Today we continued to work on the play tale, by tale. 

I have learned my lines, by doing this it will hopefully enable me to move the stools and use the lighting more fluidly(our mobile phone torches).

For each tale, even though we are working as an ensemble we all have an individual character within the piece. And each or those characters have their own individual backstory.

Ancient secrets -  During this Tale, my character objective is to stun the audience. This Tale focuses around the unfortunate consequences of a fight in a pub that eventually spilled outside. My role in this scene is to deliver the uncertainty of what actually happened and to convey the distance Jack puts himself to hide the daily reminders of what he once did. I represent the voices in his head that keep him up at night, I am quite literally 'The Ancient Secrets' that so desperately want to escape but are trapped by a guilty conscience. I think I portray this message with the blunt but also slightly snake like tone of voice which enhances the mystery.

Lived next door her and her new boyfriend,
He's only been there a month,
She's got twins from the last one, two girls
Tiny,
Cute,
But pierced ears,
Aged like two,
You know the sort,
Pink,
Like baby pigs.
- In this Tale, my character has been created to give a quick background story of the characters involved. She's also used as a dramatic device in the way that she creates a subtle rise in tension which eventually results with the death of both the Mother and her two infants (murdered by the boyfriend). For instance, the  Tale focuses on the topic of 'Domestic Abuse' and my character speaks pretty much right at the begging of the play, mentioning how she's already had two girls that have a different Father to the boyfriend. This already creates sympathy for the character as she already appears to have lost so much but also continues to loose a piece of herself everyday in her war against herself for fighting for freedom which she never receives. My character objective in this Tale is to simply inform the audience of what 'had been', my character then conveys the message within the text, she implies a message that the audience must work out for themselves and leave a bigger impact.
Whist performing these lines, I try and use quite a chavy, short and sharp tone in the hopes of capturing the familiarity with domestic abuse and the lack of shock from the character. Instead, she carries on, ignoring screams, shouts and bangs as if unaffected by it although she clearly is. She represents about 50% of the population, the half that want to but are too scared to help.

And I swear down,
I swear on my life,
And you got to believe me,
There and then,
The lights flickered,
The lights flickered,
And it was only for a second,
But we made something happen,
We made something change.
............
The lights seemed to flicker,
which I know sounds strange,
But we made something happen,
We made something change.
- In this Tale I am a feisty and possessive girl that is quite a diva and outspoken however at this particular moment in time, has taken a moment to just sit back and relax. She is proud of the change that she has just witnessed between two strangers. The kindness that they have just shared, the community vibes that she has just been a part of. Her character objective is to show that you can find hope anywhere. She  tries to deliver the message of ' there being hope in humanity' and of 'the flicker of hope that we as individuals interact with everyday'. Hope is strange and it jus takes one thing to happen, and that one thing could cause everything to change.


Here are some annotations that I made to the script which show what characters I am etc:

Ensemble

Ensemble

The theatre ensemble in our piece is crucial to the success of the final performance. 

Ensemble: The movement, speech or doing at the exact same moment done by more than one person to create one single effect.

Teamwork and patience is key to develop success in the rehearsal room when creating an ensemble piece, everyone has to work together but also try not to get frustrated when something goes wrong or when that one person is always 3 seconds out, which is often the case with ensembles. In order for us as actors to stay positive, we need to congratulate ourselves on the little amount of progress we have made rather then the fact that we have hardly done anything this lesson, because this is a hard topic which everyone needs to be committed to in order to achieve anything.

My favourite ensemble piece so far is Tale 4 with the old lady; I love how we embody shelves in a shop and how the finding of a shopping list is found by a line full of people passing it back, one behind the other. However I do feel as if this scene could use little improvement e.g. the old lady pretending to look for it in her handbag whilst producing ad-lib and then when she finally finds it she could reach up and take it. However I also really like the pub scene (tale 4), we all get the opportunity to become lads in a pub, embodying half drunk and cheerful chaps that are all happy and in the moment. I love the fact that we  over exaggerate certain parts such as the drinking of beer which we all lean as far back as possible as we glug it down and then slowly come back up only to slam our glasses on the table. The slamming of the empty glasses is really effective because it marks the beginning of the next scene, it kind of acts like a transition, giving the audience a taster of what’s to come in the next scene and to set a fixed location. The only downfall to this is the trickiness of timing, everyone need to take responsibility and make sure they are slamming their glasses down at the right time.

