Ok well this was almost a week ago that we had this class but i’m sure i’ll be able to remember what happened.

Well last week Glenn started us on a method similar to that of stanislavski’s method of breakign down a text so that it could be understood on all its levels; those being pyhsical, emothional and the other one i can’t remember what its called but i’m sure i will get it in the next week or so.  We were continuing on this line of work to further establish our understanding of the charaters and scene in further depth.

Firstly we split up into partners and briefly re-familiarised ourselves with the scene before choosing one of the characters from the same scene as last week; so mark, lulu and robbie.  Once we had adopted a character we asked each other questions, i was a little confused at this because i was unsure if we were directing our questions which furthered the information in the script or just questions compeltly off the bat.  Thinkign about this now i don’t believe it makes a difference but a combination of both would work best.  Thee idea of this was to really get into the head space of the character, havign an idea about them, their history, what their like etc and enable the actor to draw on this depth to perform better as that character with greater understanding i guess.  After around 15 minutes of this duel question time Glenn (my tutor) asked us to reassemble as a group explainign the purpose of the excercise as i have above, we were then asked to form groups of four and each of use was to be at one stage questioned byt he rest of the group (like a hot seat).  This again brought out more questions except this time from a far braoder range of areas due to the addition of two extra groups members.  After i think 20 or 25 minutes we were again stopped and convenied as a group and to finish off the process we did a whole group question time with one person in the hot seat, due to time constraits only two members of the groups got the chance to do so but without these contraints in a real rehearsel i guess that would have been udnertaken.

I choose to do Robbie as my characterand as this post is concerened with the process and not information gained i won’t bother goign itno the details of what i discovered.  In general terms the types fo questions asked generally revolved in some way aorund the scene.  So questions like when did you first try heroine, what was it like, what is your posistion in the house hold, what sexual services do you perform, what are you goign to do after makr leaves, do you think your a good person, why, do you think you will get bakc on the junk when your clean, why don’t you want mark to get clean and many many more.

After this we broke back up into our groups from the previous week (i was with Bec and Jules) and were asked to block about a third of the scene, once we had blocked the scene and knew what we were doing we were then told to chuck away our script and walk through the scene narrating our own actions, for example, who are we looking at, where am i moving to, how am i moving, how am i positioned, how am i holding myself etc.  I believe th first few things that i said went somethign like this ‘i am sitting hunched over looking at mark, i get up slowly and slowly stumble left to pick up something and then shuffle slowly over to the right and throw a towel over the pile of spew.’  All of the group would be doing this at the same time talkign voer each other is action was takign place at the same time and also moving through the actions.  The purpose of this excercise was to instill in the actor a sense of knowing completley what was takign place in that scene and although we only had a short time to do and practise this i am sure i could pick up the script now and go through the same motions i had on Thursday.

The class finished with us recieving another script 4.48 psychosis a play written by Sarah Kane which has no characters in it what so ever which lends itself extremely well to having as many or as little people in the show as desired.  As of now i can’t really say what the play is about in any depth so i will read it a few times again before posting some comments but as far as its purpose Glenn is hoping to use this script as a gateway between our scenes that we are going to present for our major scene study for the deakin show case week or whatever its called.  I guess thats pretty much it for now.