Week 16: Classwork

Wednesday

After the previous weeks of focusing on the Creon and Antigone scene, we decided to move onto the first scenes between Antigone and the nurse and also the following scene between Antigone and her sister, Ismene.

To open the scene with the nurse, we wanted to highlight the meta theatre elements so she was going to be the last person onstage and as she would be looking very confused as to why everybody had gone offstage and then she would realize what was going on and so would start to get into her character. I think that this is very affective towards the audience as it would add a funny element before the play begins and starts to take a serious edge.

We wanted the nurse scene to be quite light and playful so that there would be a bigger juxtaposition between this scene and the next one. We made sure that there was a light atmosphere by making the nurse and Antigone's interaction quite funny and having Antigone slightly mock the nurse as the nurse overreacts to the idea of antigone going out in the morning.

The staging of the scene with the nurse begins quite separate with each character on either side of the stage. This symbolizes the distance that Antigone has put between herself and the nurse by going out and not telling her what she was doing. But as the scene progresses, we see the nurse reminiscing about her past and trying to get Antigone to tell her where she's been which brings them closer in both their relationship and staging. Ending the scene, we see the nurse sat on the chair with Antigone knelt beside her saying her last line "...and I mustn't be little today."  Which shows the relationship between the two as the nurse has brought Antigone up from being little and she values her opinion because she is one of the people that she wants to have a last moment with before she completely immerses herself into burying her brother and having that as the only thing in her mind. I feel that Antigone, even though she is very stubborn, actually cares for certain people like Ismene and the nurse as they have been beside Antigone as she has grown as a person.

After exploring the Nurse scene we moved onto the Ismene scene. I was thinking about the type of relationship that these two sisters would have and I came to the conclusion that they would be very close as we find out that they had both been planning on burying their brother but Antigone, knowing her sister and what she would say, had gone out and already started as she would have expected ismene to rethink their decision and end up not wanting to participate.

Here is the scene that we came up with:

(Link)

During this scene we see the evolution of the sisters relationship through the proxemics as they begin close enough for Antigone to rest her head on Ismene's leg and as the scene quickly picks up, we see the teasing of Antigone being pushed aside by Ismenes need to deal with the matter at hand, burying their brother. This completely changes the scenes atmosphere at this point as the matter that is being discussed becomes more serious with more serious consequences. At the end of the scene they end up  in opposite positions on stage with Antigone sat in the chair, dismissing Ismene and Ismene standing towards the door.

In the first two scenes we already begin to witness Antigone slowing saying her goodbyes to her family and her beginning to create distance between herself and others so that when she dies, it may soften the blow slightly. I think that Antigone uses these scenes to remind herself of the times that she has had with these other characters and take them to her grave with her.

Week 15: Classwork

Wednesday

After blocking through half of the Creon and Antigone scene last week, we continued to work on the last section so that we would complete the scene this week. We worked through the staging of each section first. We wanted to show the power exchange that happens throughout this scene and so we started the second half of the scene with Creon kneeling in front of Antigone which shows that Antigone has the power at this point but then Creon stands and begins to regain his rightful position. He puts her in her position when he throws her to the floor.

This point is completing juxtaposing to the image that was created on stage moments before. Throughout the whole of the scene we see the power struggle between the two becoming more and more relevant and also visible to the audience and both characters are being to lose their temper with each other and they have both come to their last resort in trying to persuade the other in to doing what they want. 

At this junction in the scene we wanted to reiterate the elements of Metatheatre and remind the audience that we are actors on stage and so we got Antigone to get up and the actress character to be shown and so she would be feeling disgusted by the mud that she has just been thrown into and she will say her line out to the audience: "I don't want to do this. It's alright for you. But I'm not here to understand, I'm here to say no to you."  She points out her role to the audience; to say no to Creon. And then she returns back to her Antigone role and the scene continues. I feel like does this not only create tension between the audience and the actress as they are tense as to why she has come out of role and to why she has openly admitted that she doesn't want to play this role anymore but it also shows how severe the consequences of her actions are; this actress genuinely thinks that she is going to die because she has been cast as Antigone.