Today we focused on creating Tale 3 and the start of Tale 4.

We decided to stage Tale 3 in an open but slightly closed manor, by this I mean that most of the time the actors are either in a circular shape facing the audience (open), or in a circular shape with their backs to their nearest audience (closed). I feel as if this effect creates a mixture of an intimate feeling with the audience and but later on a more intimidating effect. By this I mean, the Tale starts off very open, happy and together (both literally and metaphorically as it was done as an ensemble piece), the actors mainly speak outwardly to the audience and the lights are on creating a warm atmosphere, however later on in the Tale the lights go off and the actors face inwards, as if talking to each other and heads are always following the person that is speaking (creating a steady flow). This makes it seem as if the audience has disappeared and the happy part of the story has taken a sinister turn. The actors are no longer smiling, they no longer speak or act as one, they have become one of many and alone, just like little Jack.

In this Tale I played a young lad, James, 21 years of age, he has just broken up with his girlfriend but has been persuaded by his mates to hit the bar and look for a new chick because he is now a free man. This doesn’t go too well though of course as he gets too caught up in the drinking and completely forgets about the chick and before he knows it he is glugging a whole pint of larger down his throat and slamming it down on the bar.

Tale 3 holds a cheerful atmosphere however not for very long, the scene quickly becomes dark and grim, and it’s almost a misleading illusion for the audience however they have no choice but to watch it out.

Tale 3 is different from tales 1 and 2 because firstly it uses the whole class and secondly it is the one only tale that starts with ‘If the east end was my friend’ that doesn’t just describe something but actually creates the imagery, we don’t just tell the story we show it, and in a unique way that the other two scenes don’t portray.

TALE 4

We use umbrellas in Tale 4, making staging quite a difficult thing; we have to make the piece look good and smooth without anyone loosing an eye. The umbrella enables us to practice different movements e.g. pulses, spins etc.  but also forces us to be more aware of the people around us as not to cause an accident. The staging is abstract and constantly changes formality and levels.

In this Tale I play a teenage girl, 17 years of age named Amanda. She is happy, kind hearted and funnily enough loves the rain and doesn’t mind getting her hair wet, however on this particular day she has straightened her hair and so there is no way that she will allow a single drop of rain to befall on her head. She also happens to be really shy, so she would be the kind of girl that would have all the intentions to help an old lady cross the road but would be too shy to go over and help.

Further questions...

Over the past few weeks I have managed to continue to develop skills such as teamwork, I feel as if I am getting better at becoming one with the class rather than one by myself. Any day I would pick a monologue over an ensemble piece with the class but I am now learning to be able to do both with ease and I hope to continue to develop the skill.

I managed to discover that if I really try then I can achieve a skill that I don’t particularly like.

Lines to sum up each Tale that we have staged so far:

Prologue: Knoworramean?

Tale 1: ‘Can stick up for himself’

Tale 2: ‘At night, she dreams of rainclouds’

Tale 3: ‘At home on his own Jack cuddles the quilt’

Tale 4: ‘Crushed soggy from her fist’

Tale 5: ‘You’re free’

Monologues:

TASK 1 – MONOLOGUES

Here's my monologue:

We then worked in pairs to stage the pieces. 

When staging the monologue I made the choice to have my character at a low level (floor level) to create a small, narrow, intimidating effect. I wanted my character to appear in this way because she felt very cowardly and ashamed, she blamed herself for something she had power to do but with little persuasion chose not to do until it was too late. This in turn made her a bit crazy and she very literally let the guilt eat away her own humanity until she was just a murmuring crazy lady with voices in her head. At this point her husband had divorced her and she is locked away in a mental asylum (where her monologue takes place). Throughout the performance she gave very little eye contact, constantly staring at one spot on the floor and moving her hands and fingers in an obscure way. I also chose to have her speech pace always varying and she continued to trail off of what she was previously talking about.

                                                                                        

The task helped me to understand the play further because it gave me the opportunity to analyse the after effects of the scene (it was during this exercise that I was able to chose whether my character learned anything from their experience or whether it all went to their head). 

We performed and watched our peer's work.

