~ Autumn Term Weeks 1 & 2 ~

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Week 1


Monday

 In our first lesson together as a group, we spent some time getting to know each other in order to be able to create an ensemble.

We started reading the abridged script for 'Romeo and Juliet' and discussed the course, learning about what we will cover. I learnt about what we will be doing in this year, after our performance of 'Romeo and Juliet', we will be doing a project involving acting in front of a camera, and doing another performance at the end of the year.

We had a group discussion about what makes Shakespeare boring for young people, and how to make our performance more engaging for a younger audience.


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[The red writing is what can make Shakespeare uninteresting to young people.
The green writing is our ideas on how to make our performance more engaging.]

We also discussed our ideas and opinions on what makes a good story.
The list includes:

  • Setting (clear and/or interesting)
  • Context
  • Good characterisation
  • Character development
  • Believable characters and/or plot
  • Plot twists
  • Cliffhanger
  • Use of/Good relationship between characters
  • Good plot

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 Tuesday

We successfully created our blogs and looked at how to structure it.

We discussed what we knew of the plot of 'Romeo and Juliet' in as much detail as we could we then split into groups of 4 to create freeze frames for 3 of the most important scenes. My group chose the scene where Romeo first meets Juliet, their marriage, and when Juliet finds Romeo dead.

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[Romeo meets Juliet at Capulet party]


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[The marriage of Romeo and Juliet]


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[Juliet finds Romeo dead]

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Wednesday

We did improvisation games which helped me to think on my feet, and it is useful because it means that if something were to go wrong during the performance I can step in and improvise to get the play back on track.


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Thursday

We started with a vocal warm up to help with dictation and articulation in rehearsals and for our performance.

We also looked at intentions, and our reasons for entering the scene.



Week 2


Monday

We looked at movement, and how moving in different ways can impact how the audience sees the character. For example, moving quickly and indirectly could make the character look suspicious. We practised moving in different ways using different combinations of quick, slow, direct and indirect.

We also explored intentions with dialogue. We paired up and did an exercise where one person said yes and the other said no and we had to have an argument using only these words. We experimented with different tactics, such as using different tones of voice (i.e sarcastic, belittling), varying the volume and speaking over each other. This meant that we thought about the intention and reason behind our lines.

We also did a group improvisation based on the party scene where we made up characters and interacted with each other. This made me aware of how I should interact with other characters in the scene, in relation to their and my own status, and whether they were from the house of Capulet or Montague.

We also did an exercise where Romeo and Juliet were trying to be together and the rest of us had to keep them apart. This was interesting to see one way we could block the scene.


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Tuesday (and the rest of the week)

We came up with three movements for a fight to potentially use in a fight scene in the performance. We were in pairs and came up with a short fight sequence. We rehearsed it until it there was no hesitation between the movements, and did them twice in slow motion and then again twice but sped up to normal speed.


[The routine my partner and I came up with.]

We also did a separate routine stood in two lines facing each other as the Montagues and the Capulets (although casting was not done yet). We did the same fighting move (mine was a punch to the throat) to someone opposite us. We did this in canon with it starting at one end of the line and moving down towards the other end so we were all coming together to fight in slow motion, taking a step forward every time we did our fighting move. We rehearsed this until we made it look smooth and the moves flowed into each other. We then worked on transitioning from this into doing our pair routines. We tried doing the pair routines in a perfect circle but then found that it looked better from an audience's perspective as a more staggered circle with different levels so that everyone could be seen. For example, one pair was stood at the front so another pair towards the back could be seen between them. The transition we went with was to simply walk, in slow motion, around the space as if we were looking for a fight until we found our partner.

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