One of the most challenging things of this scene for me, is the build up of Antigone becoming crazy. We needed to show the build up of her anger and show that she has other emotions as well. In the last section of the scene, it is the part where Antigone has learnt the truth about her brothers and Creon has told her that "Happiness is just a word eh." This triggers Antigone as her happiness is completely juxtaposing with what Creon thinks happiness is. Antigone's happiness is her being killed over her fighting for her brothers whereas Creon's happiness is to keep Antigone safe and to keep Thebes from having any uprisings against him.

Week 14: Classwork

Monday

We decided to use Monday's lesson as an opportunity to recap and go over the fight sequence that we use at the start of the play as a warm-up in our actor characters. We wanted to make the pace quite quick so that it looked as though each person wanted to severely injure the other person. Even though we were attacking each other with sticks, we looked at the end of the other person's stick so that the audience would believe that it was dangerous and could in fact harm us.

We decided to add in harsh breath sounds and grunts so that we could emphasis the affect of the fighting and it would also created a bigger juxtaposition between the fighting scenes and the silent more intimate scenes that don't have every chorus member on stage. 

Wednesday

After working on making the fight scene more intense on Monday, we decided to use this to symbolize the two brothers fighting. One person from each pair was to stand on either side of the room and we were going to stare at each other with hatred because we were fighting for Polynices and they were fighting for Eteocles.

 After crossing over, we had to find a way so that one person out of each pair to be taken to the ground when we met in the middle. Me and my partner decided that I should look as though I was going to stab her in the thigh as it was the easiest transition for her to get across my shoulder. The reason why she needed to get on my shoulder was so that we added height to our movement because when Hannah was thrown on the floor it would have bigger impact on the audience and it would also show the extremes that the fight went to.

The prologue's speech moves on to speak of the deceased bodies that are left in the soil and are so disassembled that you can't tell the different between dirt and a body part. We wanted to go from the loud frantic movement so that there are many places for the audience to look and their eyes won't be able to focus on one specific thing, to a still juxtaposing image of deceased bodies all intertwined.

In the still image, we wanted to add height so that we could represent the hills of mud and body parts that there was after the fight between Eteocles and Polynices. We had one person in a shoulder sit, a pin lift and knee stand. This allowed us to have many different levels which was visually interesting for the audience to look at because the two opposing sides that were fighting against each other just moments ago are now just a mound of bodies, and the is the only point when the sides don't matter as they have all become connect by disagreeing with each other.

The speech then proceeds to talk about Creon declaring who was the rightful brother and which brother deserves to have a funeral and have the passage to the afterlife. We wanted Eteocles, the rightful brother, to have a grand gesture the would should he was the "winner" of the fight. We added in a lift so we physically showed that Eteocles was above Polynices, who was left to rot in the mud. We wanted two juxtaposing images, so we had Eteocles being lifted and described almost like a god, and Polynices melts into the floor and slithers offstage. Polynices becomes almost like water because his life is just another one among many others and he gets lost in the system as all the attention is focused on Eteocles.

Week 13: Classwork and N2C

Wednesday

On Wednesday, we started by experimenting with puppets. We were experimenting with a group of chorus members moving a suit jacket, a hat and also a pair of shoes. Using puppets was one of the ways that we could represent the brothers, Eteocles and Polynices, when they are fighting for the throne of Thebes once their father had died.

Initially to get used to the idea of the chorus being puppeteers, we started working on the body shape of the man. We wanted to make it look like the body was forming from the dirt , so we began with a step of each foot and the suit jacket forming up after. I was one of the people who was holding the torso, so I had one hand on the shoulder and one hand on the bottom of the arm. We found that this was the easiest way to move the torso as we could bend the arm and we also had full control over the shoulders which would be the key part to making the puppet look like it was breathing. We also experimented with a chorus member having their arm in the jacket at different points so it gave an illusion of there actually being an arm in the jacket. As the jacket was being risen up, I put the jacket on but with only one arm in it did a turn and then the person on the other side grabbed the sleeve and I continued to turn to grab the other sleeve.

