Week 29: Classwork

Over the weekend, I was researching Berkoff and some other theories to do with drama and I came across a narrative theory about characters being flat or round originally coined by E.M. Forster. The term "flat character" was first introduced to refer to characters who have no hidden complexity. "Flat characters" are frequently found in comedy (like woman alone), satire and melodrama. These characters are limited to a narrow range of predictable behaviors. With these "flat" characters there are no gaps that need to be filled by the audiences imagination as what you see is what you get.

I immediately began to see links to the Berkovian style that we are performing Woman Alone in as the separate personalities can be seen as "flat" due to them being only one emotion for the whole piece and do not show any other side to them, which inevitably makes them become predictable, adding to the idea of their character being "flat." 

In juxtaposition with "flat" characters, there is "round" characters who have a varying degrees of depth and complexity, therefore, according to Forster, "cannot be summed up in a single phrase." Because the "round" characters are seen to have more than one dimension they are seen to be ranked higher than "flat" characters. "Flat" characters can be very funny (like the ones in our piece), but the complexity of "round" characters seems closer to the way people really are.

This is way I think it is hard, at times, for the audience to connect with the characters on stage due to the fact that they are "flat" characters and have no complexity and so, when they are viewed singularly, become disconnected to the audience. 

But when all of the personalities are shown to be the one woman it is easier for the audience to connect with them as they show the complexity of one person. I think this also adds to the need to make it obvious to the audience that we are one person as this is the way that we will get the audience to understand the piece more. In a way, performing this in a Berkovian style could be seen as a disadvantage as it actually creates a divide between the audience and the actors on stage as you are putting them into set personalities which is causing them to become "flat" and therefore predictable.

Monday

At this point, we have fully blocked out the whole piece and we are now going back into it and seeing if there are any ideas/topics that we need to revisit and make clearer to the audience. One of the main topics that we found needed to be worked on the most was adding in onomatopoeic words, like we did when we first learnt the Berkoff style and produced clips of East. One idea that we had was: one of my lines is "Go away...Look I'm getting to the end of my tether and if you not careful, I'll make you really really sorry." Originally the only thing we did in unison was "really, really sorry," but we decided that we could do a group movement on "tether" as though we are unfolding a rope. As we would lean to the right as though we're trying to show the audience how long her tether actually is, we would make a sound effect that would accompany the movement and helped reiterate the image that we are trying to portray.

We also discussed Berkoff's use of staccato movement to make an idea clearer and easier for the audience to understand. We went through out piece and made sure that we all knew where the start and the ends of our movements were and to make them more effective, we would have to do them all at the same time and also staccato.

We timed our piece and it was around 9 minutes long and we think that we could extended that by a couple of minutes if we add in some more movements but as we were running through, I personally found that I was speeding up my lines too quickly in order for the pace to be kept up. But when we were discussing it afterward we all agreed that we can slow down the pace of our words more, especially if it's within the region of our character, but the gaps between the lines needs to remain the same as we think that, that is what keeps the pace of the performance up. Now that we are starting to look towards performance date, learning our lines has become both a priority and a necessity.

Due to performance being so close, we began to discuss what costume we should be wearing. I began to research Berkoff's traditional costume and make up. Here are some photos that I found:

I like the way, all the different emotions have their own facial expressions with different parts being highlighted to emphasis the effect that they have on the audience. The only disadvantage that I can see would be that if some of the face paint came of in a movement it could ruin the whole effect and also if you highlight a feature wrong the audience may few it as a different personality and get the wrong idea so each personality has to be different from the others and also clear enough for the audience to understand. 

It is very defined and bold, with certain features being enhanced by the face paint that has been used. Unfortunately I am allergic to face-paint and so my group may need to find an alternate solution like bold, even black, lipstick and dark eye makeup, as we all need to look the same and me being allergic to face-paint is a big disadvantage. 

Costume wise, it appears that Berkoff uses traditional and smart attire in quite a black and white colour scheme which we could use as we could have the different aspects in, what we would regard as their, stereotypical outfits. For example, the housewife could be in black top and bottoms with her hair in a bun and an apron on whereas the sexy aspect could have a tight black dress on with her hair slightly around her face. If all of the aspects have a stereotypical costume on with a black and white colour scheme  and with black lipstick I feel like it would help the audience understand that we are actually one person.

Wednesday

My group has got into a trend of doing a full run-through of our piece as the first thing we do in a rehearsal and it helps get us into the Berkoff style and eases us into the close work that we will be doing later.

