This week superficially wouldn't seem to have many large definable achievements, but in reality it marks our first week of, in my opinion, "rehearsal". Other than the final moment, we have the entire script more or less pinned down. We worked on refining our movements, clarity and purpose, as well as our dialog. Making sure it all fits with the story and theme of the piece. We have faced some stress just generally because of deadlines and the fact that this is a huge project on top of all the other work we have and it is scary. I am excited to have this project done, not in a mean spirited way, but more as though it needs to be finished. The goal for the next few weeks is to try and run the show as many times as possible, making sure all our ducks are in a row. We need to get everyone's roles outside of acting set. Off stage things need to be worked out as well as set and props needing finalization. We are almost there. Lots of little housekeeping things and rehearsal.
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This week has been fun, we have compiled all of our moments into a timeline and filled in the parts in between with plot points to form a narrative. This was challenging, but it seem as though we had more than enough material to do so. We started acting in the space we will do our final performance in this morning. We did some lighting ques and generally got more of a feel for how the production may end up. Attached is a rough video of some of our improvisation, be aware that everything that isn't a moment (blue light) is completely devised, so a lot of it seems a bit disjointed or awkward. That's why we started doing this this early though, we needed to start getting that work done. I feel confident that by next week we will have a pretty rounded out form. Not complete or polished, but with all the needed parts. https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0hAOtT9MCzwSWhkbzFQN092Q1k
This week was a bit hard. Many of the people in our group are involved in the other school theater production. This week was their "hell week", basically they were all mentally dead. This lead to a lot of acting exercises and only a bit of new devising work. Two things we accomplished were assigning troop roles and the solidification of a few moments. The moments are coming together in pantomime with a system of snapping to represent the shift in mood or place. We have been using this technique as well as some of the method acting involving attachment of real emotion to dialog we have wrote for each moment. We continue to revise these as well as the acting in the moments. The troop roles were relatively easy to assign as everyone has fallen into some sort of roll already. I am in the roll of director as well as actor.
This week has been a roller coaster. We attempted to read each others minds, and with another Stanislavsky technique practiced acting “as if”. This became a huge influence in our process, allowing us to take our previous concept of personal experience to our actual bodies on stage. We have passed through the terrifying moment of our first group moment devising activity with high moral and new ideas. Our process has consisted of setting square cubes as a mach set then acting out some action that fits into our overarching story(moving out) then with the snap of someone offstage freezing and then, with minimal movement, reacting to pre-writtin dialog from another actor offstage. We attempted this system with two of our actors and two different dialog. The results were spontaneous and awesome. We found a triggering moment for an actor that up to this point had no idea what to choose or use. The pressure of being forced into a structure and a situation seems to have lead us to find more true reactions. The lack of precognition forced us to react “as if”, Stanislavsky methods, made our previous ideas of real personal experience and emotion present to our acting. The hope that we can show our audience our experiences with nostalgia truthfully, and meaningfully is coming into realization.
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