece. The stimulus we were given was that it has to be based around school, even if not in a school environment, just related to school somehow. 

Jerome pitched the idea of having a dramatic storyline, one with a serial killer. We really liked this idea, excited at the prospect of such a thrilling basis for a story, and so now we had to think about how we could incorporate this with the school theme. I suggested that it could be set at a school trip to the fairground, as this offered up a great setting for some quite creepy material, which we all agreed on. We considered that one of the students could be murdered, but then decided to take this into a further plot twist; that one of the students was the killer, who had faked their own death. However, after feeding back this idea to the rest of the group and discussing the nature of the masks with Sharon, we came to the conclusion that the masks were too innocent to have such a dark storyline, so, we had to think of a way to use our idea of horror in a more light hearted way, and how to translate a dark storyline into something less heavy. 

Our idea for the killer was that they were a student who was bullied and sought revenge, and we considered how we could put a less dramatic turn on this. We decided to have them as a student who was bullied and decided to play a prank on their bullies, scaring them, to stand up for themselves. 

The perfect setting for a scary prank is a haunted house ride, and since we had already decided to set it at a fairground, this was ideal. 

Diagram of ideas

Now that we had a good foundation for our story, loads of ideas began to flow for costuming, props, lighting, sound, characters and scenes. To the right is a spider diagram of some initial ideas and a timeline of the scenes we came up with. 

Timeline of scenes

Firstly, we wanted to focus on what our characters were like. Cache and Jerome are going to play the bullies, and I'm going to play the girl they pick on. We decided Jerome would work with the mask that has a cocky smirk, Cache with the one that looks kind of dorky with its teeth out, and I will work with the one with the sad, shocked expression.
This is to show that Jerome is the leader out of him and Cache, that Cache follows what he says and is quite susceptible, and of course that I am upset by the way they treat me. 

To make it very clear to the audience who our characters are, we wanted to have quite slow entrances for each of us as an introduction to our characters. Through these entrances we decided to each pick a centre, and to really emphasise that point in our body as a means of conveying our character's overall persona and emotions. My centre for example was my shoulders, and I slouched, wanting to appear nervous and also down in the dumps. 

For our costumes, to follow the school theme visually, we have chosen to wear white shirts, black jeans and ties to portray school uniforms. 

Next we considered the key scenes for our piece to create a clear storyline. We knew we wanted to set up the situation, to have the prank, and then to have a happy ending. 

Jerome came up with the idea of us travelling to the trip by bus, Cache suggested using bus sound effects for this, and together we devised the staging of three chairs and the use of choral movement to show the bus journey. We swayed in unison from side to side and front to back, shaking slightly, to portray the bus moving around and turning corners. 

To make it clear to the audience where we were going, I thought of using some Brechtian style, walking across the stage with banners to explain. So when we arrive at the fairground, I walked across with a banner which reads "School Trip to Fairground". 

We wanted our first scene at the fairground to display the relationship between the characters, so we thought of showing the way Cache and Jerome treat me as I try to join in with them and they shun me. Wanting to use more physical theatre, we thought of going on a roller coaster ride. Cache and Jerome get on it and I try to sit next to them, but they shoo me away and so I have to sit in the back. 

We thought about how to show what ride we were on, and decided to make big gestures to show the audience, first pulling on the safety bar across our chests to hold us in, and then all leaning in the same directions and different points to show we were on a fast ride. 

Wishing to really highlight how mean Cache and Jerome are to my character, I mime throwing up after the ride, and the two of them laugh. 

We wished to show a lot of time passing at the fairground, but had to keep in mind that we only had five minutes, and so Jerome suggested doing a time lapse. We developed this idea by staging it split screen, Cache and Jerome enjoying themselves on one side and me bored and on my own on the other. Cache suggested we did all of our movements sped up as if we were showing it all in fast forward, and I said we should add a clock ticking sound effect over it, all of this enhancing the illusion of time passing while highlighting that my character wasn't allowed to be friends with them. 

Next was in my opinion the most fun part of our performance to devise; the scary prank scene. 

First we had to consider how to create the atmosphere of the haunted house and immerse the audience in it. To show what they were entering, we used another banner saying "Haunted House", but we wanted to do much more than this to set the scene. 

I thought a great way to create the dark, creepy environment was to switch off the lights and have the stage almost completely dark. Cache suggested instead of leaving one light on we could each have a torch, not only to shed

We considered different scary sound effect we could use; creaking floorboards, heavy breathing, screams, but Jerome suggested a piece of music called Kimyou na Yume playing over the scene, as it sounds like fairground music, but with an eerie, creepy twist. We all loved this and decided it was the perfect sound effect for this scene. 

Now we decided and rehearsed how I would scare them in the house. First, I sat on the floor in centre stage, swaying from side to side creepily, and they came to investigate, then I scared them. Next I changed position to stage left, frozen, and when they came to investigate, I scared them again. 

To keep it light hearted and follow the notion of it being a prank, we wanted to make this comical, so we chose to have a jokey chase scene. At this point I run after them across the stage one way, then the other, and then follow them into centre stage and pop up behind them. 

We rehearsed over exaggerating our movements and being quite cartoon-like in this scene to make it humorous.  

We ran through this scene a lot, wanting to make sure the staging and everything was just right so it could deliver the full impact. 

Finally, we created the resolution to the piece. We had to decide how to make it a happy ending was for them to be friends in the end, and we did this by my character buying the other two ice cream and ending the piece in a happy pose, me in between them with their arms around my shoulders to represent that I had been accepted and we had made up.
We just had to join this to the last scene, so after the two ran from the haunted house, I went to see them, they jumped, still afraid, and I comforted them by taking them to get the ice cream. 

I feel we managed to tie it together nicely and achieved successfully a happy ending for all three characters. 

Now we had our entire piece, we ran through it over and over, trying to make sure we followed all the key principles of mask; don't touch the mask, keep your head facing the audience, don't talk in the mask, never put it on or off in front of the audience. 

We also practised interacting with the audience, making our physical embodiment of the characters clear and using our centres, and trying to use the right combination of moments of stillness and over exaggeration to make a captivating and engaging performance. 

