Our first full readthrough!

To finish a demanding but exciting week where we found out our castings and started devising some stories, we had a full readthrough of each scene, making each moment and character as physical as possible to give us possible ideas for devising next week. It was the first opportunity we got to work with the majority of characters and experiment with how exaggerated you can make them, whilst being true to what's happening inside the scene. I want to try and make all of my characters polar opposites of each other, and after receiving my lines I would like to go away and fully understand the intentions inside each story and create a backstory and a character profile so i can understand more about their place inside the scene as well as my interpretation of them. I also find music really helpful for learning more about a character, so I want to find a few songs they relate to or maybe create a playlist for each role I have in the play to start understanding what they're saying on the page, but also feeling each character in my body to create a strong physicality and voice.

One of the scenes I enjoyed working on the most was Untitled (100 Words). I've been given the role of the Tour Guide and this story contains the most dialogue I have in the play, most of which are large paragraphs with quite complex words, but I wanted to experiment with my voice for this one, as I felt this character would speak with a heightened RP accent as she gives me the impression of someone who has been brought up around expensive art and theatre, maybe a regular museum trip and either of her parents or maybe both were artists or some kind. I understand that she was born into a very privileged family who always had a passion for art which has led to her wanting to go into the industry further. She's a very theatrical and dramatic person and she has taken this job as a tour guide to express her passion but potentially become an artist herself in the future. She is particularly interested in Anne's piece of work as she sees it as a form of theatre rather than just another old work of art, she believes there is much potential inside of what Anne has created and will argue her point until they hear it loud and clear, she won't take no for an answer. I've enjoyed starting to create a brief for each of my characters and taking how they're being portrayed in the play but putting my own twist on it and experimenting with different methods to decide which path I want to take this character down. However, it took some time for me to get my head around some pieces of the text in this scene, and I've struggled with getting the words round my mouth and I speak too fast to enunciate and project. I've realised that I need to take a moment to digest a difficult word or piece of text and work on getting the words out properly, it's more important that I understand the text and what's happening in the scene and if we were to do another readthrough, I would like to take my time when approaching any difficult dialogue so I can get my head around the words, and once I know more about the intention I can start deciding on character choices.

A scene I really struggled to grasp during our first readthrough was The Girl Next Door. Even though this is the scene we've probably looked at the most, and I really like the idea of making this story into a song as it's a big contrast to the rest of the piece and it would be great to have a sarcastic, comedic moment before something as dark and serious as The Statement. I felt quite unsure whilst performing this part of the show as the song felt very simple and as an audience member, I would've felt quite bored. To make this moment stronger, I would like us to create a strong, quirky melody for this song, maybe separate the company into two or three groups and assign different harmonies to change it up a bit. Creating a song for this story was definitely hard for me individually and as part of the company, but I know it's given me a lot of ideas to pitch in when we work on this even further.

After reading over the dialogue and putting the scene on its feet with the given circumstances, I believe that Previously Frozen should be kept in the piece but I’m glad we’ve decided to cut the controversial and unneeded dialogue inside of it. I like the idea of it rounding up the casting process and looking at how no matter what Anne does, she will never be right for this role, or any role for that matter. I like how we’re including the characters from the first story All Messages Deleted to make this a full circle moment and the perfect conclusion for our piece, and ending it with the line about her missing many articles perfectly sums up Anne’s character and I think the idea of Anne being mocked by those who think they know her best after a moment that brings everyone together like Porno shows that even though progress has been made, there will always be something to tear everyone apart again, and Anne cannot win.

Overall, I thought our first full readthrough of the piece was successful and I enjoyed trialling different character ideas. It makes me really excited about starting to devise and see how far we can go with the ideas we’ve produced during our first look!