After doing our full run-through, we noticed that because we are all trying to juxtapose our voices from each other to make it clearer to the audience who is who and also trying to make sure that our voices fit with the personality that we are creating, sometimes we slip into the same way of saying all of our lines. Using a specific set voice could be seen as a disadvantage as we are trying to stay in our personalities but we are then jeopardizing our intonation as we become fixated in one way of saying our lines.

We also realized that we have never actually tried performing our piece in the space because there are exams going on in the drama studio and therefore our staging may not fit in the performance space as well as it does in the small space and so we had to prepare ourselves in case we need to fix the staging on the day of the performance as that is the time when we will get the space.

Because we are only 2 weeks away from performance, we decided that we need to step up the amount of productive work that we are doing in lessons and focusing on major things for a sustained period instead of minor things for a long time. We also scheduled more after-school rehearsals in order for us to have more time before the performance.

We discussed ways that we could make our rehearsals more productive after the lesson and we came up with the idea of sectioning the piece and then picking a section to work closely with for about 15 minutes. We would film the section before and then after the 15 minutes in order for our progress to be more visual.

We ended up having 8 sections and we decided where to start and end the sections according to the topic that she was talking about so here is a list of the last lines of each section:

• Section 1 - "now then sweetie pie, I'll get you something to eat"
• Section 2 - "Oh that hurts"
• Section 3 - "And a grope for the groper"
• Section 4 - "He called me a tart"
• Section 5 - "Oh the penny's dropped at long last has it"
• Section 6 - "Well I'll show you"
• Section 7 - "That's it, that's enough"
• Section 8 - "Very calmly"

And each time we made sure that the topic was clearly different from the one before and this would enable us to focus on one section and think about it's topic easily without having to run through the whole piece. I think that this way of working will be beneficial to our group in order for us to move quickly through our piece, now that we have blocked it all, and look closely at the Berkoff style and sharping up all of our movements and lines. 

Week 28: Classwork

Monday

Our group decided that we should focus on blocking sections of the piece and getting the basic movements down before we worked on cleaning the transitions up. Because we were still blocking we obviously still had our script in our hands which made it harder for the movements to be shown and restricted us in our body language as well.

We started to block a completely new bit and we originally found it hard because one of the group members wasn't in the lesson and so movements that we found worked in a 3 may possibly not work in a 4 and so we kept having to think ahead and imagine what the image would be like if the whole group was here and then work out whether it portrayed the image that we wanted.

As we began to block to piece we tried to keep last lesson in our heads, which was about making whoever was in control of the mouthpiece, and we tried to choreograph that into the piece more and making sure that, for example, if we turned to look at whoever was speaking it was a big enough movement, so that it was clear to the audience who they should be paying attention to and listening to. To make it even more clearer at points, we had those that weren't speaking bobbing down and whoever was standing up. We thought that juxtaposing the levels of the personalities would add to the audience's understanding of the piece.

Berkoff's is obviously very quick-paced and so to add the speed of the lines and atmosphere we made sure that the other traits were reacting to each other which would reiterate the fact that they are one person and they can be agreeing or disagreeing to what the mouthpiece is saying and, for example, if the psychotic trait didn't agree this could become the motivation behind their actions of taking control of the mouthpiece.

Wednesday

During the lesson it was still hard to choreograph anything new as we were still one member down but we decided not to worrying about the extra person as we had already scheduled other rehearsals that would be used primarily for running over what we have done and for the other member to learn the choreography.

Having this disadvantage we decided that if we blocked anymore it would be really hard to fit in the extra person and so we tried to make the section we blocked on Monday even slicker than before.

One thing that we tried to look at throughout the rehearsal is what ideas we think are key ones, for example, in our piece there is constantly a person at a door but he is not always registered, and so this key idea needed a movement with it to emphasis to the audience that they need to be aware of it. Whereas, there are some smaller ideas that don't need as much attention but can still be highlighted or picked up on by the reactions of the personalities around it.

We performed a small segment of our piece and received some feedback: https://youtu.be/EWAP8a3iLx8

We also had the opportunity to work with our teacher on a small section and this gave us the opportunity to really closely work on one small section and we chose to integrate a prop in our sequence which is a small revolver to use towards the end for the visual representation of the suicide that she could commit. We brainstormed some ideas of how we could get the gun from the back of the stage to the front and we thought about each personality having the opportunity of holding it, showing their reaction out to the audience and then the gun would either be passed on or taken by another person.