Once we had time to create and rehearse our pieces, we performed them to the rest of the group.
We didn't use the masks for this first showing, but in a way I think this was good, because it gave us a chance to make sure we really knew what we were doing and improve our piece before making it more difficult by adding the masks.
I think this first performance of it went really well. The audience were very responsive, they laughed and seemed to find the humour funny, and as far as I could tell they were engaged throughout.
I also enjoyed performing it, and it all came together very nicely, which is really satisfying and gives me great motivation to perfect and perform it for assessment next week.
I also found performing with Cache and Jerome just as good as working with them, I feel we communicate well with one another on stage and make a good company, complimenting and supporting one another's work and coming together to fulfil the potential of the overall performance.

It is already a lot of fun working on this project and I have a really good feeling about it, I'm very excited to perform next week. 

Mask Evaluation Character Masks

Describe your working process… 

i.e. Who came up with the ideas, how did you develop them for performance?

This section of the evaluation is in my logbook. 

What worked?

I think that a lot of the ideas we came up with in the initial creation of our performance worked well, which I'm really pleased with. 

I think our portraying our characters through their entrances and centres worked well, as we received a positive response from the audience which indicated they understood the dynamic between our parts clearly.
I think the humour in our piece also went well, as we used big over exaggerated and almost cartoon-like movements at different moments for comedic effect, such as in the haunted house when I was scaring and chasing Cache and Jerome, and the audience seemed to find this funny.
I would say that our overall interaction with the audience was successful, and I think we managed to build a good connection with them, because they did respond appropriately at different moments and seemed engaged in our performance. We were really happy about this because the work we put into rehearsals making sure we had moments where we involved them worked well in our live performance.
I also think that the sound and lighting effects we used in our piece, such as music, bus sounds, and turning off the lights and using torches added a really good layer to our performance and were successful in creating the desired atmospheres, such as a scary and tense one in the haunted house.

What could have been better?

As in my opinion both our rehearsal process and performance went well, I think that what I would improve on would essentially just be neatening everything up. Through more practice and rehearsal I think we could have made each part of the performance even stronger, literally just making the whole thing a bit tidier. This is because at some points I found it quite challenging to manoeuvre around the stage with the mask on, such as when chasing Cache and Jerome or exiting and entering with banners, because it was quite difficult to see in the mask as it limits your vision.

So I believe moments like these could have been better, and if we were to work on this again that is what I would focus on improving. 

What have you learnt about working with mask?

One of the most important things I have learnt from working with these masks is that they are absolutely not just props or costume, they really are performers in their own right and it is only through working with the mask that you can really build a strong performance.
Moreover I have learnt that you must take character and physicality from the mask, rather than applying it to the mask. In order to be convincing and to really create the illusion of bringing a mask to life, you have to let it be itself and adopt that character of the mask.
I've also learnt a lot about the many ways you can really use your physicality to its full potential in mask work, and that movement, body language and posture truly can be just as effective and expressive as words.
I have also learnt the importance of stillness and slowness when working with masks, and that sometimes less is more when connecting with the audience, because the mask itself portrays a lot and can be a demanding presence on stage even if you are very still.

Name the basic techniques?

• Always having your back to the audience when putting on or taking off a mask, so as not to shatter the illusion. 
• Never speaking or making sound once you have the mask on. 
• Not touching the mask once it is on, as this is another thing which breaks the illusion. 
• Allowing the mask to give you movement and character, really letting its personality flow through you and letting it control you, not the other way around. 
• Always keeping your head to the audience.
• Having clear entrances and exits. 
• Making your physicality strong and clear to fully portray your character and emotions without the need for words. 
• Interacting and connecting with the audience whenever possible, making sure they are always engaged in the performance and fully believing in the masks. 
• Using centres in your body to enhance your physicality and convey certain characters or emotions. 
• Working cooperatively with other performers on stage and together making a strong piece by all following the rules of mask while interacting with one another too. 
• Using major and minor, making it clear where the audience should be looking and who or what the focus is on at different points. 

Finally …How will this work help you as an actor?

This work has been so focused and intensive that I think it has really helped build discipline for me as an actor. It has taught me a lot about getting into the zone to perform, and I think in any kind of performance work I do this will be immeasurably helpful, as I will hopefully be able to think back to finding my neutral and getting in the right mindset to create work and perform. 

It has been so heavy on physicality that it has really done me a world of good in being concise and confident with my body language and movement. As an actor I have always found it quite difficult to be confident physically on stage, but this mask work has helped me a lot with being able to feel sure of myself physically even when not moving or gesturing. I've also learnt a lot from it about exactly how to use my body as a performance tool successfully, which I will be able to apply to all future work as a performer. 

The absolute concentration and commitment required to working with a mask, remembering all of the rules and techniques while also completely applying yourself to a role as well as working with the other actors cooperatively, connecting with the audience and serving the narrative of your piece is very challenging and having so much to think about at one point and learning how to find the balance has given me important skills in being able to divide my focus across several aspects of performance at once. 

Altogether I think that my both my confidence and skill as an actor has been improved a lot through this mask work, and I intend to carry through everything I have learnt from it into any future acting work I do. 

Technical Theatre 16

Today we were supposed to be finishing our music video, but we have experienced a few issues, which is very frustrating. Our goal today was to take the entire music video, duplicate it, and then when it plays the second time over to have it in reverse.
However - as I blogged about in our last session - there is no reverse or rewind effect on imovie.
So, this week Dominic helped us to export the video onto the server so he could reverse it on another device.

To export the file we had to:

• Open the project in imovie
• Select "share > export movie 
• We exported the movie to the desktop, which took about 15 minutes
• Then we dragged the exported file from desktop into the server 

While we waited for the movie to be exported to the desktop, Becca showed us Conchita Wurst's performance at the Eurovision 2015 semi finals to show us the lighting on it. It was really cool, they had a whole curtain of lights all controlled individually, moving up and down in a particular sequence that made it look like the movements of wings (which fits the song "Rise Like a Pheonix"). It was beautiful, I'd like to find out how they designed it. Becca told us that each light on there will have been controlled by DMX; I almost can't believe that such a huge display can be controlled by one system, but it's awesome. 

Anyway, after the movie finished exporting and we moved it into the server, Dominic then went to another device and reversed the movie for us on Final Cut Pro. He came back and helped us put the reversed file back onto the desktop and then we tried to move it into imovie, but this is where we reached our next problem. Even though imovie said the file upload was successful, we couldn't find the file anywhere in imovie. After trying to upload it a few more times but it still not working, we had no choice but to give up. 

It is really annoying that we still cannot finish it ourselves, but Dominic has really generously told us he'll export it as a different file type tomorrow morning to get it finished. Hopefully that will go well, and we will finally have our finished music video! 

