Today was a continuation of developing my Shakespeare piece. I have broken the monologue down into units, this is when there is a change of the thought or dynamic within the piece. I find this gives me the motivation for movement and gesture and this morning I have made some small adaptations to the way that I move the piece and it feels a lot more natural. For me, this is really useful because I have struggled with the unnaturalness of the text and so anything that helps to contextualise the movement and gesture is a positive.
We started the session with a diction warmup and then progressed onto working on the piece.
At the moment, I have managed to grasp the first part of the script. I have begun to finally connect with the piece and the character (Juliet). However, I have realised that as the piece progresses, I start to lose this connection with the character and piece and it therefore makes the piece less believable. This means that I need to spend some time working on the next part of the speech to make the whole piece believable.
So far, we have worked on the monologue up to the line ‘For he hath still been tried a holy man’ and I finish this line sitting on the chair.
On the line ‘How if’ I will begin to stand up and move over to stage left. This needs to happen slowly so that the focus doesn’t draw to the movement. To ensure that this doesn’t happen, I will sit on the chair in an open position so that it is easier for me to stand up and start walking with ease. After a few paces, I then stand still until I get to the line ‘Oh look’ where I move slightly more to the left and act as if I am moving towards the ghost of Tybalt.
Another element that I worked on was my vocal expression. Before working on this, my intonation was very rhythmic and made the piece sound boring. Therefore this meant that I needed to make the piece more exciting by adding in expression, dynamics, etc. Starting on the words ‘How if’ I started to add more panic into my voice as this is when Juliet is starting to panic at the thought of dying. I will achieve this panic in my voice by using emotional memory. The memory that I am using is the memory when I have been panicked in the past about exams. Once applying this technique to the speech, my lecturer said that this part of the speech was now much more believable right up to the line ‘my Romeo comes?’ There is then a change of direction on the next line and this is where I started to lose my panic. I have got into a rhythm now that every time I perform the piece, I get into the same rhythm when performing it. This rhythm is not believable at all and now I have the challenge of breaking out of this pattern and changing the pace of the lines to make it more believable. I am starting to work on this by slowing a few lines down and speeding others up. This will make the piece more dynamic and interesting. This is something that I will continue to work on for the next couple of sessions.
Charlotte, movement and gesture will come from your internal thought processes. You cannot rely on directors notes alone, we need to see Juliet's intention before the lines are delivered. You thought learning the text would be challenging but having done that, you are still getting to grips with expressing the gamut of emotions that Juliet runs through in this speech.
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