We also looked closely at the physicality of the sequence and how we could involve the frame more to give the audience a more visual representation of what we were trying to show. There is a point in the sequence, where the woman takes her brother-in-law out for a walk. He is in a wheelchair and so we decided that the frame could become the wheelchair and so I, as the housewife who thinks this is her job, push the "wheelchair" whilst another traits makes the action of a wheel turning and a squeaking sound. Each of the traits react differently towards both the idea of the walk and the action being carried out which add to the comical value of the piece and also contributes to the continuity of Berkoff's style.

Week 27: Classwork

Monday

Before we began rehearsing, we had a discussion in class about how to show that all people on stage were the same person. We focused on the transferal of who is in control of the body of the woman, which is showing clearly the shifting from one personality in control to another.

We discussed the different ways that would show the transferal of control and we came up with:

• Costume. 

We started by thinking of a variety of the same kind of costume. Like black, trousers and white shirt but with accessories that show the different between the personalities, for example scarves or hats etc.

But the difficulty with this was that it might not be clear enough for the audience and they may lose concentration and also they may not follow what is going on. 

Adapting a base costume might work better. For example, like when people change their school uniform to how they like it, we would change our base costume to fit our feelings so the sexy one would have their shirt unbuttoned and then the housewife would have hers tucked in and more regimental. We could even play around with having some stains on a tshirt, so the housewife could look like she had been thrown up on from a baby and the sexy one could have lipstick stains on her collar.

We also discussed having different colours to represent the feelings, so the psychotic person would have red because that is a harsh colour and red evokes anger and makes the audience slightly disconnect from them because of the harsh colour. On the other hand, the housewife would wear light blue or pastel colours because they are more inviting and the audience would lean towards that personality more and highlight the juxtaposition.

• Unity of lines/movements

Unity of voice could be effective to show the unity of the personalities as the same woman but it might not be enough for the audience to understand and the audience need to be fully engaged throughout the piece for the continuity of the style and the story line.

We thought that intonation of the lines could back up the difference between the personalities because it would juxtapose the reactions from each other and show how many different reactions this one person is having in her head.

In our group, we use an echo as a way of showing the difference between each person and so when I say the line "A kiss?" I do a movement like i was covering my lips and wiping the kiss away. As the housewife, I don't want to kiss the boy who is trying to enter the house and so the hand that goes over my mouse signifies this.

The other characters then say the same line but do their own actions at the same time that I do mine and it symbolizes the unison of the woman's emotions but also the difference between the personalities. We felt that a kiss would be a good line for an echo because she would have mixed reactions to it. The reactions need to be quick in concession of one another as it would have a better effect on the audience and could also emphasis the continuity of the audience being engaged.

•  Physical Contact

A push/pull transition could be an effective way of showing who was speaking as the audience could see the physical connection between the different personalities. We could also use proxemics to help indicate who was in control of the body as whoever was in control could be towards to center and front of the stage so that they would have a closer connection with the audience and they would be able to see their facial expressions clearer which will lead to them understanding and identifying what the different personalities were.

A smaller and easier change that could be added in after we have blocked everything would be just to have a sharp head turn and look at whoever's speaking so that it was slightly clearer to the audience, and also the Berkoff style is snappy as well so as well as making the speaker more clearer it will add to the continuity of the style.

Our group decided that after blocking everything out and getting all of the movements in with the lines, we would begin to focus on the speed of the lines, so that there was hardly any space between the lines, and the clarity of the speaker.

Week 26: Classwork

Monday

After working on the start of Woman Alone last Wednesday, we were given the section of the play that we would be working on to perform later on this month. My group was given the end of the play and so we decided, after reading through the play, that we would begin 5 pages from the end as we thought with synchronized actions and lines added in it would make the extract up to the 15 minutes that it needed to be and if not we could always add in extra lines at the start.

Our group discussed the extra element of her personality that we would add in because there was now 4 of us in our group. We decided on sexy as we wanted all of the elements to be juxtaposing so that it was clearer to the audience but it would also add in a comical element to the piece. With us wanting the different elements to be completely the opposite of each other we wanted to push them to the extreme so:

• Bubbly became extremely excited about everything
• House wife became patronizing and spoke to everyone as though they were a child
• Psychotic became angry at anything whether it was directed at them or not
• Sexy was just trying to be sexual with anyone (and anything)

As we were reading through the lines we discussed what it would be like to have the complete opposite personality to what it really meant saying the lines to add more to the comical value of the piece. For example, the line "Now, then, sweetie pie, I'll get you something to eat," was originally going to be said by the housewife but to add more comedy and juxtaposition the sexy person now says it. 

