Shakespeare Rehearsal Period

Rehearsing Shakespeare:

Week 1:

In the first week of being introduced to Shakespeare, we headed up to London to see Julius Caesar performed by professional actors at The Globe Theatre. This experiance was great as it is quite a change from sitting down and watching a musical or play. i was dreading standing up for hours watching a play I didn't think I was going to understand. I thought it was going to be bone dry and I was going to have to work really hard to understand what the actors were saying. The characters and the play got my attention straight away by starting the play off with some of the actors joining in with the crowd and letting us become part of the show. It was really well staged and I had a lot of fun feeling as if I was in the show. Before the show we got to take part in a workshop which allowed us to take some of the text and add different techniques into it. Some of which we did was adding an action with a specific word. We did this in pairs and watched how it effected the way we accented some of the words. We were introduced to the iambic pentameter which is something to help create a rhythm in the text. It usually shows and emphasis on every other line and usually has 10 symbols in each line.



Week 2:

This we looked at starting to experiment with pieces of text. We looked at a speech from the movie Annoyomus called "O for a muse of fire". We were asked to work together as a group and think about how we were going to stage it and deliever the piece. One thing that didn't go to plan was every one had really good ideas and tended to want to do what they wanted, we have a lot of good leaders in our group and so it didn't work at first when everyone wanted to rush in with there ideas. I see some good points in this because it showed that a lot of us were interested in trying out what we thought might work well. In the end we decided we'd each suggest an idea if we had one, try it out and if we didn't fond well over it we would move to the next suggestion. I think I worked well in this situation because I see myself as a peace keeper and therefore some of my suggestions were put across maturely and therefore received a lot better. An idea I had was to express it using different tones in our voice and mixing up the tone so it wasn't just all on one level. Adam stepped in an tried an exercise where we had to perform it as if we were drunk. This was really interesting because it added different levels and emotion. It added a type of energy that was a bit different too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue2bUpz_uRw

Week 3:

This week we were finally put into groups. I was given the part of Caska along side Shelby playing Cassius. So I started learning about Caska and trying to understand what he was saying in the scene. Later on Shelby was leaving us, and Imogen offered to stand in and be Cassius. It wasn't until quite late on in the rehearsal period that we realised that I didn't have a lot to say and Imogen had another character and therefore we switched and I became Cassius. I was excited about being able to do more, but I was also anxious about learning the lines because I'm not a confident line learner but I knew I would give it my best shot. The only downside was that I had already started on the character of Caska and felt like I had lost time. I didn't get to perform with everyone else last term because I was ill. Over Christmas I started to look into the character of Cassius a bit more, he seems to be quite a manipulative and controlling character. I think because I am performing her as a girl I am going to base her on a modern day character from Sons of Anarchy "Miss Stark". This is because she is always out for her own gain and I feel that Cassius is doing this too. Due being ill I never got to block the character for Cassius, or rehearse for the character. I did however get an insight into the setting. They are outside and it is thunder storming.