Technical Theatre 15

Today in technical theatre we continued editing our video, but as Mo wasn't able to come in today, Elvina, Ryan and I worked on the video.
This week we were able to work a lot faster because we already know how to do the editing and stuff that we learnt last week.

We put in all the rest of the clips that we wanted to use using the same steps as last time, and it didn't take too long. But once we had used all of our available footage, we realised that we didn't have enough to cover the entire song! So frustrating, we really weren't sure what to do. We considered fading the song out, but at the point in the song where our footage finishes it sounds wrong fading out, so we eliminated that option.

We were desperately trying to think of a solution, when Ryan came up with a really cool idea. He said we could play the whole video in reverse at the end and then have it like it never happened. Elvina and I both loved this idea, and so we decided that was what we wanted to do.
But then, another obstacle arose.
Basically, we couldn't find anywhere the option to reverse clips or play them in rewind. We searched all over imovie and we couldn't find that effect anywhere. Annoyed but assuming we must have been missing something, we Googled it to find out how to do it. Our internet searches proved as fruitless as our searching around on imovie, though, we couldn't find any way to do it.
We suspected then that maybe you can't do it in version 9 of imovie, and Dominic came down and confirmed that for us. He said that in our next class he'll show us how to export our project onto another device and use different editing software to do the reverse effect, which is really nice of him.

So for now we've done all we can, and after we use the other software next class we get to start editing the completed video in terms of things like contrast and fades in and out.

Technical Theatre 14

Today we uploaded our footage onto the computer and began the process of editing it to make our music video.
It was quite a long process to upload the videos from my phone, because for some reason the phone and the computer wouldn't sync together. Dominic came in to help us out and he showed us how to upload the videos to the larger apple computer:

1. Plug my phone into the computer with the USB cable.
2. Select the files from my camera roll we wanted to use and import them into iphoto.
3. Copy the files from iphoto onto the desktop. 
4. Open imovie and create a new project, which we named "Pompeii".
5. In imovie, select "file > import videos", then select from desktop folder and select our videos. 
6. They then upload into our project on imovie. 

After we had finally managed to get our footage onto imovie (thank goodness), we watched a short instruction video on how to use imovie. 

We quickly downloaded our song "Pompeii" and uploaded it onto imovie.

Now it was time to create our music video, and these are the steps we used to select the clips we wanted, order them, and add the music track.

1. Drag the uploaded music from the event library into the project library.
2. Select the video you want to add from the event library.
3. Right click on it and select "copy".
4. Go up into the project library > right click > paste. 
5. Now you can trim the clip down in the project library to the length you want. To do this you right click on the piece of video, select "trim", then use the cutting tool at either end of the clip to cut out bits at the beginning and end you don't want, then select "done".
6. Then select the music track by clicking on it, and drag it along the whole length of the clip you have, so the music plays for the whole thing.
7. Repeat with all the footage you want to use in your final project. 

Because our project is a music video and there was already sound in our clips, we had to mute our footage so that only the song is heard. To do this we select the clip by left clicking on it and then click the little symbol of the speaker. This opens the audio controls on the clip and we turned the volume down to zero. 

We did a lot of cropping of clips today, and when we watched it back at the end it all flowed nicely, which is great to see. 

We had a proper laugh editing it today, because it was so funny watching our footage back. The time seemed to zoom by, and by the end of the session we had a total of about 1 minute of completely edited music video. 

It's looking really good now, I'm looking forward to completing it together over the next couple of weeks. 

Drama: Week Twenty Six

Monday 27th April 2015

Work in logbook.

Tuesday 28th April 2015

http://wkcisabellaclark.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Improvisation

Wednesday 29th April 2015 

Work in logbook, not on blog.

Thursday 30th April 2015 

Work in logbook.

Improvisation

This term we are working on improvisation. 

We started this work in class this week and were introduced to the sorts of things we'll be doing and learning about over the course of this term. We started doing a bit of improvisation back in September 2014 when we started our course, and so we have picked back up where we left off.

Improvisation Diary:

Thursday 23rd April 2015

Today with Rob we began looking again at improvisation. Our day started with being taken through our improvisation assignment brief and then discussing what would be required of us and what sort of thing we will be doing over the couple of months.
We talked about the staples of improv, what we should all endeavour to do when working in improvisation and what we should avoid when possible.

• Accepting ideas is extremely important in improvisation. We learned today in class just how essential it is as us for actors and as a part of a team to always accept and build on what whoever you're working with offers. If somebody comes up with an idea in an improvisation, go along with it! No matter how crazy or nonsensical it may be, it is always good to be a positive team player and accept the ideas others contribute. In order for an improvisation to go well you really have to work with one another; be able to work as a team serving a purpose together, not as an actor only serving yourself.
  To work on this in a simple form we revisited a game we played many months ago in class called "Yes, lets!". In this game we were put into pairs, and took it in turns to come up with an idea of what to do. Person A says (for example) "Lets go surfboarding!", and Person B responds "Yes, lets!", then you both proceed to mime the suggested activity briefly before it's person B's turn to come up with one. The idea of this game is that it is quick fire, on the spot, and you just have to throw yourself into whatever your partner chooses.
  I was in a pair with Mara today, and we managed to get through quite a lot of different "yes lets" activities in the time we had. I think this was because we were both happy to just do whatever it was and not be reluctant, which kept the momentum going. 
• Blocking is a very bad thing to do during an improvisation and should be avoided completely. Blocking is when you do the opposite of the above "accepting ideas", and you just reject whatever the person or people you are acting with suggest. An example of blocking could be:
  Person A: How about we go to the zoo?
  Person B: No. 
  Person A: Ok, never mind! I understand, is there any reason why?
  Person B: I don't know. 
  Any dynamic like this where one actor is trying their best to fuel the situation, come up with ideas and keep things going, and the other actor is constantly rebuffing and dismissing their efforts leads to an awkward situation, not to mention it makes things very difficult for the one who keeps getting blocked. I didn't realise until we started practising some pieces of improvisation and watching one another just how easy it is to block even by accident and how frequently it occurs. Sometimes you don't mean to block at all but do by mistake, as it is a natural instinct of ours in real life not to always agree and to say dismissive things. When we played a variation of games and observed one another we saw quite a few examples of blocking, though none of them were intentional. It takes a lot of effort and forethought on the spot to make sure what you say isn't a verbal block. I think we're going to have to practise, practise, practise to get out of the habit of blocking. 
• Attacking one another is something that quite often ends up happening in improvisations, it would seem. This can be not intentionally malicious of course, but just by default when you end up turning the improvisation into an argument or a jumbled up mess of slur after slur at one another. Rob told us that sometimes it can come too naturally and be the easy way out to just start insulting whoever you're working with because you can't think of anything to do, particularly if it gets a cheap laugh from the audience. Arguments and fights aren't complete a complete no-go in improv, as sometimes they can serve a narrative, but the danger is that you stop working together and begin only looking out for yourselves and boosting your personal ego through stuff like audience reactions you can provoke.
  It's really important to work together and never take the spotlight and leave your fellows actor/s feeling useless or overshadowed. 
• Be imaginative! This is something that Rob really emphasised in class today. The more free we feel, the more fun we're able to have and the more crazy and unrestricted our ideas can be, the better. He said we should feel encouraged to use our imaginations and always try things even when you think they may not work; this way your improvisation could go to bizarre and hilarious places.
• Step outside of your comfort zone. We learned today through discussions and also through doing some practical work the importance of letting yourself go and being willing to step over the "safe line". This term came up because it seemed like we were all a bit afraid to be out there, we were acting as if there was a big scary line beyond which point there was unknown territory we didn't want to enter. Rob has encouraged us to all work together towards stepping over that line and just experimenting.

