Tuesday 18th september

Improvisation exercise- as improvisation in an important element of acting, it is commonly asked for during auditions and practised in workshops, therefore we need to cover this to improve our improvisation skills. Our tutor gave us a situation which we would have to improvise... the situation involved an argument  between Victoria and Chloe the night before which had been spread all over Facebook! as a group we were asked to come up with a devised scene for the end of the lesson which we were all going to be marked on, so obviously this would be difficult in-between an ongoing argument!. The improvisation was funny to perform and watch as everybody did it differently, some people were being as naturalistic (I think I was naturalistic) as possible whilst others were playing it over the top with added comedy which gave others something to bounce off. I was quite pleased though as we did manage to make the scene flow even if it wasn't too believable!. 

Analysing monologues (picking them to pieces to figure out the character and their intentions)-

We were all given a monologue which we knew nothing about and as a group we started to analyse it to figure out what the characters personality is like. We realised straight away that she is a pushy mum who wants fame for her daughter and probably herself as well, we found this out because she was talking about taking her daughter to auditions and arguing with her daughter when she messed up. we thought that she probably wanted the fame more than her daughter as at the beginning she says "when we first started out", and why would she say "we" when its only her daughter attending the auditions?. her language was also incorrect and involved swearing ("i mean she's fucking illiterate") which suggests she isn't posh or very well educated. After analysing it more we came to the conclusion that she is attempting to live her life through her daughter and puts fame and money before her daughters happiness. Its helpful to understand how you pick a monologue to pieces (to learn about the characters) as its really important that you fully understand audition monologues so you can perform them with meaning. It was also interesting that even the punctuation used can teach you a great deal e.g if theres allot of short and sharp sentences it may mean that the character is really angry,  upset or not educated to a high standard.

For the last half hour we worked on our monologues individually, this gave me time to run through Polly's monologue a few times to get a grasp of the language used and time to memorise the first half