Day Three

We started with movement and acting warm ups. Again, not something I'm used to as a musician but I really enjoyed getting involved! This involved using imagination to transform the room into something crazy, such as candy floss, and playing off against each other. I thought the most useful aspect of these exercises was heightening the response, taking our actions to the extremes. This was loosely based on a Stella Adler workshop style and I think it would be relevant to all performers, not just actors. 

The improvising exercises were especially effective and getting us all to work together and come up with a lot of ideas.

One of the dancers in the group decided to lead a movement workshop, focusing on feeling emotions and letting the whole body move to it. We then came together to move in a group This was influenced by the movement work on monday, in which we followed one another's intentions. We decided we could use this movement and music to enhance text. We chose Wasted, written by a Lewisham based writer on current issues faced by many in today's society. The extract has a strong rhythm and emotive language that we feel we can heighten. The emotions we will use are helplessness, anger, euphoria and feeling out of control.

We are thinking about moving the narrator to the centre of the group, to give the impression that our movements an expression of their emotions. Tomorrow we will work at staging and creating specific movements for emotive words or strong rhythms. I feel that the simple melodic lines work well. We decided to use a tenor saxophone for the female voice and a flute for the male to create a contrast in pitch and ensure the words are understood.

In the afternoon we explored different characters for our pub scene using conversations and hot seating. The different scenarios that we created mainly used current issues but it was lacking a good pace once the soundscape finishes. We worked on improving the pace of the piece using short snippets of conversation. This did make me a little more confident as a non-actor and the longer conversations were beginning to lose focus. I was pleased with the edit as the rhythm now fits the style of our soundscape that has a really strong beat.

Our third and final piece is based on people's different reactions to the book 50 Shades of Grey, as the film is coming out this weekend. Again we use a soundscape of different words and sounds related to the topic and try to move with the soundscape.

We staged this really effectively with striking, personal monologues from some members of the group however we felt that the end result was cringey. By moving away from the original comedic aspect we had discussed, the dramatisation was taking away from the actual content. 

Tomorrow we will look at reworking this piece. The Wasted performance is becoming really powerful as we are working well together and using simple music to enhance emotions. The Pub scene also has a nice pulse and rhythmic, light-hearted soundscape. Hopefully we can get all 3 pieces performance ready!