We also played a few other games today in our pairs which I found a little more challenging and fun than yes lets. 

One of them was called physical offers. What happens in this game is that person A strikes a physical pose or gesture, and Person B has to start the improvisation based on that pose and what they could be doing. The improvisation only has to last for a few seconds and then they change roles. 

Mara and I had quite a bit of fun with this, I actually found it felt more natural and comfortable than yes lets. Maybe this is because you are thrown straight into the physicality so you don't have to awkwardly try and put that into the activity you're doing. It's also interesting because it relies on Person B's interpretation. Person A could be frozen pretending to be baking and person B could see it as stirring a witches cauldron! 

A-Z conversation is another exercise we did. 

Basically one of you starts a conversations with a sentence beginning with the letter A, then the other continues with a sentence starting with B, and so on and so forth. This one was really funny, because sometimes you just can't think of an appropriate word starting with the right letter so you end up saying something that doesn't quite make sense and it sounds really silly. Another thing about this that had us all having a laugh was that you suddenly realise you don't know the alphabet as well as you thought you did! This game is really productive for building teamwork though, because you've both/all got to think of lines as fast as you can that will help the next person think of something else to say. Rob suggested that we come up with lines as long as possible, because this gives way for more possibilities and also gives you both/all more time. I found this actually really helped, especially because it made the whole thing sound more natural and cohesive. 

"He said, she said" was the other one we tried. This is how it goes: 

Person A: It's really sunny today.

Person B: She said, looking up at the sky (Person A looks up at sky). Yes it's so gorgeous, I love the spring!

Person A: He said, skipping around (person B skips around). I love the Spring too! Remember last year? 

Etc. 

I actually found this one quite confusing, as a lot of the class seemed to. It is good because it challenges you, but I found on the whole that having to say "he/she said doing blah blah" really got in the way of the flow and made things more difficult. Perhaps if we get a chance to practise this though it will become easier and more fun over time! 

All the games we played today and the aspects of improv we discussed were a great way to get started with this assignment, it feels like we've learned a lot already! 

I've purchased the book "Impro" By Keith Johnstone and intend to read this as further research and education for this unit.

Tuesday 28th April 2015 

College was absolutely amazing today. I had so much fun, it was really fun and just a day for experimenting and really getting into our improvisation.
We played tons of games this morning and this afternoon, many of which I really found took what we've learned so far much further and broadened my understanding of what works and what doesn't in improv.

We looked quite a lot at trust today, developing that mutual trust with your fellow actors and feeling confident to work together cohesively. To start this off we got into pairs and played "why, what, who?". I was in a pair with Amber today.
In "why, what, who" person A says one of the three words and person B has to quickly improvise a response to what they asked, making up a scenario as quickly as they can. Both of you then play out that scenario only for about ten seconds, until it naturally dies out and you move onto the next one.
I thought that this was one of the less interesting games, as there isn't very far you can go in that short amount of time, but I can definitely see the benefits of it. I think playing this keeps you really engaged and works on your focus and ability to think fast, and the speed of it, I found at least, means that you're coming up with ideas so quickly that you have to just totally throw yourself in and not think about it too much. I believe that's really important in improv because you should be flexible and willing to go wherever the piece takes you.

After we did this work in pairs we played games where we sat and observed together as a group while pairs and trios of actors went up to do different games.
We did a variation of games based on a similar basis, which is that the actors are given different environments, lines, and emotions which they have to work with.
This is interesting to watch, in fact I found some of these games even more insightful to observe than I did to play them. This is because, particularly with the emotions the actors have to play, you really get to see how one simple objective (to play that emotion) can completely change the entire drive of a scene. I thought back to the work we did on Stanislavski when watching my peers and acting myself, and I realised that his techniques can be really helpful in improvisation.
For example, "what if" and your "circles of attention". If you use the magic "if" in your mind, "what if I was feeling this", "what if I were in this place", then it makes it seem really natural and easier to just go along with the improv and feel more connected to it.
Your circle of attention is really important in improv, as Rob discussed with us, because if you are completely focused on the actor you're working with, a really strong connection can be built quickly and you find that the whole scene has a better flow when you're working together so closely.

One of these improv games with three actors I took part in was really good, although it was quite tough to get to grips with. We were given the environment "a treehouse", and there was a rule that we could each only say one word every time we spoke. This meant you had to think fast about what word would sum up the emotion you were trying to portray and the objective of your character. It was a laugh doing this, and I found that once I entered the scene it flowed quite naturally for me. As we went on, the one word rule became easier. It was intriguing to discover that so much can be conveyed and achieved within a scene in such few words. We didn't need full sentences, having only a word each emphasised the urgency of what we were each saying, and got so straight to the point that it helped the narrative move along quickly.

A game I observed today was "Goal keeper". In this game, one actor stands on stage and takes on the role of the "goalie." People then go up and start an improvisation with them, and the goalie has to go along with whatever that person's idea is.
I was totally impressed with the work I observed from the others in the class on this; everyone was so willing to leap straight in, and Shaday, who was the goalie, was successful in following the suggested narrative willingly and in a motivated way every time. I think this game is a really good one, especially as it seems quite a challenge for the goalie, and it builds on spontaneity and accepting ideas.

