Unit 24 - Auditions for actors

Monday 30th April

Today I was carrying on with working on my Shakespeare piece.

We started the lesson with a warmup which involved body stretches, the intercostal diaphragmatic breathing exercise and diction exercises. We then moved on to running through my monologue.

To begin with, I had a word rehearsal because I have been struggling to remember this speech. At the beginning of this unit, I really wasn’t keen on learning a he Shakespeare monologue because I thought I wouldn’t be able to learn the piece because I didn’t understand the language. However, I have put in a lot of work and after a few weeks of practicing the speech, I have learnt learnt most of the piece. This means that we can focus more on my voice, intonation and movement throughout the piece.

At the beginning of the piece, Juliet is saying goodbye to Romeo. In these first 2 lines, Juliet is feeling extremely upset that she is leaving the boy that she truly loves and would do anything for. I have been struggling to coney this level of emotion when delivering these lines and therefore I have been working with ly lecturer to convey the emotion that Juliet is feeling. My lecturer asked me to think of a time when I have felt sad with a feeling of uncertainty. By using this memory of mine (emotional memory) it will make it much easier for me to convey Juliet’s emotion. The experience which I have decided to draw upon is when I first moved away to college and had to leave home for the first time. I didn’t know what life at residential college was going to be like having lived at home for the past 16 years with my parents. Over time as I begin to apply this emotion to the Shakespeare piece, it will make the monologue a lot more believable for the audience. I even started to notice a difference within the space of this lecture after practicing the piece a few times.

Another refinement that I have made to the piece is splitting the piece up into units. This is done by splitting the script up into sections for every time that the script changes a direction. This could involve a new thought, a question or and change in conversation. By splitting my script up time units, it will enable me to grasp a better understanding of what the piece is talking about, when I should change my intonation and when I should move around the space. I have begun to work on each unit separately to make the piece more dynamic and believable.

Some notes which I have received from my lecturer is that the piece is now becoming more believable since applying these techniques to my speech. Therefore, I need to carrying on applying these techniques to the piece to make sure that the piece becomes even more believable for the audience. Another note which she gave me was to make sure that the second half of the speech is as believable as the first half of the speech. Because I am more familiar with the first half of the script and I have practiced it more, it is more developed and believable. However, this is not the case for the second half of the script because this bit is fairly new to me and I therefore haven’t had as much time to work on it. Also, the second part of the script invovles a lot more emotion and questioning. Therefore this is going to require a lot more refinement.

One refinement that I have made to help with my emotion during the second half of the script is to lean forward on the line ‘How if...’ to show the feeling of fear and uncertainty as Juliet talks about if she wakes before Romeo finds her.

By applying all of these refinements and more, the piece will begin to grow and will become more believable for the audience.