After trying to make the puppet walk we found a variety of very difficult problems that were jeopardizing the effectiveness of the puppet:

• Keeping the same distance between the shoes, jacket and hat at all times so that the continuity of the puppet didn't break.
• Making sure that, if we turned, the shoulder's were in line with the feet.
• Making sure that the whole group was breathing at the same time and moving the body in time with the breathing.

The main thing that we found hard in our group was the effectiveness of us just holding the jacket so we decided to use a large plastic sheet to fill out the shape of the body and then fit all of the articles of clothing around the frame of the body. We use masking tape secure certain features of the puppet like its neck, wrists and knees.

Next, we focused on the section of the prologue's speech that introduced Creon and we used the extra chorus members as separate businesses that needed something signing by Creon or if they had important documents that he need to look at. We had to grab either single pieces of paper or a stack and walk in a path towards Creon. We had to walk all the way to the front of the stage and then turn along the right angles to get to Creon and he would look at the piece of paper and give it back. We could either react as though we were satisfied with the answer that we got or we had to react as though it was completely the opposite of what we were expecting.

N2C

We used the entire N2C time to work on the Creon and Antigone scene because it take up a third of the play and we wanted to block out as much as possible. There are 3 different people playing Antigone and 2 different people playing Creon so even though we have set casts we mixed up so that we got to work with everybody. 

We blocked out every scene with one pair and then broke off into separate pairs with one Antigone overlooking one of the pairs. We made notes on our scripts when we got given a set direction for all Antigone's.

We managed to get through half of the pages of the scene.

Week 12: N2C

Reviewing the performance

We performed on the 15th of December to an audience of around 40 people. Before we went on, our director, Lindsay, asked us to get into character and do some quiet line run-throughs with people that we had scenes with. I went through a scene with Jay which involved a lot of movement that we rehearsed in a small space by ourselves. Whilst we were doing this, we discussed how we react to each other and how we could make these actions bigger. We concluded that we needed to angle our bodies towards the audience so that the audience would get the full impact of the movement and also, move slightly more apart so that our actions would hit the other person. After this I went through the final scene which was between me and King. We wanted to get the space in between each of our lines as small as possible so that the audience would be engaged right to the end. 

When directing the last scene, Lindsay said that she wanted Mouse's reactions to King to be completely juxtaposing to her reactions in the quiz scene. My reactions to King in the quiz scene were exaggerated to make it look like I was disgusted when he didn't know the answer to some of the easiest movie quote answers like Star Wars and Titanic. So in the last scene, I had to still keep some of the disbelief in the straight answers that were in response to some detailed questions but also create a friendly atmosphere that made the audience feel welcomed as the relationship between Mouse and King had changed. We needed to show the development of their relationship throughout the play and show that they went from being enemies in the film and then to being the co-directors of the play. We tried to show some of the relationship development through King directing some of his questions towards Mouse. For example, once he's shown the whole group his new film, which is around the middle of the play, he asks Mouse for her opinion on the film which shows King's developing his appreciation of Mouse's knowledge and experience with film.

One of the scenes that I thought went particularly well was the scene where the cast is introduced to the Platinum Class cinema screens. I think that the Godber style was clearly shown throughout this scene as it was labelled at the start and also many different stereotypes were shown when the new class was introduced. For example, Fish was over exited, Mags didn't really care and Spike and Elton looked as though they thought that they'd played a huge part in the creation of Platinum Class when they actually had nothing to do with it and just watched King make it instead. In this scene, I was the only character that didn't seem impressed or appreciated how amazing this was as, at Mouse's old cinema all of the cinema suites were like Platinum Class as so Mouse was impressed because this was what she was used to. 

A scene that I think could have done with some improvements was the montage scene as that was only directed quite late on in the process and some characters, like me, weren't given any specific directions or lines to say which resulted in, firstly me just being frozen in position and I had to tell some of the cast members what action they should do and in conclusion all of the characters final position was them all frozen in the same arm position but in the reverse hierarchy position.

