Vocal Awareness

Last lessons, we had to do an exercise with a partner about directing a monologue from the script of 'Gotcha' by Barrie Keefe, and they had to perform the monologue we chose for them to do. We had to annotate the monologue with instructions for our partner on how to perform it in terms of accent, tone, pace, volume, pitch, and also the words we wanted them to emphasize. I worked with James Pullen acting as Ton. He would speak in a subtle cockney accent; with a very sinnister yet sarcastic tone to it; the pace would start off quite fast but then it would slowly drop towards the end of the monologue to create more tension; the volume would be quite to start with and would then become much louder.

Laban System of Efforts

The tasks in class we had done were set to explore the 7 states of tension, we chose to use different states to see how our characterisation would change. We changed our body movements and speed of the movements to improve the details of our performance. The states dictated our movement, I could be at state 7 which highly restricts our movement, or state 1 which is almost dead, people would be slow and faint almost unable to function though their pace, tone of voice and effort levels. In a different task we walk around at different levels and change how the same situation can be interpreted, this exercise helped to understand what the states included, when I was at Californian my body was relaxed, flimsy and this made me develop specific characteristics that fit with this character, I became more care free and happy towards others. These were effort levels that showed the amount of energy to put in and gave me as an actor a guidance to how to respond on a scale.I played the Kid in the final task and the context of my scene was at a school detention where Ton was in charge and I was not, however Lyne enters because I am suppose to be in her class, this leads to the teachers arguing and me leaving. In this task we explored the different effort qualities which are governed by the four polarities of time, weight, space and flow, I replicated the quality of Floating, this is when the character feels light and uses in direct movement, the character is also free to flow and has sustained movement.My performance related to the context of gotcha as we used the three same characters and used them in the same settings of a comprehensive school however we did change the direct realism and replaced it with a more comical performance because we naturally gravitated towards this style in rehearsals.