Rehearsal Evaluation

Evaluation of my ability to perform in rehearsals: 

1. Can you hit your cues?

Yes, I believe I can hit my cues. Having my scenes at the very beginning of the play and the end of the play is an advantage because it ensures that I'm always on time. One issue I am finding hard is keeping up with what units have been performed while I am backstage, since I am off for a long period of time. This is made worse because so far rehearsals have been quite loud. I think that in the future rehearsals if our group learns to focus more, it will be much easier to hit cues because everyone will be able to hear the scenes happening and know when they are meant to be on.

Cues are essential because they make the performance flow. At the moment, there is only a small number of people in my group who are hitting their cues right on time which is making rehearsal time not as efficient as it could be. However, if we all stood at the side of the stage silently with an open ear and came on with energy, playing our objectives then the play will be successful.

2. Are you bringing your objectives on with you?

Unit 1: When my character is first onstage, Hippolyta's brings on her main objective: to explore/examine/review/evaluate her wedding room. It's the first time she has seen it and she's very excited and feels really sneaky and naughty as she technically isn't supposed to see her wedding room till the wedding day. As her and Theseus galavant around the room excitedly, she is fulfilling her objective which I think I am playing well. I am trying to do this differently each time.

 I realised at the beginning of rehearsals that me and Ruby (Theseus) seemed to be a lot more closer to each other during this scene; we felt the need to constantly touch and hold each other. Of course, this couple is very lovey-dovey and have intimate moments all the time but I believe this is the scene which reveals just how excited they are to the audience - it makes the audience excited too because it's the opening scene. Therefore, I have tried to play with the space more to explore and kept the contact with Ruby to a minimum. It's where our characters are truly alone and have the chance to let themselves go whereas when the other characters enter in the following scene (Egeus, Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia), that is when they return to their formal selves and make come closer together, especially as my objective for that scene switches to observe.

For the later scenes at the end of the play, I believe I am playing my objectives well. Initially, I found these objectives a lot more challenging because I have no lines so I may feel more awkward on the stage.  This occurred especially in Unit 28, where myself and Theseus discover the lovers asleep in the forest. I have no lines, so my objective was simply to 'observe'. However, I quickly realised that lines are meaningless and all you have to do is play your objective - without overacting.

Over acting is unjustified and isn't naturalistic and a representation of real life like theatre should be. I am making sure I don't do this by playing objectives naturally, without any force. 

3. Are you using the language well?

Happy days will quickly steep themselves in nights,

Happy nights will quickly dream away the time,

And then the moon, like to a silver bow,

New bent in heaven, shall behold the night

Of our solemnities.

This is one of my lines. To effectively perform Shakespeare, it is vital to pronounce and enunciate the vowels clearly because vowels carry emotion and bring the colour to your thoughts.  It is also important to stress certain words. Shakespeare's use of iambic pentameter is an indication to the actors of what words to stress and what words not to stress. Some of the words I stress in this speech include 'nights', 'bow' and 'bent'. However, I think to make my lines better, I should especially exaggerate the vowels in this speech a bit more to make sure I am fully appreciating the demands of the text. 

4. Are you breathing in the middle of thoughts?

No, I am not. I am using the punctuation to guide how I deliver the lines, which is making them flow more and helping information go to the audience with more clarity and precision. 

5. This play is not about the final performance but about learning the ability to rehearse.

This statement means that we should be completely committed in rehearsals, hitting our cues and acquiring our skills. The bi product is the performance, which is merely just a polished run of the whole play to a proper audience, but every week we should be truly committing ourselves to rehearsals. This is what a real actor is: someone who can have relationships with other actors and just have commitment all the time. I think I am doing this because every week I come to rehearsals with my notes, script (which is annotated) and I try to keep as quiet backstage, staying in role. I try to do each scene differently every time I do it to have some spontaneity and I try to write notes to self based on the scenes I'd have just performed.

Costume Moodboard

Being Successful in Year 12

Thursday, 14th April

Discussion question:
What does it take for you to be a successful artist in Year 12 at the BRIT School?

• Have positive relationships with your peers & teachers - therefore, you can work together creatively to make art beautifully.
• Be on time and have good punctuality and attendance to show you actually want to be there.
• Make notes in all of your lessons and try your best across the board to succeed in all subjects.
• In strand (theatre), always send positive energy to all members in your strand, work effectively in rehearsals, have all coursework up to date, know script lines, put in extra effort, evaluate your ideas and any exercises done in strand time.
• Go and see theatre outside of school.
• Be yourself.
• Use other skills/take up other skills. Don't just be an actor, be a singer, dancer, be intellectual, be opinionated, be interested about politics, write plays, go to art galleries, learn instruments. 
• Challenge yourself at all times and be open to new ideas and methods.
• Become the 'total actor': Physical, Intellectual, Social ninja

Character Session Notes: Cover Lesson

Thursday, 7th April

Character Exercise One: Scale of Potential

During this exercise, we walked around the space in neutral, until our teacher gave us instructions. For example, 'Anger' would be the set emotion and there would be a set scale, e.g 10 being extremely angry and we'd have to play extremely angry or In Love would be the set emotion and given the number 5 we'd have to play being in love at the scale of 5. This exercise is useful because it plays with what happens if..... and helps us experience our characters more and experiment more with them.

