Lewis & Clark Moodle

This week Casey and I have been really trying to work on our use of space and blocking in our scene. Rebecca gave us some great advice that we have been taking to heart, which was finding a reason why you move and what is your intentions doing so. We have been struggling with knowing when to move, which causes our scenes to have wasted movement. However, when we took, the advice Rebecca gave us it really helped develop our scene and especially the stakes of our characters.

Another thing we have been working on is the status of our characters. For both of us, our natural personalities are a lot different from our characters, and it has been a process to adapt. We have been doing a great job dropping into our characters and focusing on our choices. The last thing we have been working on is listening and making our script sound organic. Sometimes we tend to anticipate our lines and just say them without listening to each other.

Nevertheless, we have gained great feedback for our scene and have been ingraining our critiques into our rehearsals. We are continuing to improve our scene and are excited to perform our final product soon!

Last rehearsal Virginia and I went to church... literally we rehearsed in the Chapel and it helped so much with dropping in and blocking for the BB. I really recommend doing a rehearsal in a space that is like the one your characters are in in the scene. It helped me a lot with dropping in. 

What I have been struggling with the most is taking the same risks I take during rehearsal when I am performing in class. I am going to try to take even more risks during the next rehearsal and hopefully our coaching session with Rebecca will help me make more dynamic choices.

Having Virginia as a scene partner has been so helpful because I really feed off her energy and seeing her be really dropped in helps me drop in too. 

I'm so sad that this semester is coming to a close because it means we all won't be in class together anymore I love being in class with you all and I'm going to miss it so much!! 

Our second round of dress rehearsals in front of the class went extremely well! We really are making huge strides in pinch-ouch movement and concerned moment to moment actions. One of the key moments for me in the dress rehearsal was when Griffin accidentally spilled water on my shirt as he said he was willing to go out for the night. It was an accident but one that could totally have happened in the conversation between Ben and Kenny. It forced me to be more explosive and dynamic in my response. On the same note, Griffin really worked the scene where he crushed the beer can and decided to go out. Focusing on moment to moment he really changed the way he visibly makes a decision to go out for the night. Really strong improvement for both of us! 

Looking forward for rehearsal strategies, I need to work on enunciation a great deal more. During the dress rehearsal, I focused on enunciation after Rebecca pointed out how I slur my words. This is something I have gotten my whole life and is actually a reason I took the class in the first place. When rehearsing, I was so focused on enunciating, I accidentally said Griffin's line! I will record myself and intentionally focus on how I sound to address this problem. Griffin is working on stopping unnecessary pauses. He got that comment from Rebecca and started working it during the dress rehearsal and I immediately noticed a significant difference in how I reacted to him! Getting rid of those pauses forces me to be more "dropped in" to the scene. Addressing these two concerns, the two of us can really create a final product that we're proud of!  

We have been working on exaggerating in our rehearsals since last performance. We think it has worked out some of the weird blocking sections, and has put us more into the given circumstances. We have developed our characters more as budding love then us just having a friendship. 

We also have been working on really considering why we are saying the lines, and not just repeating the lines because they are our lines. This has lead us to be more intentional in our body language and movements throughout the scene. 

Annika has worked on really telling a story with her monologue with facial expressions, and really being into her moment to moment during this. I have worked on actively listening with both movements and facial expressions during her monologue. Also still working on dropping in in the beginning of scene, so we are doing some experimenting with that. 

Can't wait for our second rehearsal!!! 

CRAZY that we have to perform our scene in a week. Time truly flies when you're having fun.

In our last rehearsal, we tried the laser game we played in class last week. The pros of this game are that it forces you to listen and react when your partner is speaking. The cons, of course, are that it's hilarious and it's hard to remain serious while kicking at your partner. Our next move was to walk through blocking slowly and deliberately, trying to really think about why we might move to a certain place or look at each other at a certain time. In other words, we walked through the scene trying to be really deliberate about our actions and the reasons behind our actions.

We have another rehearsal scheduled for this afternoon, and we have a few things planned. First, we have to really consider where we are in relation to each other and to the audience. I think we have a real problem sometimes considering how things look from an outside perspective.

This process has been a lot of fun. Rehearsing is like homework that we actually look forward to, but is somehow much harder than other work. We can't wait for the final performance! It'll be  areal hoot.

-Ellen & Sydni

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.