After refreshing and mentally recharging over the Christmas break, I enjoyed diving into the new process with a challenging first week back. I pushed myself for the first time in a while, both physically and emotionally and I discovered a lot about my development throughout my training so far and what I can still improve on. I was very anxious on the first day, which I usually am going into a new project, but I was able to manipulate this nervous energy into my determination to push myself, take risks and make mistakes and I’m very happy with how the first week of our next process turned out for me. I want to showcase how much I’ve developed and matured since ‘Hope In The Enchanted Forest’, and I am excited to work as a company to choose the play that suits what genre of theatre we want to explore, but also what's suitable for our castings and our cast size.
During our first day we made sure to check back in with ourselves after being away from the rehearsal room for a long period of time. I personally felt very disconnected whilst meeting with the wider Miskin company and this session was very helpful in making me feel grounded again. I really liked getting to work on selling ourselves as even though we worked on this a lot during our ‘Self Discovery’ process, I still don’t understand much about describing my skills in the right way and talking about my previous works without it becoming my life story. It was good the get the opportunity to describe myself the way I’ve learnt to in previous processes, see which pieces of information sell me the best and relate to what type of performance I specialise in eg. When in an interview relating to Musical Theatre, make sure to highlight your strengths and experience in musicals and that genre. At the start of the session, I only touched on my previous experience in film, theatre and other aspects of the industry but I became more aware of how important it is to talk about your previous processes in depth without going too far into the explanation and it becomes boring, and I ended up with a great speech about the different projects I’ve worked on during my training and some of the job roles I’ve got to try out outside of acting. I found this exercise really helpful because I find it very easy to discuss speeches and any questions that are thrown at me when we are practising audition and interview technique, but I’ve struggled being able to find the right tools to sell myself in the right way and talk about me in a way that is intriguing for the panel, but also something I can be enthusiastic about when discussing.
I also tapped back into my physical development this week as we started to get back into our bodies and learn some new techniques for warming up during this process. This week we started off by looking at some Grotowski methods that we could try out, and our main focus was conditioning and strengthening certain parts of the body through the imagination. We each chose something that we felt needed work since coming back, and I chose the legs as I used to be quite flexible but I seem to have lost that recently and I want to use this time to get that back before potentially going to drama school. After this, I had to decide on a warm up method that is used to strengthen the legs and use my imagination to turn that method into more of a “scenario” we can immerse ourselves in. I picked squats and I immediately thought that using the toilet would be a good idea for this, and I enjoyed taking the company through a story which I personally found helped to take my mind off the burning whilst mid squat. Looking back, I could’ve worked harder to make it more exciting and unique and I have been developing more ideas for this exercise if we were to try it again. Although mine wasn’t as successful as I hoped, I really enjoyed taking part in what the other actors had prepared, especially Chloe’s apple - bobbing themed press ups. I felt very immersed in her scenario and even though press ups are a weakness of mine, I forgot about the pain in holding myself up as I was trying to grab the apples below and discard them quick enough to go again. I found it a lot of fun and there is potential for that to be used with different themes, and for it to become a competition between actors. It was difficult getting back into the physical aspects of our process and I know it’s going to take me more than one session for me to get back into this mindset, but I’m very happy with the strong start I’ve made and I know with this mindset, I’ll be able to achieve the goals I want to very easily during this process.
One of the big components of this project is working as a company to decide on the play that’s right for us and we’ve had some good ideas put on the table so far. We decided that we’ve done lots of work in children’s theatre and pantomime since our training began, so we wanted to experiment with something more dramatic and a more serious topic. It’s all about trial and error, so we want to gather as many plays as possible that are suitable for us and our cast size and play around with them to see what we can create. This week myself and Chloe looked at Nothing by Lulu Raczka, a play that is based around a range of monologues by characters with different lifestyles and stories, and we decided to split the first monologue in the show so it was read line by line. The play indicates that any amount of actors can be part of the show and an actor can cut in to start their monologue at any time, and when reading it I thought we could do all sorts with these speeches, whether we keep it naturalistic or go heavy on the physicality. We decided to play with it by having Chloe perform it more naturalistic and intimate, as if the piece were on camera, and I physicalised all of my lines in the monologue so there was a contrast between us, and it highlighted that there are many ways you can take these ideas. I definitely think we should choose a play that gives us lots of freedom with stylistic choices and it’s open to interpretation, and by combining different styles and genres and in a play like this, it’s the perfect opportunity to showcase everyone’s strengths and versatility if we invite any agents to our performances.
I’m really happy with the strong start we’ve made in this process, and I’m feeling optimistic about the plays everyone is suggesting. I was very worried it would be difficult to find a challenging play whilst including our cast size, budget and the amount of male actors inside the company, but every actor is giving really strong recommendations and I can’t wait to read more of them and get them on their feet next week!
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