In the afternoon, the exercises we did were slightly more complex.
We paired up again and were given a couple of minutes to improvise any scene, any place, whatever we wanted. After we'd played around with it for a bit, we went up pair by pair and performed our improvised scenes for the rest of the class, being paused several times throughout and being given a new emotion to play within the scene.
I was in a pair with Jerome. Originally, our piece was just two people in a coffee shop, but it quickly took a different turn as we developed it in rehearsal. Soon, it turned into a tale of comic espionage. We were both spies, making desperately unprofessional attempts at terminating one another, and failing each time.
When we went up to perform, we were given the emotions embarrassed, frightened, and one which escapes me now.  Although we had quite a clear narrative in our minds from rehearsing, everything was shaken up and the tone was changed each time we had to change our emotion.
Although they all coincidentally quite matched our piece, the emotions quickly changed how our characters appeared, to I think quite comic effect. This happened in lots of the pieces in this game, we got three different angles on each story as the feelings changed.
We looked at a quote from the "Impro" by Keith Johnstone, which we discussed and came to the conclusion that what was being said was this: "People who are not "creative" or have no imagination are scared of making a fool out of themselves."
After we talked about this I felt even more inspired to just go for it in our improv, because really you have nothing to lose. I feel my confidence as a performer and my flexibility too is really improving through doing this improvisational assignment, and today I felt really good about the exercises we were doing and eager to participate and develop our work.

We played a few more games today, which I'll write about now.

Party quirks: In this game, one person is the host of a party, and three other people are the guests. Each guest is assigned at random a "quirk" for their character, such as somebody who is paranoid about being abducted by aliens, for example. The guest arrive one by one, playing their quirk to the best of their abilities, and it's the job of the host to deduce what their quirk is.
This game is so funny, every time we play it it's a great laugh.
It's useful if you're playing a guest especially I think, as you're given the chance to totally over exaggerate characteristics and fully immerse yourself in a part, no matter how weird it is.

Foreign film:
This is where four actors enter the stage space. Two of them speak to one another in completely gobbledegook, and the other two "translate" each line into English, basically deciding what they're saying to one another. This is also really comical. It works productively on teamwork; you've got to try and interpret what one another are thinking and trying to say, and be willing to commit to the lines you're given. When it works, there's good chemistry on stage and it all flows really nicely.

Boris: This is a game where one of you in an interrogator, and the other a criminal. The interrogator questions the criminal about a crime, and when their answers aren't sufficiently believable, the interrogator calls in "Boris", and invisible character who comes in and beats up the criminal. Whoever is playing the criminal has to pretend to be knocked about by this invisible guy.
Honestly, I don't totally get the point of this particular game. To me, observing at least, it didn't seem as good as the others we did. That's only my opinion of course, though.

I feel like I'm learning all the time as we proceed with this unit.
These are some of the things we've discovered and discussed today which I've found very helpful:

Listening and reacting, and bouncing off one another:
As I think is always the case in acting, being in tune with your fellow performers is really important. Today we explored further through our exercises that listening and reacting is essential to bring to life a piece of theatre, and especially helps you to play the moment, which is of course brilliant in improv. As long as you are listening to what the other actors are saying and are reacting to them and playing off them, it feels like you can't go far wrong. It makes the performances really believable when you can see the actor bouncing off one another, accepting and developing each other's ideas, and being completely engaged with one another.

Don't keep it basic, explore and add: We've been learning to avoid linear story lines in our scenes and Rob has been encouraging us to go off on tangents and see wherever the piece takes us. As I mentioned on Thursday in relation to not playing it safe, the whole piece is more fun and full of possibility if you allow yourself to run away with it and don't get trapped in boring, generic conversations and situations.

Don't be scared to fail: Making mistakes is absolutely fine, it's good to try things, otherwise how can you even find out what works and what doesn't? A scene not working or fizzling out, or something not going well in an improvisation isn't the end of the world, not at all. Quite on the contrary in fact, it's through exploration, success and failure that I think you can really learn and develop as a performer. Try, try, and try loads of different things, that's certainly what I hope to do throughout this assignment.
I think it's a great opportunity for us to really have a go with whatever we want and really use our creativity and imaginations.

Added to this entry are some photos I took of the posters we're adding to our walls each time we have class on improv, on which we're taking not of what we're learning and different techniques as we go along. In them you'll see some of the things I have talked about above.


Thursday 7th May 2015 

Today we did a few improvisation games that we hadn't worked on before as well as revisiting one we did in the early days of college.

The game we had played before is where you walk around the room, partnering up with whoever is next to you when we stop walking, and then improvising a conversation with them in which there is a particular subtext (such as they have bad breath or you have a crush on them).
This is a good exercise for building the skill of conveying subtext whilst also serving the more apparent narrative, I find.

Some of the more complicated or even just longer exercises we did were my favourites.
We teamed up into groups, were given ten seconds to choose a well known movie, and then had about five minutes to devise "deleted scenes" from them. In the group I was part of was Romaine, Ria and Melody. We had a proper laugh with this game, and I found it really good because it relies on building a certain relationship with the audience, in that they have to have or be given by you a clear enough understanding of the film for your made up bloopers to make sense.
We did the scene where the current day Rose is telling the camera crew about what happened that night on the Titanic, and we had a lot of fun just playing around with things like her forgetting her lines and the concept of them having to replace the actress again and again.
I think this is a good exercise for involving your audience with your improvisation and building a kind of repertoire with them where you both get the jokes without them having to be explained literally.

The next game we did, in the same groups, was one where you have a few minutes to create a piece telling the story of the morning that one member of the group had today.
Then, as you are performing, the genre gets changed a few times and you have to adapt your piece to fit that certain film genre.
This was interesting because it shows what a difference structures associated with different genres can make to the narrative of a performance. Even in keeping similar lines and continuing the same story, each moment gets drastically changed when you start acting it out to serve whichever "trope" you'v been given to play.
I found this exercise especially helpful with boosting spontaneity on stage, as suddenly we all have to work together to put 100% into whichever genre we've been given in order to make it clear.
Something that was quite difficult about this game however is that it can die out easily if you aren't sure how to continue your piece, and this happened to a certain extent with Romaine and I, although we were at the end of the piece we had all planned anyway by the point it fizzled out.
Watching the other groups do this exercise was really great, because I was able to observe how quickly the actors adapted themselves to fit the new style.