Roseby and Rory had brilliant monologues, Roseby put on a Scottish accent and was all ‘girl power, yeah!’ and vey unpredictable, she screamed at one point and I’m pretty sure she frightened everyone in the room. She talked about the good old days and how she would smoke pot ect. It was just a really nice performance that was enjoyable to watch, I’m not 100% sure what character she was playing but that might have just been me. Rory's performance was also very cleverly written, it was the abuser of the mum and their twins in Tale 5. This performance had the best twist on it in my opinion; he was the murderer of his girlfriend and his two infants only he didn’t know/couldn’t remember what her did. The scene consisted of him being interviewed (he created an interview by taking advantage of the audience and imagined that we had asked him the questions to which he answered in a ‘full sentences manor’ where he kind of repeated the question before answering it), he was absolutely frantic at the news of the deaths in his family and when the interviewer asked him who killed his family, he was enraged and threw a chair to the ground shouting something along the lines of “I don’t know who, you tell me”, to this he got the news that it was himself and the realization slowly sunk in, then the monologue ended. I presume the character was either so pissed that he couldn’t remember a thing or that he had schizophrenia and maintained a split personality. The fact that Rory also broke the forth wall however made sure that it didn’t seem like he felt the audiences present was also very unique.

I thought that was a brilliant perception of the play and how the character could be, it has also helped me to build imagery of this character in my head and I will continue to use his monologue as a stimulus to continue to analyse him further.

 WE DID NOT DO ANY OF THI IN CLASS!

TASK 2 - East End research devising task

Using the articles given to you about the East End, you created another East End Tale in a small group. This was how the writer created EET originally.

You were given one of these articles:

http://www.eastlondonadvertiser.co.uk/news/crimecourt/bethnal_green_teen_jailed_for_attempted_murder_1_3848926

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/the-moment-gang-shoots-volley-of-fireworks-at-a-passing-police-car-in-east-london-9850706.html

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/fancy-cockroaches-with-your-curry-bugs-found-scuttling-along-floor-of-indian-takeaway-9763423.html

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/thousands-of-fish-found-mysteriously-floating-dead-in-east-london-park-lake-9751637.html

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/police-appeal-after-black-man-racially-assaulted-in-childrens-playground-9727163.html

Q - What choices did you make with your group to make one of these articles into an East End Tale? Why? 

Q - How did you make the new tale you created like the tales in the play?

Q - Which character did you play and how?

Q - Which theatre skills did you use to perform the tale? 

I think I achieved a D1 because I think I was able to understand a character in depth, I managed to discover the next door neighbour of the abused woman in Tale 5 and then chose to base my monologue on how she was affected by the death. By doing this it helped me to capture the character's day to day life and how she would most likely act in certain situations, which in turn will hopefully help me be that character with ease.

Developing movement for characters:

The two videos below are useful when rehearsing and creating a role because they both tell you how important it is to use your body in a physical form to radiate emotion and create an authentic atmosphere, as well as how to create these movement in order to make them relevant to the character. With the help of the videos you are able to connect with the character you are playing and deliver a better performance (even from just rehearsing like this for an hour or so with a nationalistic play it would probably help you to connect with the emotion that we are meant to be portraying).:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KY-gWqj-FIk



https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1RRc4tq2kpE

Research Page:

Info:

-The history of the East End:

http://www.history.co.uk/study-topics/history-of-london/east-end-land-of-the-cockney

-Play is set in the East of London.

·      -The play is set in the present tense. Although it has been based around past experiences and events, it will always surround current affairs and influences.

·        -The writer created the play to show the brutality that humanity can have on one another, but also to remind us that we are not all bad. That we can be a loving community and that we can love one another as if they were our own.

     -Mastering the accent:

     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnjGNJ5JL8w

     The research has helped me to get to grips with the play, the accent and the overall views that different people have on London (especially the Eastern parts of London).

Tale 5 influenced drawing of Mother and her two infant children.

Rehearing: THRUST STAGE: Advantage: The play can be viewed from more than one angle, an intimate atmosphere is created. Having one end which is visible to all provides a ‘back’ to the stage. Disadvantage: Sight lines can still be an issue. Question: As an actor the challenges that I will have personally being directed in this space is the dilemma of having my back to the audience, of course it is okay for most of the scenes as we have a big cast and so the chances of someone else facing that member of the audience when I am not is very high.However I still feel like this comes as a challenge. Stage directions: The prologue has been staged so that there a multiple groups playing the same role, it's almost like the taxi driver skips from one journey to another whilst conveying the same story. We create this affect using lights to ensure a sharp and modern fluidity that moves around the space (the audience don't know where they will be looking next until it is lit). Tale 1: My role is a young typical East End kinda girl. The piece has been staged in a symmetrical formation in which we interact with neither the audience or each other. Staging choices were made by our director however we had to choose what we wanted to say, how we say the lines and particular poses we do e.g. selfie, phone call, texting etc. My strengths on this piece so far has been line learning as I have already learned my lines in this Tale. I need to develop the ending transition because we all stand up however it is straight after my line and so I don’t forget to stand but I feel as if I look messy and almost like a delayed reaction. I need to practice the transition and my speed at which I do things.