Character Exercise Two: A Day in the Life

In this exercise, we had to play our character's daily activities, from waking up, what they do during the day, sleeping, eating breakfast etc. This is called Imaginary Acting however can be problematic as you're just assuming and changing a character from how the playwright made that character. This acting technique shows how lots of different actors use differing ways of acting, for example this exercise compared to the first one, to get to know your character. This got me thinking about the different acting techniques there are:

Meisner: Life & Acting Technique

Sanford Meisner (August 31st 1905-February 2nd, 1997)  was an American actor/teacher. He developed a new approach to acting known as The Meisner Technique.

Meisner was born in Brooklyn as the oldest child of four, to Hermann Meisner and Bertha Knoepfler, both Jewish immigrants who came to the US from Hungary.  When Sanford's brother Jacob died of tuberculosis after being fed unpasteurised milk,  Meisner said in an interview years later that it was "the dominant emotional influence in my life from which I have never, after all these years, escaped." Meisner became very isolated from his parents after they blamed him for his brother's death. (The trip on which Jacob died was one intended to help Sanford's health)

Meisner became very interested in the piano and went to the Juilliard School where he studied to become a concert pianist. However, soon The Great Depression hit and he was taken out of school to help in the family business. Meisner later recalled that the only way he got through the lull of business work was to recall in his head all the classical musical pieces he'd studied in school. This gave him a great sense of sound and when he later became an acting teacher, he often closed his eyes and listened to student's work to 'listen more closely and pinpoint the true and false moments in their acting'.

By 1935, Sansford Meisner had joined the faculty of 'The Neighbourhood Playhouse School of the Theatre', continuing as the director of the Acting department. This school first opened in 1928 and was exclusive to only nine students who were taught by acting experts. Over his time at the school, he developed and refined the Meisner Technique: "to live truthfully under given imaginary circumstances". This was influenced by Meisner's dis illusion with method acting (1933) : "Actors are not guinea pigs to be manipulated, dissected".  His classroom was peppered wth signs advising students to 'act before you think' and remember that 'an ounce of behaviour is worth a pound of words'. He continued to teach until his 80s despite his cataracts being removed (meaning he needed huge glasses). Also, after a largyngectomy, he also needed a microphone headset during teaching to amplify his voice.

Meisner's teaching techniques were usually to guide students in pairs through improvisational exercise, in order to be ''introducing you to a way of making yourself one with the text and getting you to work off of the other fellow.'' 

Acting is based on instinct and intuition, he told the class, and ''the emotional rhythm that goes on inside the actor is the least controllable part of any performance, but it must be present in the right proportion if the scene is to work.''

Meisner died on February 2nd, 1977 at Sherman Oaks, LA, US.

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The Meisner Technique:

Sanford Meisner said that his approach to training “is based on bringing the actor back to his emotional impulses and to acting that is firmly rooted in the instinctive. It is based on the fact that all good acting comes from the heart, as it were, and that there’s no mentality to it.”  

Learn to live in the moment as an actor, and let go of any idea of result.  Learn what it means to really “do” and to respond truthfully to a given moment based on what you get from your partner.  Through improvisation, emotional truth and personal response learn to resonate authenticity within a given circumstance. Only in this way will you begin to understand the definition of real acting, which is “to live truthfully under the imaginary circumstances”.  

In Meisner’s view, great acting depends on the actor’s impulsive response to what’s happening around him. His key exercise, spontaneous repetition, is designed for the actor to develop that dormant capacity.  Meisner’s approach trains the actor to “live truthfully under imaginary circumstances,” to discover or create personally meaningful points of view with respect to the (written or improvised) word, and to express spontaneous human reactions and authentic emotion with the utmost sense of truth.

Rehearsing Effectively

How do you rehearse effectively?

• If you're not performing, be considerate to people on stage by not talking to show respect. Instead, you can learn your lines or you can go through your script and work out more about your character and their relationships with others (whether your character likes them, what they want from them).
• Alternatively, you can give feedback to scenes you're not in by observing; looking at what needs to be improved and by making notes. Are the people in the scene playing the objective you think they are? 
• Learn from other people's mistakes: listen to the director's feedback for other scenes and apply tips to your scene.
• Be constructive, not destructive: only talk if you want to discuss an aspect of the scene with another actor offstage. Also, make sure you send positive energy to those performing so they don't become discouraged by giving them friendly but fair advice on how to improve, or what was good about the scene. 

Rehearsal Notes (24th March)

24th March, 2016

Rehearsal Notes: what were some of the issues of this rehearsal? 

• Breathing sequences: a lot of people had their breathing sequences wrong and were breathing at the wrong time. Therefore, this broke up thoughts and made it harder for the audience to understand what was being said on stage.                                                                              Solution: Don't breathe at the end of Shakespearian lines unless there is punctuation. 
• Giving lines emotion: lines spoken didn't have enough emotion or passion in and this made the scenes boring and hard to engage with, especially if you were offstage observing.            Solution: Have an opinion about what you're saying: pronounce vowels more to give you vocal tone; use good diction to make what you're saying clear; be emotionally connected what you're saying (this will give you colour) and use iambic pentameter so you know where the important words are in a line.
• Spatial awareness: a lot of the time in a scene, actors would clump together in one space when there was a lot of room on the stage to play in. This made the scene less visually pleasing and less engaging.                                                                                                                         Solution: Play your objective and you will naturally spread out; use your peripheral vision so if you see any actors clumped near you, you can spread out and remember you don't always have to be stood near someone when talking to them, it is more powerful to be stood further away from someone when talking to them (shows status).
• Cues were slow: many people missed their cues or weren't sure when their scenes were, making the rehearsal process slower.                                                                                   Solution; When offstage, be looking through your script, checking for when your next scene is and be ready to come on knowing your objective and with energy.