Lewis & Clark Moodle

Amber and I have been working on blocking and memorizing lines so far. When we met outside of class and rehearsed, we tried to make the set similar to what we noramaly use in the black box and ended up placing the furnitures like this (the picture below).

We first read through the lines roughly and decided how we do physical movements for each beat, but when we actually move and speak the lines at the same time, there were some parts felt wired to do, which made us realized that doing actual action rather than thinking in a head leads us to make better decision about physical movements.

Any way, we still need to work on memorizing lines, and once we get done with that, we need to just rehearse a lot!!!!

Victor here. Once again we haven't had many chances to meet to rehearse in person so our effort has been focused on individually reviewing lines. This video is after our first major out of class rehearsal.

This week consisted of ‘just doing’ the work to memorizing my lines.  I had a hard time starting the process of finding the right way to memorize my lines.  It took me a while until I realized I just had to do the work to get the results I wanted.  Though it was tough for me to get started, I found that the easiest way for me to memorize my lines is saying them out loud again and again.  Repetition is the only way I will be successful in my last performance.

This week Abdo and I plan to meet with one another multiple times to make sure we are on the same page with what we are doing when we are not together.  As for lines, I am confident that we will know what the stakes are so that we are able to stay grounded within ourselves and with one another. It is very exciting seeing how our scene is coming together slowly!

“When the going gets tough, put one foot in front of the other and just keep going. Don’t give up.”

It has been fun but challenging so far, just been trying to be as authentic as we can.

What We Wanted To Do:

This week we mainly focused on just getting memorized. I know, booooorinnnnnggg, but you know what? Not everybody is presenting on Monday. 

What We (Like Actually) Did:

We met several times both in and out of the Blackbox theatre to rehearse our lines. At first, we thought about doing them without blocking, but it soon became evident that we would need to practice with it just for cohesion as well as a way to help us remember our lines by tying them to specific movements. We actually could only get into the blackbox once, and that time we had to cut down our practice time because the class that was in there went a little late. For the next time, we practiced in an unused Howard classroom, which is when we decided to use the classroom chairs to actually plan out/perfect our blocking. We also tried to rehearse once using outrageous accents in order to try to help remember our lines even with extraneous circumstances!

What We Learned:

The activity we did looking at what happens directly before the scene starts helped us quite a bit here. The awkwardness of the scene really comes from a large amount of places, with the majority coming from Sam and Rose's history, but also from their change in management and recent talks with both the new management as well as Avery. This kind of paints how exactly we act in the scene, as well as how and why we have that 'pinch ouch' reaction to some lines. I think the self imposed accent exercise also helped a bit. Probably. Maybe. Hope so!

Problems We Encountered:

The only real problem we ran into was the same one we ran into in prior rehearsals, the same thing pretty much everyone doing the Flick will be able to relate to, which are the pauses. A couple of them just feel out of place, or unnatural. To remedy this, we cut out pauses any time there wasn't explicitly a pause in the script, and shortened some pauses that the script specifies as longer. Next time we'll also likely use video to record some stuff, and I won't have to write out long boring paragraphs!

This week Hongyi and I focused on memorizing and then blocking the first chunk of our scene. We were having a hard time figuring out how to recreate a hospital bed so (as you can see in Hongyi's beautiful sketch) we are using six big black boxes and two foam mats to make a similar look.  The goal was to figure out a way to have the top part of the bed be at angle, like a real hospital bed with the remote control that changes your angle of sitting, so that it could be less awkward when I talk to her from a laying down position. 

We also worked on putting our beats to actions. We went through our chunk multiple times to see what exact movement feels right on what word or pause or moment. We have a lot of extreme given circumstances (as in I just lost my eye and Kayleen is drunk, covered in mud and in high heeled shoes) so it was also a lot to remember those circumstances and hold them in our bodies throughout the scene.  Hongyi brought her black heels to our rehearsal to practice walking in them as if she were drunk. The affect losing your eye has on your body was very hard to portray as it is me squinting one eye and trying to imagine what it would be like to suddenly have lost vision in one eye. Would I be dizzy? Would I I just be whipping my head around a lot trying to see everything? Would my depth perception be off?  Anyone with experience having lost one eyeball's eyesight (even temporarily)- please comment. 

This week’s rehearsal has been good. At this point we both just really need to work on our lines. We both have a good idea of what each line is supposed to be but they are kind of short quick lines, so it’s easy to stumble over them and try to remember which lines come next. Especially in the scenes where they are arguing because it is super easy to get lost in the commotion of what is going on. We also have continued to have a lot of fun working together and hope that fun can extend into the final performance (in the sense that we want to enjoy while we are performing). Finding a connection to the characters is a continued struggle but we are both working hard on that. Doug and Kayleen’s lives, although may have some similarities to our own, are for the most part, pretty different from ours. So working on finding a connection to the emotion and the thoughts behind each line and action is something we have really tried to discuss together. Overall we are really happy with the work we have put into this scene, and our happy with what we have come up with, but we both agree that there is more work to be done!

Tawayne, checkin in. Sorry to all of our fans out there, but we didn’t get a video this week. Next time we got you though. Dae and I still don’t have all our lines down but we hope to have them completely down by Wednesday this week. What we have been struggling with is that there are a number of pauses and actions throughout the scene from the Flick that we are trying to figure out. We have planned out the different lengths of the pauses so that we can hopefully act them out realistically when it comes to our final performance. Another focus of ours this week is on trying to move moment to moment within the scene and remaining grounded even through all of the pauses and actions. We said “ We need to practice on our sweeping so we should clean our rooms a lot leading up to the final day.” Also, we have learned that is hard to fake laughter so we will really have to work on that to make it seem real. Catch you next week, Gone!  

For the first week due to difficult schedules we've had very few chances to meet outside of class to work on the scene so we've been limited in our progress. Aside from beat analysis and discussion of given circumstances our progress has mostly been focused on individually learning our lines. To do this we each recorded our halves and sent them to each other. I feel we work together well when we can and the main obstacle is time constraints. We're hoping that it'll become easier after this week.