Unit 6 - Performance workshop

Tuesday 16^th May

Before the session today, I met up with Alys to discuss my character. In this conversation we came to an agreement that we thought that my character was becoming over complicated and that I didn’t have a lot of time to develop my character well and learn more about the disorder due to having to concentrate on my other subjects within college. Therefore we have decided that my new character is going to be very similar to the old one but there is only going to be one personality. The character is however still going to have an intelligent side but when she gets angry, she turns childish.

To start the lesson we carried out a quick warmup so that we had maximum time to practice and rehearse our material.

We started by running through the scenes which we have already got. Some of the scenes such as the pet shop and one of the lift scenes have been scripted so we read through these lines as a cast.

At the end of last week’s session we worked on the lift scene. In this scene, all of the characters become stuck in the lift. However, this week we came up with the idea that there are going to be several lift scenes and as the scenes progress, they will become darker and more intense. Since the last session, Alys has typed up the script which we came up with last week for the first lift scene. We started to think about what could happen within the rest of the scenes. We began to bring some ideas together as a cast. An idea that we had from several weeks ago was for my character, Estelle to start singing whilst in the lift. As the song goes on, it gets scarier. All of these lift scenes happen in darkness and the audience are given a glimpse of the lift for about 5 seconds at the end of every scene. As a cast we managed to come up with ideas for 4 more lift scenes. Alys said that she would type the script up and send it to us within the next week. At first, we weren’t sure about the order of the scenes as we had the idea of splitting the scenes and not having them together. However, after some negotiation, we decided to put all the lift scenes together in order.

At this moment, we are unsure of which order we should put the scenes in. We have tried running the scenes in different orders and they all seem to work nicely. Next week, Dinos who works for UCAN will be coming in again to look at all of our material. We will ask him next week for his opinion on the order that we have currently.