Lewis & Clark Moodle

Mia and I experimented with our location a lot last week. We first went to the chapel on campus. Running the scene in the chapel was amazing, and offered a lot of insights into the blocking of our scene. We felt dropped in almost immediately. We were making good progress in the chapel, but we had to leave after only two runs of the scene, because an event was starting. We moved to a classroom in Howard, where we had more interesting challenges for blocking. It was difficult to move from a literal chapel into a classroom, but we managed to stay grounded through the text and our listening and responding. I would recommend that other partners try to find a space that is at least closer to what your setting is, like an apartment or house for the stop kiss groups, or a yard for the Detroit groups. 

Something Mia and I are still really struggling with is the Magic If. We feel like when we are really grounded, we lose our energy, and the ability to act young, because we are grounded in ourselves as young adults in our twenties. By really thinking through how we connect to our characters, we are hoping to find a way to be grounded and high energy. 

This week after having our first rehearsal we had a lot of new opportunities with blocking with our new set up. This will allow us to create more diagonals and create a scene that depicts the text. Also, we have taken notes from I believe it was Dan? We have taken into practicing our lines in random environments that require us to focus on another task, like playing ping pong in Pamplin. This allowed us to get focus less on remembering our lines but more on what the other was doing. We still need to work on pinch ouch and listen could be improved on.

Another concept we have been thinking about is not trying to be ourselves in the scene but play some other person in the scene. Both Mike and I are having some character reversals playing our parts in this scene. Mike struggles with not driving the conversation and realizing he is in the lower status situation. While I am struggling with playing a character in power with such girlish charm I usually don’t have. And heels. This has been a new challenge for us especially myself, changing the way I say my words in rehearsal to sound unlike myself has helped me get a new and refreshing take on Claire.

We have also decided to rehearse for the first time out of class in the black box on Friday. I'm super excited for how we will act in our performance environment and how we can follow our impulses like Sydney, can’t wait!

Hey everyone!!

So not much has changed since Tuesday but our progress is really moving along nicely. We have officially memorized our lines which is great! Getting our lines down especially because we both have monologues was top priority. Now, we are continuing to work on listening to one another, blocking and taking moments to really think why we are saying each line and how our lines relate to the overall story line/ ark. This weekend we planning on working on our movement and other notes you all suggested the first time we performed! 

Cheers! 

Our process is really moving along well! We are now basically off book for everything, even that big final speech at the end! We rehearsed in the blackbox on Wednesday with props and with water in the beer cans. Adding the water to the beer cans really transformed how I personally interacted with my character. Now I feel like I really am drinking and can use beer way more effectively to drive home certain feelings during the silences. For example, I can be sad or frustrated in how I drink my beer.

We continue to be more explosive and dynamic in our rehearsals. We try really hard to be more pinch ouch in how we react to each other. However, we still have issues on the blocking. We are kind of making up as we go along. This leads to a fairly authentic yet inconsistent blocking for us. That being said, the more explosive and reactive rehearsals are really successful.

One thing I am still trying to work on and figure out is how to deliver my speech at the end of the play. I am experimenting with slowing it down and speeding it up at different parts. I try to go serious for parts of it and then go back to being joyful and playful during other parts of the speech. The results are mixed so this is definitely something that I need to keep working on. As a whole though, we are moving well in the right direction!

So in the past couple of days, we have continued working on making our voices more dynamic. We have been practicing saying lines while doing other things to incorporate more random movement, so that our scenes movements will be more off of impulse. This is something we have been trying to work on since we think that our movement has been a little too planned out. 

Since Tuesday, not much has happened besides us trying to really focus on saying our lines both with random movement and different levels of exaggeration. We are focusing on still being a little crazy with our scene, so that we can be more alive in our scene.   

The hardest thing about rehearsing with a partner is finding time to rehearse with a partner. 

That aside, I think Sydni and I have been doing good work in what rehearsals we are able to do together. We've used the game in which you switch where you are in relation to your partner depending on the beat, and I think that has helped us drop in more effectively. I think it also helps us differentiate beats, which is a problem we've been having with this scene since the beginning. 

