Lewis & Clark Moodle
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What's going on in the scene? Why are we saying the things we're saying? What are we saying? What do we mean by it? How does what we mean change throughout the scene? How does what we want to say change? How does how we say it change? Beats. Look at the beats. What are my beats? What are the best words to annunciate what I'm doing within these beats? Words are hard.
Great. Now we have beats. We have beats that make sense. We have beats that are fun to play. Now what? (Now what? Now what?)
Now we put it on its feet and see if it can run.
It runs. It took a couple of stumbles along the way, but it got to the finish line. Now again. And again. Third time's the charm. Nice. Little bit of cleaning up, then it'll run like new. Well, not new, but like it should.
Again then.
Feels stiff. Why? Who is this person I'm interacting with? Rose? No, the person. Oh. Let's find out.
Now I know. Not strangers turned scene partners, but strangers turned scene partners turned friends (I hope).
Now What?
Again, but Better.
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Overall this week's rehearsal went well. Before we actually got together, both of us did a lot of personal character work to try and figure out who we were, and meeting up to do the scene definitely changed some of the things I originally had written out for my character, because they didn't fit with how Marilyn was playing her character. We figured out our beats in the scene and the best word to articulate how we are feeling at that moment and what we are doing. Then we put it on its feet a few times to try and get the beats down, figure out our chemistry, and figure out how we interact. We got the scene to a place where it felt good to us, but we knew it still had a some workshopping to do. Memorization for this part of the scene felt good too. After we got it to this point, we spent some time getting to know each other a little more, since we didn't know each other that well. At the moment, I feel that we are in a good place with the first 2 minutes, so now we just need to get that way with the whole scene.
Over the course of this past week, my scene partner, Keshav, and I have been focussing on the underlying circumstances within our chosen scene. For instance, we’ve discussed the implications of the status dynamic between Callie and Peter. Assuming that the play takes place during the late 90s (when it was written), we factored in the idea that Peter views Callie’s relationship for Sara as “illegitimate” due to the fact that they’re both women. Peter uses this notion to assume dominance over Callie--asserting that, despite her feelings towards Sara, she has no influence in the decision to take Sara back home. Their relationship at the start of the scene seems fairly cordial between the two, with them engaging in some awkward conversation. Eventually, however, Peter gradually begins to assert his dominance over Callie--desperately trying to understand why Sara risked her life for her. Callie is rendered helpless, seeing as she’s unable to publicly claim her love for Sara without repercussions. With this in mind, we felt as though this contributed to the overall dynamic of the scene and helped us be able to more easily understand the hostility Peter feels towards Callie.
In terms of actually rehearsing, I think we would benefit greatly from more meetings. However, so far, I think we're making good progress with determining the motivations behind our actions within our scene.
Rehearsal Blog #1, Stop Kiss (1998)
In my first stages of rehearsing for the scene between Peter and Callie in the hospital waiting room, I have focused a lot on Peter’s identity. He is not a character who I’d say I have a lot in common with. I imagine him as traditional, masculine, prideful, and opinionated. None of these words have an especially flattering connotation. Consequently, my first obstacle is finding myself within Peter’s character.
The component of Peter’s identity that I have decided to emphasize in my performance is his longing for control. Throughout this scene, Peter seems defeated, helpless, and angry. Towards the end, these emotions pour out of him when he verbally attacks Callie. Through this overflow of emotions and passion, Peter is expressing his desire to be in control of Sara’s life. He believes he knows what is best for her and that as long as they are together, she will be safe and happy. At the core of all of this is Peter’s desire to protect Sara. I often feel I know what is best for people and overstep in providing guidance. It is this overlap between Peter’s character and myself that I will emphasize in my performance.
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Julie and I have made good progress in deciding how to set up the scene along with our body language throughout the scene. We, especially me, are still working on building confidence in memorizing our lines so the performance can be more fluid.
P.s.
Sorry I don’t have any creative visuals to display the progress we have made. I’ll be sure to be more innovative in my next blog.
Sadly we did not take any pictures...so I hope the rest of you will substitute for our lack of them.
Over this past week, Brenden and I have worked a lot on developing our characters and actions in our scene. I think that the beat analysis really helped us to do this and I feel that we both have a better grasp as to what our characters are feeling and doing throughout the scene. I think something we want to work on collectively is the way that we react to one another as well. I think of this especially in terms of what beat that Brenden does that causes me to react and shift/what causes me to say my next line and vice versa. I feel that once we do our first 2 minutes of the scene, we'll get a lot of useful feedback as to how we can improve our performance.
Me and tyler have done a good amount of work this week to prepare for the dress rehearsal. We have talked about what we are going to wear for our costumes for the final performance. We also have rehearsed in a room in Howard for this scene so we know when to say our lines and we have are physical movements down. A story during rehearsal is that we used some chairs in the classroom to kind of set up our set so we can get a more realistic look of our set and we rehearsed through that. Overall I think Tyler and I have a good foundation for our performance thus far and we will just have to bring the performance together for the final show.
We used many different places and blocking to rehearse. We used Stamm in Templeton, the lounge in the theater department and most importantly the black box. It was interesting to see how our acting changed from one space to another. We definitely felt most comfortable in the Black box.
Our biggest takeaways from Rebecca's comments was that I had to feel the obstacle more which is that Khalean might not love me back the same way I love her back and Khalean's biggest takeway was to be more present. We plan on further developing these comments on our characters and meet twice before our finale tomorrow.
Best of luck to all groups,
Abdo & Hannah
Tawayne, checkin in with you guys. Hope everyone is doing well, we are almost done so don't give up just yet. Dae and I have been working on this for the past couple of weeks and believe that it is really coming along. We are now focused on a lot of the little things like our physical behaviors and having more meaning behind our text. It has been both fun and challenging to truly understand this scene. It's really crazy how far everyone has come from the beginning of the semester when everyone was so uncomfortable acting in front of one another, but now it's easy. Dae and I are about to have something special for you guys on the final day, just wait!!! Look forward to watching everyone else's performances as well. Let's win these Academy Awards! Tawayne out!
Hello everyone!
Caley here. Will and I have had a great week this week practicing and delving further into our scene! We both have a lot of things we are trying to work on. I want to work on smiling less and really landing the action of my beat on Doug. Will is trying to do a better job of being injured the entire scene and identify the motivation of his character in every moment. While we both have a lot to work on we are excited for what the rest of the semester holds!
Hello everyone! Connor here. Sorry this is a day late.
Falcon and I performed our scene last Wednesday. I am so pleased by the feedback you all gave! You're a really thoughtful group, and your criticisms were so helpful! Our next step is implementing them to make our scene the best it can be. Falcon and I have been super busy now that the year is almost over, so not a ton of progress has been made since the performance. We intend to focus on the more tender moments in our scene—places where our characters engage with each other without hostility. There are some really gorgeous moments to work with, and sadly we haven't yet given them enough thought. I want to present my character, Peter, in a more complex way than I am currently doing. Right now I've been playing him like he's little more than a jerk, but he has so much going on! I need to explore his less-angry side.
That's all for now. Falcon and I will keep you posted! For your enjoyment, here's a video of Falcon reading aloud a chalkboard full of unintelligible text we came across while working. Whoever tells us what it means first gets a Snickers ;)*
*Offer not valid in the continental US.