"First line - last line", sometimes called "bookmarks", is another exercise we took part in today. I didn't participate in this game, but rather observed.
In this game the two actors on stage are given two lines, one which must be used to start the piece and one which must be used to finish it. The whole rest of the scene has to be improvised, and the two actors must work together to make the lines fit in.
This is a very comical exercise, particularly when the lines given are a bit bizarre, and it's good to see the connection that the actors have to build in such a fast amount of time so they're on the same wavelength. This again relies at least partly on that concept which is ever relevant in improv where you have to accept and build on one another's ideas.

The final thing we did today was refer back to some short scripted scenes that we worked with when we first started improv last year.
We had to work in pairs and pick one of three six line scripts. Our task was to memorise it and then make up our own six lines (three each) to add onto the end of the piece.
I worked with Melody on this, although we didn't get the chance to perform our piece. This was the piece of script we chose:

Melody: Are you serious?
Me: Never been more so.
Melody: Well, that is surely quite a shock. Have you told anyone else?
Me: No, you're the first.
Melody: Not even (insert name here)?
Me: Especially not them!
Melody: But wait, what about if...

Melody and I decided this would be a story where one friend confesses they have killed somebody, and the other friend is shocked.
The lines we added went something like this:

Melody: But wait, what about if I told her instead?
Me: No, I don't think we should. She might call the cops.
Melody: She wouldn't do that; she's your best friend!
Me: I know she is, but why do you think I told you and not her? She can't be trusted.
Melody: I guess...
Me: I can't believe I killed him.

This was an interesting thing to device. I love being given such simple and versatile stimuli, it meant that we could be as creative as we wanted and had almost complete artistic license.
Something else about this task I noticed, which referred back to the work we did on Stanislavski, is being truthful to the moment: "acting is being truthful in imagined circumstances". As long as you are committed to what you're doing and are invested in the moment, you can really bring a piece of theatre to life. This rings so true in improvisation; you've got to believe for the audience to believe!

Although there were some things today that really worked well and went well too, there were also some times when things didn't quite succeed, in my work and in the work I observed.
This was no bad things, though! As we've discussed, it's fine to make mistakes, and if something isn't working then it's okay to stop it and just say "this isn't working".
In fact knowing when something hasn't gone well is just as important as it going fine, because I think you can really draw on both to get more experience. As the saying goes, you learn from your mistakes.

Tuesday 12th May 2015 

The first thing we focused on this morning was status. We did work on it with Sharon a few weeks ago and we explored in more detail today.
The aim of focusing on this topic was to study how status effects social situations, behaviour, both mental and physical, and how it can make a difference on stage.

Social status is something that we, for some reason, allow to make a big difference to our lives. One’s status often effects how they’re thought of, treated, and what assumptions are made about them. Within society there are a lot of stereotypical traits which we define status through, such as someone’s clothing or shoes, how they look/how well kept they are, what environments we see them in, how they behave, how they interact with others, what their job or current living situation in life is.
Although it isn’t necessarily good or right, people do get treated in different ways based on their social status, or even what others believe their status to be. For example, somebody who works as a cleaner may have a lot assumed about them based on that alone: stereotypically that they’re working class, poor, maybe even people would assume they weren’t very educated because they don’t have a better paying job.

The first thing we did to have a look at this was a very simple exercise. Romaine and Melody sat opposite one another, and their aim was to get the higher status without saying a word or making any physical contact. The rest of us observed, seeing what we could pick out that they were doing to try and gain power.
Once they finished the exercise, the class was split about who we thought had the higher status. Nearer the start of the exercise, it seemed Romaine had the authority. He was more confident, and for a while it really seemed like he had the upper hand… but then, by the end, it had been pulled the other way, and, in my opinion, Melody had the higher status then.
We discussed why we thought each of them was above the other in the exercise, and a lot of it came down to very similar things; eye contact/not making eye contact, use of space, posture, sitting up straight, crossing legs in a relaxed way, confidence, facial expressions, how comfortable they seemed, exhibits of disinterest and self-importance to the point of not engaging with those you deem lower than you.
Nuray asked a good question; was there any particular reason Rob chose Romaine and Melody? He said it was because sometimes Romaine displayed confident behaviour and took authority in the space, whereas Melody on occasion has exhibited less self-assured behaviour, and it is funny how elements of their usual behaviour was altered and adapted as they came onto competitive footing in the exercise.
Something I found interesting we talked about was how gender stereotypes affected our views. Even though we didn’t genuinely believe this, sexist constructs such the way some males feel self-entitled and are treated higher than women by some people, made a difference to our initial impression. Romaine being male seemed to give him an automatic upper hand, not because your gender actually makes a difference, but because that’s how we’ve been conditioned to think.

After this we all participated in a group exercise, but not with any actors, with props. There was a chair, a table, and a bottle of water in the stage space. It was our job as a group to go up and change the positions of the three items, positioning them in a way we felt represented the bottle had the highest status. After a lot of changes, we came to a conclusion, but the process was quite choppy. Some people worked with the concept of the highest status being represented by the bottle literally being the highest thing in the space, other times people centred the bottle in centre stage and put the other items behind it, sometimes the chair and table were knocked down and dishevelled while the bottle stood upright and proper. In the end, I put the bottle in centre stage and I placed the chair and table upstage right and left, creating an arrow shape with the bottle as the forefront and the point.
Then, a few actors added themselves to the scene, posing as if it were a photograph and each attempting to get the highest status. Jerome stood high on the chair with his hand in the air, Jennifer took centre stage, Toyo casually chilled on the upturned table, Divina joined Jerome on the chair and held her arm even higher, and then Romaine took the position Rob believed to have the highest status: the photographer. Everyone else onstage then became only the subjects of his photo.

We then played a game in two halves of the class where we were assigned numbers, our number representing our status, one being the highest. We were given an environment, not allowed to tell anyone our number, and then had to all improvise a scene acting as a person of our status. The other half of the class had to guess our status and line us up how they thought we were numbered.

The first group were in a backstage party environment, numbered from one to seven. I observed a lot of the same things we saw in Romaine and Melody. You could guess people’s status by how confident they acted, how they used the space, their body language, their posture, their voice, how loudly they spoke, what they said, the way they behaved, what they were doing, how they treated the other actors.
It is interesting that social stereotypes in terms of roles and jobs were also used to portray status; for example, if somebody was a low status number, they would choose a role such as dinner lady or cleaner to emphasise their social standing.
I felt we worked well as a group in guessing the numbers of the other group, as we got all right except two whose numbers we got the wrong way round.

