Unit 6 - Performance workshop

Tuesday 2^nd May

Previous to the lecture, I met up with Alys as I was struggling to write my monologue and phone conversation which we were asked to write last week ready for this week’s session. I was struggling to write the monologue because I have to take into consideration my character’s disorder. My character has Split Personality Disorder which is now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). I was unsure of how to show the change of personalities during the monologue so spoke to my teacher beforehand for some help. She gave me some ideas as to what to include in the monologue so it should now be easier for me to write the monologue.

Today in the lecture we were focusing on creating some new material from ideas that we have had in the past few sessions and also practicing the material that we have already created.

To start with, we carried out a quick warmup so that we had maximum time to spend working on the material for the performance.

The first thing that we focused on in this lecture was creating material from an idea that was proposed by our lecturer, Alys. The idea was to create a daily log of what our characters do. We were all given 4 times of day and then we had to think about what our character would do at that time of day. We started the log at 12:00am (midnight). I was given this character so I had to think of what my character would say at this time. For this time I say “12am – I get into my butterfly embroided pyjamas and crawl into bed”. During this scene, there are times at which all of the characters speak together (choral speech). This adds some suspense to the scene and may make the audience question why we all the characters are doing the same thing at the same time. We managed to script right up to 11:00am. We decided to stop here because we would create a different scene where we would speak what we did in the afternoon.

For the next part of the lesson we ran through all of the scenes that we didn’t have time to run through last week. These are all of the mini scenes which will include our second character (multi-rolling). We then came up with the idea that the daily routine scene could split up the performance. The morning part of the scene would come after we come out of the lift and then would be followed by the smaller scenes. Then, after the smaller scenes, we would carry on with the afternoon routine and then repeat the smaller scenes but from a different angle such as the scene getting worse.

In the next week I need to try and write a monologue and a phone conversation for my character. Last week, I did some research on Dissociative Identity Disorder and made a mind map to help me think about the disorder. Here is a picture of it:

I feel like today’s lesson was very productive as we created a whole new scene and started to plan the order of the scenes.