I think that the hierarchical staging was a good way of showing the uprising of Mouse and also how the hierarchy changed from beginning to the end. It clearly showed the audience who was at the top of the food chain and who was at the bottom with the positioning of the characters. For example at the start, I was laid on the floor because I was a Plankton which was at the bottom of the food chain but when we got into the reverse hierarchy position, I was stood in place of King who is a Buff and at the top of the food chain.

Overall I feel that the performance went well from my perspective as an actor as all the Godber aspects were shown clearly and there were hardly any mistakes that were made. The space between lines were quite short and all of the staging movements went as smoothly and the audience were laughing the whole way through the performance, which was one of the main goals we were aiming for.

Week 11: Classwork

Monday

Mondays lesson is only an hour and so we use this lesson to go over the start sequence that we had previously created and make sure that we had remembered the directions that we were given when we had performed it the first time. We also tried to shorten the amount of time that it took us to complete the whole sequence from start to finish because the first section took us 5 minutes but we didn't want to use 5 minutes just to introduce the characters to the audience so we wanted to compress the opening sequence to under 3 minutes.

We did this by closing down the gap between each pair or group of people who walked in to the room and also the queue for the prologue to start talking was for the one who was playing Antigone to sit down so we tried to make that quicker so that the play would flow better and we could keep the audience intrigued. 

Wednesday

Because Wednesdays lesson is two hours, we use this is add new content to Antigone. We started to go through the prologue's speech and pick out the lines that we thought would be key lines for adding elements to the play and we also tried to make the staging as interesting as possible.

When the prologue's speech begins Antigone is sat cross-legged at the front right-hand side of the stage as she has separated herself from the rest of the group. We were asked to think of a sentence that our actor character would react to the news of whoever was sat at the front becoming Antigone. We had to imagine that this play and the actions involved were real, so we hide to truly believe that whoever was given the position of Antigone was going to die and the other characters involved were going to bury her alive, which would lead to her dying by her own hand.

The first time that we did this I was sat as Antigone and I had to think of a sentence that I would say once I was given the role of Anitgone. My sentence was "I wanted this, and I've got it."

In my head, I was hoping that it was me and so when it was given to me I decided that I would step up to the plate and completly immerse myself in the character in Antigone as whilst there were things going on in the background and so I sat staring forwards accepting the role I had been given and deciding how that should be played and projected to the audience.

In the video that is linked, I wasn't the one who was playing Antigone so I changed my sentence to fit my actor character at this point. My sentence became "It should have been me, she doesn't deserve to die." 

I am another actor who plays Antigone so I wanted to put myself in place of her because I didn't want to put anybody else through that pain and suffering that Antigone goes through and I understand what it's like because I have studied the character of Antigone at the same time as her. I feel the need to put myself before the others and so when she is picked I feel that I should object but you can't go against who was pciked so I try and show the pain that I feel through my facial expressions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rp9BVAKVFs&feature=share

Week 10: Classwork

Wednesday

We started to work on the fight sequence that happens after Antigone is found bury her brother. We wanted to create an atmosphere that made the audience feel uncomfortable and as though the situation was out of control, but the actors on stage would be in control of the sequence.

We started off with how we would indicate to the other actors on stage that Antigone would be moving to attack them. We decided that step clearly in the direct that we were going to swing in before moving the stick, we were using sticks to practice instead of metal poles as we weren't confident with the sequence yet, because that would give the people, who were in a range of being hit, enough time to move out of the way before the Antigone tried to swing at them.

The people around the edges of the stage were extra guards that come on after the two main guards to taunt Antigone. The guards were the main culprits for the uncomfortable atmosphere as they hadn't realised the this girl was Creon's niece and so made vulgar comments and made it more of a game for them whereas for Antigone, this is her fantasy and it is all planned out in her head but these guards are getting in the way of that which causes her to lash out at them.

Here's the final product that we came up with:

https://youtu.be/O3WJLzZUEWQ

One improvement that I think we could do next time would be that when Antigone had been detained she could struggle more as I think that it would be infuriating for her to be held down and so instead of just laying there I feel that she wouldn't want to admit defeat and be detained by men who have verbally abused her.