Today I messaged the group and organised a checklist as to what we needed to do, and then we all worked on adding the finishing touches to the site. My job was to finish the bibliography, and make notes for the Caucasian Chalk Circle page. I added quotes for each technique for the first act, and uploaded all my content accordingly. We are all working very well on the site, and aside from the video I feel that we have done a very good job at getting this back on track.
In today's lesson we re-recorded our scene, however it is still incredibly short and not very high quality due to staging restraints; we had to use an empty classroom instead of the drama room. However, this did enable us to use the smart board to project a background image to add to our set.
Even so, lines were still missed and directions messed up. Despite this, it is much higher quality than the previous one, and probably the best we can get it in our time restraints. I forgot to mention, our costuming was sourced from the costume room, however we chose clothes that reflected the roles and portrayed especially the class gap. Paul as the Governor's wife wore large dresses with a silver headress, and had pillows stuffed up the dress to make him/her appear grotesque and overfed. Grusha wore a simple skirt and shirt, not as impoverished as the slaves but still less extravagant than the Governor's wife. As nurse I wore an old-fashioned matron-like dress, and carried a paper bag with 'BABY' written on it as the child, which i threw down to add to the alienation. The adjutant wore a long coat that was badly damaged, indicating his class as not impoverished, yet not as rich as the Governor's wife. The servants wore torn, dirty canvas clothing and were forced to carry huge bags of their lady's lustrous clothes, indicating the class divide and also exemplifying the alienation effect of them not fulfilling their own desires despite the ongoing rebellion. In short, our groupwork is not going as well as we'd hoped, due to time and resource restraints. Communication within the group is also strained, as many of us are confused as to what is going on. We shot a take of our video today, however it was incredibly badly blocked and we barely got it done. Some of us couldn't remember our lines, and it was hard to retain focus. I am to edit it alongside Genevieve, however I think we will have to retake it, due to it being incredibly rushed as we had to leave because of the afternoon Yoga group. In future, it would be advisable to have blocked to an adequate standard before recording, and also find a more suitable time. However, I feel that we have done our best with what we had in terms of time, as many of us are busy with other assignments and the drama room is compromised due to HSC performances.
Today we continued to block with the following roles;
Governor's Wife: Paul Grusha: Evie Keira: Fat Lady Me: Nurse Taylor: Young Lady John: Adjutant Khika: Third Lady However, the group is largely unfocused and we didn't get that much done. We plan to record on Wednesday, but I don't think that we're going to be able to get all of this done in a lunchtime, especially as we are very unprepared at the moment. This lesson we blocked some more of our script and resolved casting issues. We found that Paul and John had too many lines to reasonably learn, and so I reshuffled the roles over the weekend to facilitate for costume and character changes.
A major barrier we faced was our lack of knowledge as to how to act in the Epic Theatre style. Some members of our group insisted it was just movement and lines, while others (myself included) believed it to be highly physical, but 2-dimensional. We resolved this by looking up videos of Epic Theatre and watching them, and then Ms Carolan explained it to us in better detail. We blocked a little of the play, however we did not have much time after the acting/casting issues. Dearest Blogbook, I'm rather behind on entries, and have missed a couple of lessons: Friday: Read more of the play and annotated it into my book. I'm having trouble finding other techniques aside from alienation effects, achieved through the poor treatment of the child and changing characters. However, this is a very central technique to this style of theatre, so it stands to reason that it is more prevalent than other aspects. Monday: I was unfortunately unable to attend due to my subject selection interview among other factors, however I have been informed that research was compiled and continued across the group. I read through more of the play and made more annotations. We are almost definitely going to do the scene suggested by Ms Carolan, i.e. the Governess' escape from the city. Tuesday: I was also unable to attend due to the Biology excursion, however group roles were allocated for the next phase of our assignment i.e. blocking and creating the workshop. The roles for the scene Taylor and I chose as our example have been allocated; I will be playing the Nurse, and am working on memorising my lines. Today, the performance committee (Evie, Taylor, Paul, and myself) looked at videos of past productions and I found some pictures to use as reference when making our costumes/props. The video/s may be found on Evie's blogbook. Here are the pictures that I have found: I also started looking through the script for blocking directions, and we will start blocking as soon as possible. Tonight I will load some of the information off the Google Doc that I made for storing information into the Weebly.
I will also be compiling the bibliography on the resource page, and hopefully the rest of the group will post their resources soon so that I can begin. I am also encountering problems with the dates of the logbook posts, as they are on american time. I will fix these as soon as possible. Dearest Blogbook,
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