Rehearing:

THRUST STAGE: 

Advantage: The play can be viewed from more than one angle, an intimate atmosphere is created. Having one end which is visible to all provides a ‘back’ to the stage.

Disadvantage: Sight lines can still be an issue.

Question:

As an actor the challenges that I will have personally being directed in this space is the dilemma of having my back to the audience, of course it is okay for most of the scenes as we have a big cast and so the chances of someone else facing that member of the audience when I am not is very high.However I still feel like this comes as a challenge.

Stage directions:

The prologue has been staged so that there a multiple groups playing the same role, it's almost like the taxi driver skips from one journey to another whilst conveying the same story. We create this affect using lights to ensure a sharp and modern fluidity that moves around the space (the audience don't know where they will be looking next until it is lit).

Tale 1:

My role is a young typical East End kinda girl.

The piece has been staged in a symmetrical formation in which we interact with neither the audience or each other. 

Staging choices were made by our director however we had to choose what we wanted to say, how we say the lines and particular poses we do e.g. selfie, phone call, texting etc.

My strengths on this piece so far has been line learning as I have already learned my lines in this Tale.

I need to develop the ending transition because we all stand up however it is straight after my line and so I don’t forget to stand but I feel as if I look messy and almost like a delayed reaction. I need to practice the transition and my speed at which I do things.

Taxi Partners:

Today we continued to explore the text in a bit more depth and tried to get a better understanding of the East End.

Here are some of the exercises we did in class:

Working on the Prologue.

We created the prologue in pairs by adding in responses to the other character’s lines. I found this task a bit difficult as I was slightly confused and not too sue of what we were meant to be doing, and so that most likely reflected on the overall product. 
Also I didn't actually realise that the Prologue was a conversation between a Taxi driver and the passenger, which probably half explained my misunderstanding of the task. My partner and I first created the conversation between two friends just talking (and as we were asked not to have scene look like a static driver and passenger sat one behind the other,  the driver holding an imaginary steering wheel,we did it so that I was sitting down with my legs crossed whilst my partner had her head on my lap, responding to what I had to say).  
Then just before we were asked to perform we looked around the room at some of the other actors work and realized that we were doing the wrong task completely and so we started over. 
We decided that we were now going to have one of us (me) standing, facing one direction, and then the other one of us (Nina) to be sitting, facing the other direction so that we were both back to back. We did this so that we could incorporate levels into the piece and also to try and show status (there was hardly a difference in the status but it showed the audience that the driver didn't really have a choice, the driver had to reply to the passenger. And by having the passenger standing up it let the actor have a bit more freedom and leverage to move around the space. It also showed that the passenger was the character that had more to say whereas the driver was merely listening and only spoke occasionally).

What questions is the taxi driver asking and answering, what lines aren't in the text?

You needed to think about staging this with imagination (not sat one behind the other, with the driver holding an imaginary steering wheel).

We all got the chance to perform our pieces which was good as it gave us all the opportunity to see what the other actors took form the script and the decisions they made in order to portray a realistic piece.
My favourite pair were in fact not a pair but a three which I think it its self makes the task harder to complete but was taken on as a challenge and performed as a truly creative piece. The group (Ella, Sarah and Alex) managed to use levels, movement, improvisation,  characterisation and a high level of focus, this made the performance effective because it meant that the scene came to life. The East End accents used, truly giving the illusion of the setting, the actors all swayed and bounced ever so slightly to give the idea of a moving vehicle which also contributed to the setting. 

The group placed the taxi driver on a box in the middle and the two passengers on either side of the driver, I liked the staging as all actors where clearly seen, I also think the fact that the driver was in the middle and higher up was a good staging choice as the drive (Alex) has a lot to say and was the main focus point, having her own improvised monologue to perform.

