Unit 24 - Auditions for actors

Tuesday 15^th May

Today was the day that I was performing my final rendition of my Shakespeare piece. In the piece I was playing the part of Juliet in the scene where she is saying goodbye to Romeo. During the scene, Juliet is deliberating what will happen if she is to drink the vial and is prepared to do anything for the one she loves.

To start the session, I carried out a full diction warmup to ensure that I could perform my piece to the best of my ability. I was then ready to perform the piece. Here is a video of my rendition of Juliet’s ‘Farewell’ monologue:

After performing this, I received some feedback from my lecturer. She said that she thought that the first half of the monologue was really believable. She felt like she was in it and could feel Juliet’s emotion. However, going into the second half of the speech, she felt like the emotion was lost and therefore she didn’t feel the connection for the character anymore. She then asked me to perform it again but this time focusing on the second half of the speech. Here is a video of me carrying out the monologue for the second time:

I believe that in the second video, the second half of the piece was a lot better than the first time I performed it. I think this is because it is what my lecturer told me to focus on and therefore I applied this refinement to my work. However, I also believe that the first half of the speech wasn’t as good as the first time that I performed it. I think this is because I was focusing so much on the second half of the monologue that I forgot to focus on the first half of it and put in the same emotion for the first part as the second part. Therefore, if I was to do the piece again, I would make sure that this emotion was conveyed all the way through to make the piece more believable and realistic.

There are many different similarities and differences between the 2 pieces that I have performed.

A similarity is that both of the monologues involved props. For my contemporary monologue, I used a hat. This was both a part of costume and a prop because I used it whilst I was doing some of the movements. For my Shakespeare monologue I used a vile and a dagger which both helped with my characterisation. However, a couple of rehearsals before performing this piece for the final time, I removed the props from my performance. This was because I wouldn’t necessarily have props in the audition. Therefore I decided to perform one with props and one without so it gives me an insight into both variations.

Another similarity is that when I was practicing the monologues, costume really helped me to improve my characterisation. For my contemporary monologue I wore tap shoes which really helped because there are some tap moves mentioned in the monologue. For my Shakespeare monologue I wore a long skirt which flowed nicely and would be something that would typically be worn in the time of when the piece was set. Therefore because this is something that my character would wear, it made me feel more like my character and therefore improved the piece a lot during the rehearsal process.

A difference between the monologues is that at the start of the process, I really struggled to learn the Shakespeare monologue because I struggled to understand the meaning behind the language that Shakespeare was using. This then led me to working slowly through the text to firstly understand the meaning behind the text and then I could start to learnt the monologue. This is in complete contrast to the contemporary piece because I was able to understand this piece of text straight away and therefore found it a lot easier to learn.

My contemporary piece required quite a lot of choreography to make it more realistic and believable. This meant that I had to work through the piece to choreograph moves which were referenced in the speech. This meant that in the end, there were a lot of different movements. Compared to my Shakespeare monologue, there was a huge amount of movement. My Shakespeare monologue did not contain much movement at all. There were a few movements to a chair and a few hand gestures but apart from that, there wasn’t much movement. This then gave me a big contrast because one of my monologues had a lot of movement compared to the other which had hardly any movement. I feel like movement helped me to portray my characters better as it is something that comes quite naturally to me.

The characters of both monologues are very contrasting. Mavis from the contemporary monologue was very bossy and wanted everything to be perfect. Although she was bossy, she was also quite lively and a typical dance teacher of the time at which the play which the monologue was set. However, Juliet from my Shakespeare monologue was very sad and fearful of what was going to happen to her if she drinks the potion.

Overall, I much preferred learning and performing the contemporary monologue than the Shakespeare monologue. I think that this is because the contemporary monologue is much more in my comfort zone than the Shakespeare monologue. Even though I had to work hard on my contemporary piece, I had to work extra hard on my Shakespeare monologue because it was very different from anything that I have done before whereas the contemporary piece was similar to other pieces that I have done in the past.