Things that we can still improve on is not rehearsing the scene in just one way. I worry that we do too much of the "just run through it over and over" technique, but the activities we've gone over in class really help. This week, I think the best thing we can do is try to really listen and respond -- as well as we know our lines now, there is still a moment of remembering that slows us down and fills the scene with unnecessary pauses. 

We're looking forward to our second showing! At least we have the costumes and props together.

Don’t laugh don’t laugh don’t

Laugh don’t laugh don’t laugh don’t laugh

Don’t laugh don’t you dare

Talk slower because

You are talking too fast and

No one understands

Listen and respond

respond to what she says to

To you and react

Change delivery

Of my lines and my movements

For a real response

Red couch disappears

From the black box theatre where

The hell did it go

Roll up roll down my

Spine to relax and feel calm

To steady my breath

Dropping in is like

Taking a test while high you

Focus later on

But once you drop in

The world disappears you are

Alone with Sara

Kaia pinches me

And I have to respond but

Ouch is hard to do

Alec is sick and

I don’t want to kiss her cause

I too will get sick

Fever so recent

Lips on lips is bad idea

Dress rehearsal though

Haikus seem a weird

Expression of rehearsals

But it’s just more art

Must slow down the lines

No matter how slow I go

It is still too fast

This pull-out couch is

Not a little bit comfy

The floor is so hard

Time races by when

We are on stage did the scene

Just take twenty mins

Up to this week when we had our rehearsal, we really tried to work blocking and listening and responding. We tried to fill in awkward gaps with movement to make it less awkward. We also think that our rehearsal times may have hindered our practice because we only had super early times in the black box that were available. With this in mind, we may not have been fully awake, and therefore we may not have fully dropped in.

This week we had our rehearsal, and we felt as though we again struggled with dropping in right away within our scene. We feel as though our monologues need to be slowed down, and voice articulation needs to be amplified. With this in mind, our voices need to be more dynamic, and the pace of our scene needs to be more regulated in rehearsal.

For next week, we will do the exercises of dramatically slowing down our scene, and we want to practice the scene over the top so we can practice getting out of our shells. We think the more ridiculous we practice it, the easier it will be for us to be more animated and dynamic on stage.

Ellen and I have been trying to warm up differently and creatively instead of just jumping into the scene. Doing the roll down the back imagining bones, and the partner warm up where we kind of massage one another. And just asking each other what we need. I think this really has really helped get into the zone, to be able to drop in right at the beginning. We also have been practicing saying each others lines back to one another before we start, to work on the pinch ouch, as well as saying our lines different distances apart, and moving closer or farther depending on the feelings. I think doing all of this has helped immensely when we go to practice the scene. It also really makes me feel in tune with Ellen. I’m still definitely working on dropping in at the beginning. Its weird because I am so similar to Sara, so I feel like at the beginning of the scene I’m in this flux state between me and Sara… if that makes sense? I think what I need to do is channel Sara all the way, and let the parts of myself that identify with Sara really be a part of Sara. Its almost like forgetting yourself to be the character?

While we were rehearsing yesterday, I had the idea to try to go through the scene, but slightly different: we were going to actively try to freak each other out while playing the scene. The reasoning behind this was to try to give a bigger, more extreme "pinch" to make the "pinch-ouch" a more natural response. Also, since Ben and Kenny have such a competitive/combative relationship, this seemed like a good way to get our characters to get under each other's skin.

The result was very interesting, and made a lot of our dialogue a lot more explosive in the moments where we're arguing, and more tense in the quieter moments. One thing that really surprised me was how much going into the scene with that mindset of trying to catch Dan/Kenny off-guard changed the dynamic. Some of my lines that I had previously interpreted as a defense or a justification (ex. when I'm trying to convince Kenny to pay me for financial advice) now seemed like an attack, giving a clear, yet different reason for Dan to shut down the argument. It created a really cool, more exciting energy that I hope to keep in our scene.

One thing I'd like to work on still is our blocking; a lot of the time, it feels like we're either making a lot of it up as we go through the scene or sticking too rigidly to the blocking we decide on; is anyone else running into this issue? I'd like to try to find something somewhere in the middle, but I'm not really sure how.