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.