We had time to create, rehearse and then share some of the pieces created before discussing what we liked about others scenes. 

Nina and I first created the scene as a normal conversation between two people, Nina was lying down with her head on my lap because we were told not to create just a boring conversation between a static taxi driver and  its passenger. However when we realized that we were doing the wrong thing with next to no time left to come up with a super creative scene, we settled for Nina standing up and me sitting down to create different levels and we added movement to make it look like the vehicle was moving by bopping ever so slightly and rocking from side to side when necessary. 

We also did a whole class hot-seat.

We continued to explore the taxi driver using a technique called hot seating, this involved putting the actor on the spot and asking them questions to which they answer as the taxi driver. This is an effective technique as it enables the actor to truly get an understanding of the character as well as help them build a realistic background story (this technique is especially useful for improvisation as you are forced to think on the spot creatively). For example I learned that the driver has 2 young daughters that attend Rosemarie Primary school Mel,aged 7 and Ria, age 9, his wife is called Savita and they all live in a 3 floor apartment flat at number 23 a. When I was the one asking the qustions I asked things such as: How old are you?  How much does it cost from Whitechapel Road,Shadwell,London,E1 1DB to the O2?  What times are your shifts?  Is there ever any commotion at night?  What's the worst/weirdest thing that has ever happened during a shirt.

Ensemble taxi driving:

The whole class explored being a taxi driver.

We all became taxi drivers and created some improvised movement and thought of some lines that the driver might say. 

As a taxi driver I leaned forward in my chair, had a bad posture, spoke in a deep cockney accent and constantly sat with my legs wide open, moving the steering wheel with not a care in the world. I made this choice because I decided to be a taxi driver that had had that job for a long time and so yes drove well but was quite relaxed and would quite happily multi task whilst driving. 

Other people chose to maybe not be the typical norm, they decided to sound slightly camp or had a habit of scratching their chin which I thought worked well as it was more realistic and thought out.

We worked as an ensemble by starting off just doing our own thing, what we thought a taxi driver to look/act. We then gradually were told to copy a certain persons taxi driver which included listening to their voice and then all repeating the same line back etc.

TALE 8 

In groups we read through TALE 8. 

We then underlined anything that suggested a location, weather, or atmosphere.

Here are some examples:

CREATE/REHEARSE

Once we'd done this we went through anything we'd underlined and created a series of sounds and some movement to develop the scene. 

we were asked to focus on creating the atmosphere and think about being the buildings, the weather, and the atmosphere.

We were allowed to use some of the lines from the text – however we might have decided to just use your sounds and movements to tell the tale.

We were then meant to shared our work with the class and reflected on it however we didn't get a chance to do this.

My group's rehearsal was a bit shaky at first but after a bit of encouragement we managed to work together as team. The sounds we used were effective because they created imagery for both the characters and the audience. My group decided to take a chunk of the script and use that as our script and use the rest as a stimulus for the soundscape. We used sounds such as, echoes, ghostly whistles, whispers, animal noises, rain drops, scratching, screeching, drumming and we also used animal movements. Everyone apart from me scattered themselves out and I, playing the role of 'Queen of the Concrete Jungle' went through, around and under the rest of the actors in my group whilst trying to stay dry from the rain (there was a constant soundscape throughout the performance). They then formed a sort of tunnel  and whilst making bird and spooky noises I sheltered myself from the rain. On the line 'Queen of the Concrete Jungle' our whole group became animals and Jamie took my hand and led me onto a chair where I was then fanned as if I were royalty.
I didn't really enjoy this task and found it difficult to work in a group whilst creating something that used next to no lines as I found it hard to work with something that held next to no substance. The piece made me feel empowered a bit but apart from that I didn't really enjoy this task. Our group could have developed a bit more of a physical theatre type of scene but I think overall our group didn't work to well together although we did try. I'm not sure if there were similarities in what groups did as we didn't share performances. Using a soundscape makes it easier to tell the story, it gives the piece an effect, makes it dramatic and creates an atmosphere, in our piece we created an eerie and intimidating soundscape as that is the kind of affect that 'The Queen of The Concrete Jungle' would have on the audience.

Mr Worden set us the following for homework:

He put us into groups and asked us to come to class next week with ideas, character research and drawings of the characters you are exploring. However the following week we didn't have Mr Worden and so we didn't share anything but here are some of the characters below: