Lewis & Clark Moodle

We presented our second draft of the Final scene on Thursday the 5th of December. After receiving positive feedback both from our classmates and Rebecca about the better grounding achieved in our second draft, we decided to meet on Sunday 8th of December in the black box to rehearse in order to get work on the anticipation of actions and the intention we attack the lines with. We thought it was necessary to get more comfortable with the props and analyze again our relationship with each other and the physical setting. 

During this rehearsal, we worked a lot more in blocking and our relationship with each other. We changed some of the movements we had planned by doing a couple of run-throughs with improvised physical actions. After Sunday's rehearsal, we both felt a lot more comfortable with relevant objects like the door (highly complex physical action for Julia) and the couch (place of Julia's attempt at understanding Callie). We struggled the most with the idea of achieving high stakes without overacting the obstacle (Julia: not understanding Callie's concerns.  Fabi: Being mad/annoyed without forgetting that Callie still loves Sara). We are looking forward to our coaching session with Rebecca! 

As we are pretty far into the rehearsal prosses, blocking has not become to essential question anymore. Blocking has only become the way to specific means. How is our message best articulated, only if it serves the "story" is blocking necessary. Experimentation is the best part of rehearsing. Not one rehearsal is the same and the art is not to make each run be the same but organically adapt to changing circumstances. That has been the best part, adapting to your scene partner is what keeps the scene alive and sparkly. I am always looking for ways for Johanna to affect (or is it effect) me more harshly (and vice-versa)and thereby raising the stakes. It is interesting to see how props can change a scene. We introduced hand sanitizer to our scene and peter became much meaner as a result. We are doing good progress and 2 more rehearsals should be enough for us to finish. 

All the best, 

Flavio and Johanna 

I cannot believe reading days are already here! This week, Helen and I have really worked on the specificities in our scene. So far, we definitely feel like we have the fundamentals of the scene down. We both noticed that we don't even have to work to remember our lines anymore, they just flow naturally. The feedback we got the last time we performed was really helpful moving forward. We have created a smoother flow between some of the moments in our scene, like when we have to make the pullout bed. It has been really fun trying to find new, silly ways Callie and Sara can flirt. The laughter we got during our performance was very reassuring as well

Moving forward, we both have to focus on volume. In our coaching session, Rebecca mentioned our pacing and volume. Often, in performance as well as in everyday life, I tend to rush through my words and they become muddled. But, we practiced a few times in rehearsal and each time I became more confident in my enunciation. I can already tell that the tools I have learned in this class are helping me in other parts of my life as well. I am excited to put the last few final touches on our scene, but I'm also sad that this our last performance!

Hello everyone,

I do humbly apologize for accidentally not submitting the blog post that I wrote over Thanksgiving break. To make it up to you loyal fans, Nathan and I will bring you two in one day! Now I know you guys are definitely excited to hear about all the blocking work Nathan and I have done, so here are some of those changes.

• Nathan and I decided on specific times for when to go into the aisle and come upstage
• We have solidified my monologue blocking
• We have worked on pauses and actions during the silence
• We cleaned up the exits and entrances

Kayla and I have been rehearsing in the Black Box a few times thus far, and it’s been fun to get deep into the underlying meaning of the lines and our characters’ motivations. However, our challenges have really been to figure out what exactly those motivations are throughout the scene, since there’s a lot running beneath the surface of the text, as well as the challenge of projection in the space. Rebecca has consistently given us notes on projecting the text to the audience, and we’ve found that it’s a challenge to maintain our sense of intimacy and interpersonal energy within the scene while at the same time actually conveying the text to an (imaginary) audience sitting far away from us, since it inherently breaks a little bit of the “realism” of the acting. Another challenge has been finding meaning in the lines which we know so well at this point — the words have started to become more like sequences of sounds than actual sentences, and it’s becoming hard for us to let each other’s lines affect our responses and psychological actions, so we’re going to work on that and hopefully find a way to mitigate that effect.

It was recently discovered that Negasi's first entry never ended up being posted, so I guess this is officially post number one. There will be more to come in the next few days.

When Negasi and I first chose the scene, we sat down and spent about an hour reading through the whole show to get the full scope of the relationship between Sam and Avery because it is built up so much throughout the story. We started the reading performing the characters as we would speak and as the play went along, we let the changes in the characters change the way we delivered each line.

The next thing we did was try and figure out how the set was going to be designed. Negasi and I had very different views on how the chairs should be set up. I wanted the chairs to face the projector wall so it felt like the audience would be incorporated into the scene, like it was a real movie theatre, while Negasi wanted the chairs to face the audience and pretend that the screen would be between the audience and the actors. We had a discussion about this for at least an hour over the course of a few meetings. 

The next step we took was making our beat analysis. At first we tried to work together on each of our beats but we realized that our characters have such different goals that it was getting difficult to work on each other's beats. 

We just did our final scene rehearsal this Tuesday! It's so wild that the semester is almost over. 

We met up with Rebecca on Monday, which really helped us gain some clarity on how to approach our scene! Right now, we are working on volume, projecting our feelings onto the other person rather than expressing them internally, and trying to up the romantic tension. It's difficult to focus on so many things at once while also remaining grounded, but we have been meeting up so we can try and combat this before the final scene. 

I have found that increasing volume really helps with the energy within our scene, but it is hard to do this while trying to not be aware of the audience. I think these things just take time, and that's okay! If anyone has any tips on how they approach this, I'd really appreciate it.

 Everyone has been doing great so far and I'm so excited to see the final performances! We've got this!!!

We had a rehearsal just before class on Wednesday, because that time works the best for our schedules. It wasn’t as long as we were hoping for it to be, but it was productive! 

We ran the scene a few times while focusing on certain aspects of the performance, like blocking, volume, and tempo. I think it was effective, and it got a few things cleaned up before we had to show the scene in class. We’re hoping to meet two more times before the coaching session with Rebecca.

We certainly have to work on blocking again, as Rebecca pointed out to us that there’s too much moving around the scene, which tends to un-ground us. Also, perhaps in these next few rehearsals, we can do things other than run the scene. I feel like we need to do some other exercises to get the scene moving in new ways.

I attached a sped up version of our last run through (the long version was to big to upload). It’s interesting to watch the scene from the outside. I’m glad we took the video. We find it very helpful

Very excited! Hope you guys are feeling good about your scenes!

Here we are. End of the semester and the end of Acting I. We're done with class and almost done with our final scenes. Our scene has come a long way from the beginning and it has been great to watch it grow and to see the characters really develop into fully fledged people. As with most things there still feels like there is a lot of work that can be done to perfect the scene but perfection isn't really the point here. Art is rarely perfect and it is always subjective. Personally I've had to keep that last bit in mind while working our scene in particular because I have a horrible habit of comparing myself and my work to others. While this was a major stressor in the beginning it has since become a joy to see the different takes on this scene and these characters and I'm so excited to see what everyone does for the final performance! For rehearsal this week we worked on activating each other in the scene and keeping the tension going towards the end. We found the keeping that a connection between the characters also helps to keep tensions high and we were able to add a little more motion to the scene to help with emphasizing emotions and keeping the scene from becoming too stagnant which has been a bit of a struggle. We're still working on playing our objectives and not deflecting when things get too tense but over all I am happy with where we're at.