As we are self directing the play, I wanted to make sure that the movements created were constantly bringing the true meaning of the subtext forward. This is because the language that Berkoff uses is very poetic, and although is very interesting - we want the audience to understand the feelings of the characters, if not by vocal, by actions.
We started to play around with the idea that if Ciara (suppressive emotion) starts behind the confident being, it shows that the knowledge of this man observing the woman brings out the shyness, so we started by allowing Ciara to lunge out behind me showing this. As we do not make contact with the boys until the second page, we decided it would be best to create the movements as two separate duality pieces. Therefore the boys choreographed movement that suited them, and me and Ciara did the same. This allowed us to focus on our emotions and reactions rather than bouncing of the boys actions.
For most of the first page we stay sat on the bench, this shows how we feel the man should be the one to initiate the conversation. This is supported by when Ciara pushes my face after I say 'turn around' as she's telling me to be patient. This makes it clear to the audience that the feeling between both man and woman of wanting to talk is mutual and produces slight humour as the shy sides of each character restricts progression of interaction.
On 'poor beast' Ciara slaps the top of my head. This can show how I am beating myself up in the head about what he actually is. This also presents very clearly to the audience within the first page that me and Ciara are very conflicting emotions of the same person.
On 'he wants to' - I walk my fingers along Ciara's leg to show want the sexualised thoughts the woman is having. Ciara then cuts of this thought by lifting my hand and putting it over my mouth and saying 'talk', creating humour as the cut of is clearly the battle of the characteristics and their thoughts of what the man should be thinking. It also sets a tone for the play because there are a lot of sexual innuendo's from both male and female character, hinting at the sexual thoughts from the beginning makes the final result later on in the play not seem to unrealistic to the audience if their thoughts were fairly sexual from the beginning.
The stage direction said 'woman moves as if to leave', so me and Ciara wanted to create a bit of movement that showed duality and battling emotions. We stand up irritated on 'dumbstruck' and start walking on 'dead'. I run in front of Ciara as if to stop her, I then pull her in, as if I am trying to push her back into myself, but instead she weaves around me, but I still have control on her arm and therefore try to pull her back but she is also pulling. By this time the boys utterance should have finished in time for Ciara to say 'too late too late' and then as the more dominate characteristic, I pull Ciara back as we walk underneath are arms and finish where we started. This is definitely more visually interesting to watch as we do not get up from the bench until this point, it shows how active both thoughts of both woman and man are upon their first meeting. By ending up in the same position before walking away, it shows how it was only the shy thought taking over wanting to leave the situation but that the dominate characteristic won and managed to stay standing before moving on in the script.
For the rest of the lesson, we went over the movement separately until they were very slick, before joining them together and making sure it all fitted. We thought that it was a good start as the movement from me and Ciara prevented the performance from becoming static, and wasn't making the performance look messy which was our only fear.
We will continue to work on the script once we have completed some more workshops that will help provide idea's and give motivation and inspiration for what we can do in our performance and keep it at the strong standard we started it at.
No comments:
Post a Comment