When it came to taking part in the exercise myself, I was given the number four; there were nine of us in total and our environment was a school.
As my character I chose a student giving a tour to new students or people going round on an open day. I thought this was quite a good way to show that I didn’t actually have high authority and I wasn’t in a role of great power, but I was high up enough and had enough of an established role at school that I had responsibilities to carry out.
The other group managed to guess my number perfectly, which I was very happy with, as they picked up on most of the stuff I was trying to convey.

The next thing we took part in was an exercise in pairs. One person played the master, one the servant. The master had to instruct the servant to do several things, and it was the task of the servant each time to use their wit and cunning to come up with ways of sneakily getting one over on the master in performing the assigned task. It was a good game because it really engaged your brain and you had to think of things on the spot.
First I worked with Jerome. He instructed me to clean the floor, I proceeded to do so with his arm, he said to me to make a sandwich and I added a nasty chemical to it, he told me to carry him to the table, I instead dragged the table over to him. We played around with it quite a lot; it was fun thinking on the spot.
I also worked with Cache and we did some similar things to that I did with Jerome.
This game was an intriguing way to explore how somebody can twist their status or role to make them happy and give them the upper hand; even in a position as a servant there are ways of being spiteful and getting revenge on the unkind master.

The work we did on status I feel made strong links to our Waiting for Godot work, because the concept of status, in the case of Godot lower class, and even the statuses within that status (e.g. Vladimir acting as though he is slightly superior to Estragon), hold a fair amount of weight in terms of driving the narrative.

Improvisation using Godot as stimuli is what we worked on this afternoon; an interesting angle on developing the Godot pieces by using our imaginations to create pieces demonstrating our own interpretations of the play.
The first exercise Romaine and I didn’t get the chance perform, but I enjoyed watching the other pairs. The task we’d been set was to improvise a short scene which could come after the excerpt we’re doing from the play.
I think this is an effective way to improve understanding of the scenes we have, as it gets you to think about the repercussions and aftermath of the scenes we’re performing for the assignment.
I observed some very interesting takes on what might happen immediately after the scenes. The various actors who performed the improvisations had similar ideas in some ways; a sort of lethargic argument between Didi and Gogo, and a discussion about “where on earth is Godot?”
Exploring questions which I feel cross our minds as actors like “how long will they be waiting?” and “does Godot even exist?” through having the characters query it themselves was brilliant, and brought out this apparent level of self-awareness in the characters, which almost broke down the fourth wall in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way.

Our next task in our pairs was to devise an improvisational scene between the two Godot characters, in which they have a short talk which turns into one of them telling a story. Jerome worked with Romaine and I as his partner wasn’t here, so we had to think of a way to incorporate a third person, and it seemed just perfect: as we tell the story, Jerome acts it out.
We thought of the idea after coming up with this that we could each tell our own version of the same story, giving different points of view on the same thing.
We started our piece just finishing the conversation about the four evangelists, at the end of which I as Estragon cut Vladimir off. Vladimir then tried to engage me in a few more stories, but each time I cut him off. Feeling bad for behaving so rudely, my character then decided to try and make amends and cheer up Vladimir by telling a story of his own, and this is where we incorporated the tale we had to make up and include.
We chose one where Estragon had been tricked by Vladimir into thinking he was dead. This was for a comical and ridiculous effect, but it actually, in a strange way, related to status. The reason Vladimir tricked Estragon in our devised scene was that Estragon fell asleep listening to Vladimir’s story, so Vladimir wanted to teach him a lesson.
This links to the idea of Vladimir being above Estragon and in a subliminal, perhaps even subconscious way, wanting to keep him in line; or, in his place.

It was inspiring to look at even more ways of exploring the Godot scene and the relationship between the men today, I feel that we’re really adding more and more layers as we go along and our comprehension of the piece is getting richer.
Today has also been a great way to use our imaginations and develop creativity in quick thinking, which is really productive in relation to our improvisation of course.

Thursday 14th May 2015 

The exercises we did to warm up today were enjoyable ones which really required you to think on your feet as fast as you could. First we stood in a circle and put a glasses case in the centre. We then had to go in one by one and quickly think of something it could be, then use it as that in an improv for a few seconds. Everyone thought of completely different things for it to be; a phone, food, a golf club, or as I thought of a grenade. This warm up showed that the ability to create a scene can lie entirely in the imagination of the actors. 

Next we played a game where we stood in pairs in a circle, one person on the inside facing out and the other standing facing them. Everyone standing on the inside of the circle had to think of an opening line, and then they used it to start a ten second improvised conversation with the person opposite them. Every ten seconds the people on the outside of the circle moved around one space, to the next person on the inside. The people on the inside had to use the same line every time, it was really up to their new partner to continue the story each time. This was pretty fun, as I moved from person to person wondering what their line would be! I found this game really helpful with accepting and idea and building on it, because you have no choice here but to elaborate on the line offered to you. 

The work we did in pairs today was interesting. 

The first task we were given was to create a short improvisation set in the morning, based around something that had happened to one or both of us the night before. 

Jack and I worked together on this. We really liked the idea of having an improvisation where we didn't actually know what was going to happen, only one of us knew what had happened and the other didn't. We decided it would be Jack that something had happened to and me that had to get it out of him. 

The comic concept which I've seen numerous times in fiction of somebody obviously wanting to talk about something but insisting they don't by saying "Oh never mind..." is something we found really funny, so we decided to use this. We set out the basic structure; I would be making breakfast, Jack comes in, tries really hard to get my attention, begins to act all coy while clearly wanting to tell me, then he tells me what happened. 

The rest of it, the story of what had happened and my reaction, was improvised on the spot when we performed. I personally found this quite fun; it meant my reactions were spontaneous and we had to properly make it up on the spot to serve the narrative as we performed. 

Something intriguing that some of the other pairs did however was to never actually tell us what had happened. There were varying degrees of revealing what happened in the different pieces, and the ones I found most effective were those that were very ambiguous and cleverly done so you wanted to know more. Given the chance to do this exercise again, I think I'd enjoy working with that idea! 