In the lesson, we managed to divide up all the lines and also decide on some lines and actions that can be done in unison. We made sure that we finished it in the lesson so that on Wednesday we would be able to go straight into blocking the section and then having more time to work on it and also add in any more if the segment is not 15 minutes.

Wednesday

We went straight into devising our section and throughout the lesson we focused on the movements that were going with the specific lines. We discussed one of my lines which is "Look, I'm getting to the end of my tether, and if your not careful I'm going to make you really really sorry." and we were thinking about whether I should just do the actions to show that I was in control of the woman's mind and body or whether the whole group should do it and react alongside the actions. We decided on the unison movement but only me saying the line so that the audience's perception of us all being the same woman would be sustained.

Our group took it upon ourselves to limit the amount of set that we would use so that it would force us to us each other for height and it would make the whole performance look more dynamic as we would be forced to pull and push each other which would add to the Berkoff style. We decided to just use the metal base of a riser without the wooden lid as we thought that we could make some interesting visual images with it and we could also use it to separate the different personalities.

One section of the script describes the way she reacts once she has stabbed the boy's hand with a spoon and we decided that during those lines we could use our arms to create the boy's hand. We realized that we can't have one person's hand being the boy who is trying to get in through the kitchen all the way through our piece and so we made sure that the hand was always being brought back in to reiterate that it was still there to the audience. Likewise, we also made a door out of our bodies when she realizes that the boy has actually got his head stuck in the door and so one of us became the boy's head and the others were the door around him.

Week 25: Classwork

Monday

We used Monday as a rehearsal in preparation for us to show them to the class on Wednesday. We had the weekend to work on the lines so some of us knew bits and pieces of lines which meant that we could start focussing on the Berkoff elements more. We tried to get our lines as snappy as we could but some lines were harder than others as they had bigger movements and we were wanted the movements to be right before we added in the lines.

We made sure that we all knew the movements and knew what was happening at all times. We also discussed the fact that all of us needed to be reacting to all lines that were being said as Berkoff's style is very quick and has a fast pace, this meant that we all needed to keep making noises and adding to the atmosphere at all times for the continuity of the style. As the consious this meant that any line that was said by the man in reality, I had to be appalled by as it lead the conversation in completely the opposite direction to which I wanted it to go in.

Wednesday

After putting the finishing touches on the lunch extracts, we then performed them to the class.

https://youtu.be/DOsopKDqAXA

One thing that I think we made clear to the audience was the juxtaposition between the consious' and the actual people and we did this by making sure that they had completely opposite body language and facial expressions. For example, we had the consious' being very closely around the real life people and making physical connections with them, whereas the actual people were very static and weren't interacting with the consious' and sitting in a position that they thought would give a good impression to the other person. We also thought that the facial expressions of the consious' needed to be pushed to the extreme like in the Berkoff style to accentuate the difference between the motives of the the consious' and the actual people.

By the end of the extract, I feel like we added in too many actions for the sake of trying to continue to style but by doing so we lost the motivation for the actions and they became out of place and distracting from what was actually going on. A way that we could have continued the style without having to add in any more actions would be to keep the vocal energy up so we could have reacted to each other as the consious' and then reacted to the words that our real life people were actually saying.

Another element of the Berkoff style was onomatopoeic words, which means making the words sound like what they mean. For example, with the line "burning holes in my back," we tried to make it sound like there was actual holes being burnt and so me and Emily, as the consious', made the sound effect and motioned as though holes were being burnt in the real life woman's back. I think that we could have done this more with other words such as "bees" and "ghost" where we could have made sound effects that would help with the continuity of the style.

The last thing that I thought could be improved was the definition of the moves. I felt like the moves could still be fast pace but needed a clearer start and end. If all the movements were done this way it would mean that the piece would look more finished and also all of the movements would become more defined.

After performing, we were set the task of creating 3 freeze frames of 3 different images of how a woman should be. We did, a good mother, a housewife (so cleaning) and religious, because in some views a woman should be religious and always follow God. I think that this exercise was a good introduction to the play, Woman Alone, as there is obviously only one woman on stage and so we had to think about all the different ways that she could be played or even the different ways that she could portray herself to the audience throughout the duration of the play.

After talking about all the different ways we came up with about how women have been portrayed in the past and how they could be portrayed now, we were given the first 3 pages of woman alone and we begin to read through and label the different ways that she says the lines. 

My first impressions when reading through the script was that the play is funny but covers some serious topics and I actually thought that the Woman had multi-personalities because it seemed that she was nice to the neighbor at one point and then she could be saying the next line very furiously, which also give me the impression that she was delusional. I also got the impression that she was side-tracked very easily but her mind always came back to her husband and so I thought that she had orientated her life around her husband and he was the focal point of her life. 