The next improvisation we did followed similar lines to that I just discussed of subliminal messages, but this time it was with very sensitive topics. We had to choose one serious subject to use as stimuli, out of the following options:

- Self harm 

- FGM

- Coming out 

- Abuse 

- Bullying 

- Seperation

Jack and I chose bullying. We further developed the concept of him knowing and me having to find out, but this time it was far less comical. Although we added some sensitively used light hearted-ness to add layers to it, most of our scene was rather sad. It wasn't dramatic, we wanted it to be simple so it could be quite realistic. 

The character Jack played was a young autistic boy with a prosthetic leg, who was the victim of bullying at school. I played his older sister who had to talk to him about it and try to comfort him. 

I found this an emotional piece to do,  and I found myself invested in the situation. 

In our scene, Jack came home in a bad mood, and I had to try and talk to him about what had happened. But it was a difficult conversation, because his thoughts and behaviour was suggestive of aspergers, and he found it difficult to communicate his emotions.

I really liked our piece, I think it was sweet and it dealt with the situation gently. Jack added something at the very end which I think was a very nice touch, as my character leaves to make dinner, Jack's character just stopped me to say "thank you". Just that, nothing more. Thank you for talking to him and making him feel better. I think it was quite a tender moment, considering this child's difficulty with conveying emotion and understanding usual interactions.

Unfortunately we didn't get the chance to perform our improvisation, but I think that it was a good experience to observe some of the other groups and see the approaches people took to the subjects.

Today was very helpful to me because it allowed us to work on really developing ideas in improvisation; we had the opportunity to explore more depth in our scenes.

Thursday 21st May 2015 

Today we looked at reinforcing our basic knowledge of one of the staples of improvisation, as well as taking part in some new exercises. One of the most important things in improv we talked about is making the other actor look good. Avoid attacking, don't make cheap jokes, and don't try to get cheap laughs at the other actor's expense. It is totally unhelpful and it is very selfish to hog the limelight; it should be about working together to serve the narrative.
Keeping this in mind, we played some improvisational games based in pairs and groups, focusing on teamwork to create a good performance!

The first game we played today was a game in pairs. One actor plays an expert in something of their choosing, but can only speak gobbledegook. The other actor has to play their translator, taking questions from the audience, asking the expert, and then making up what their response was and telling the audience. This is such a funny exercise, and it is a perfect example of using teamwork.
For example, the expert can really help out the translator by giving a long answer in gobbledegook to give the translator time to make up what the answer is.
The translator also has to be a team player by interpreting through the kind of gestures, facial expressions and body language the other actor uses what kind of answer they might be implying. Even the rest of us, sitting in the audience, have to help out the actors on stage; giving them interesting questions.

The rest of the morning was based on using historical events as stimuli for solo, duo, and group improvisations. We all had to write our name on one piece of paper, and a historical event on the other. We then put them into two hats.
One piece of paper was then drawn out of each hat, and whoever's name it was had to work with the historical event pulled from the other hat. They had to be someone or something associated with that event and deliver a thirty second monologue discussing how they felt about it.
This was great, I feel like it really pushed people to work hard and use their imaginations. Having to develop an improvisation totally alone really challenges an actor because all of the focus is on them, and they have had no preparation - they are thrown in at the deep end. Everyone who did this performed really strong monologues, whether emotional or funny, and I think it highlighted the ability and potential within the actors in our class.

Next we were put into groups and each group was given a historical event to create an mime of.
Our group were given Columbus discovering America.
Knowing we had to convey the event through only mime and no dialogue, we used the knowledge we had of the event to pinpoint moments in the journey which could be physically clear; using a big map to plot the journey, going on a ship, searching with a compass, getting lost, then finally discovering "new" land and being overjoyed.
Ryan managed to guess what our scene was from the mime, so I think we must have made a relatively clear story. I think this was another prime example of the importance of working together in improvisation; if we didn't all put in 100% and work together, the piece would have been a shambles and we wouldn't have delivered a clear performance.

Today was a productive session on improv, I think especially as we could see the contrast in working alone and working with others, and how both your personal performance and your ability to work as a team are important. 

11th June 2015: Assessment day 

So today, all of the work we have been doing on improvisation came to a head as we finished our unit with a morning workshop of improv games. 

We played several we have already done and know relatively well, such as foreign film, party quirks and goalie, most of them focused on improvisation in pairs; 

it was really good. 

Today through lots of participation and also observation, I felt this was a really great way to end this improv unit, as we got to use everything we've learnt and apply it in one big workshop. 

I observed in this morning's session that there was really, really strong work all round. Everybody was working together and putting 100% of themselves into the exercises; I could see serious effort and a fantastic level of understanding improvisation within the class. 

I believe today was so successful because people mostly stuck to the fundamentals of improv that we've looked at so many times; don't block, don't attack, make the other actor look good, serve the narrative, take risks, avoid linear stories, be imaginitive. 

There were only a few instances where people deviated from these guidelines; I did observe some blocking at various points for example. It's clear I think when watching that, even though it's usually unintentional, blocking can really get in the way and make the scene awkward. I find I can see the awkwardness on stage and there's a definite struggle to continue when an idea isn't accepted or is rebuffed... It really makes a huge difference. 

It was also interesting, and I think very productive, even when things didn't work out. There were a few games in which the actors just don't feel it was working or it didn't go so well, and it was good to see people feeling confident enough to just say "this isn't working". It's an important part of the learning and building process I think, and there's really nothing wrong with making mistakes or anything. 

I felt pleased with the exercises I took part in today too; feeling determined to put to good work all I've developed over the last couple of months, I think I asserted myself and did my best. 

In reflection on my own work from this morning I think most of it was good, specifically in terms of working together with the other actor, as what I focused most of my energy on was trying to be a good co-actor. 

If I could make alterations to my input today, I think I'd just go a bit more crazy with it: take more risks and maybe create more bizarre and ridiculous improvisations. 

But on the whole this has been a really positive experience, as well as completely helpful for me in developing my skills as an actor and performer. 

I think improv can be used in all corners of performing, as it's that ability to be spontaneous, try stuff out, and work as a team that can be just what you need to put on a performance. 

I really do think this unit has aided my development and education in many ways, most specifically it has helped me: 

• Build confidence on stage 

• Not be afraid to take risks 

• Be able to experiment with material and stimuli 

• Be a good team player and company member 

• Have fun while performing 

• Let creativity flow 

I intend to expand and elaborate even further on all we have learnt through this unit and apply it to my future work.