We began working on the first 3 pages and we came up with 3 elements of her personality that we thought the lines could fit into:

• Bubbly
• House Wife
• Psychotic

We began dividing up the lines and performed the first 2 minutes to the class:

https://youtu.be/bot59NzBNAk

Week 24: Classwork

On Monday, we didn't have a lesson because it was a bank holiday but our Berkoff group decided to have an extra rehearsal because we needed to change a lot of the staging and also the representation of Les and Mike. We went through the script and looked at the lines that were being said to help us define who Les and Mike at certain points. For example, the first line I say is "And round the back we went that night, the fog was falling fast, our coat collars were up and our breath like dragon's steam belch forth from our violent mouths," and I am Les at this point because I have introduced the fight that they are about to have and then the other two members of my group would then become Les and Mike and I would become the chorus member. If we had a cast of 5, there could be more of an atmosphere as they could be reacting to all the lines that were being said and then it would highlight the comedic qualities. If we did this as a duologue it would be much clearer who was playing Les and Mike which is why we had two main characters and then the third person was the chorus.

With me playing the chorus this meant that I had to change the wording of some of my lines. For example, one of my lines was "But we could hardly turn back now..."  and this would have been alright if I was playing one of the named characters, so I had to change it to "But they could hardly turn back now."

Wednesday

With all of the little changes that we made, we performed it to the class:

https://youtu.be/uLzS-IjmOP4


After watching all of the performances, we all got given a script called Lunch. I did a little research on the play and found out that it is mainly performed by 2 people; we're performing it with 4. I feel that we actually have an easier way of doing it because if there were only 2 people on stage, you would have to exaggerate your body language even more than your doing so that the audience would understand that you have become the conscious or if you have return to reality.

Our first reading made it clear that Lunch was completely different from East and we now had the consciousness of the man and woman speaking. Initially, the first thing that I found hard was deciphering between which lines were being said by the actual man and which ones were his conscious, as I was going to play his conscious. The lines that we thought were the consious speaking are highlighted in pink.

We decided that we should block some of the movements first and add in what we know about the Berkoff style and then proceed to learn the lines and speed up the gaps in between each line. The first thing that we had to decide was how we should show that the man's conscious and his body were going to look as one at the start. We decided that Sarah, who was to play the man would walk in front of me and I would have my arm around her waist and then we would walk with the same foot first and at the same time until I noticed the woman sat on the bench.

As we progressed with the script, we found that the consious' wanted their conversation to turn sexual which was completely the opposite of what was actually happening in real life. We wanted to show the juxtaposition between the thoughts and the reality so when the man says "Lovely day!" both the man's consious and the woman's consious react with groans and disappointing noises as they both thought that he was going to ask her something more personal or even sexual but instead he asked her about the weather.

Week 23: A Woman Alone

Introduction to A Woman Alone

Before we actually began working on the script, we were asked to buy it and I decided that I would research into previous performances of it and see what my first impressions of the synopsis was. 

A short synopsis that I found about the play said:

"Locked up in a flat, a solitary woman makes her confession. Amid domestic chores, dodgy phone calls, a sex-mad brother-in-law and a forever screaming baby she tells us the story of how her love for a young student led to her imprisonment at the hands of her jealous husband. Through farce to tragedy, her story propels the audience to its shocking climax."

My first impressions of the text was that it would be initially very hard for one person on stage to express the journey of emotions that they go through whilst explaining the story in a way that the audience can understand. I felt that the woman is very head-strong and will stick to her roots and what she knows is right.

I look at this website:

http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/a-woman-alone-etcetera-theatr-14186

And I thought that the photos on this website were a good representation of the roller-coaster of emotions that she goes through. After seeing this pictures I tried to imagine what it would be like for a group of people to perform this instead of one and I thought that it could have it's advantages as you wouldn't have to rely on one person to show all the different emotions and it may be clearer for the audience of the story-line that it going on beneath it if there were more people to look at and identify with.

 I searched for videos on YouTube of clips from performances of A Woman Alone and I found this one:

https://youtu.be/bDs_eFkAWnQ

I found these clips very interesting as it shows how the comedy can be placed in it and because we are thinking about doing it in a Berkoff style, we could emphasise the comedic points. Also if we were adapting her performance into a Berkoff style, we could make her facial expressions more extreme and have her more staccato in her movements so that we emphasise the fact that she is the only person on stage.