In Mike’s lesson we did several breathing exercises to help us with our articulation and diction. Articulation is the clarity in the way we say something, so if I’m saying ‘that’ whilst using a nasal resonator it won’t sound clear, and to make it sound clear I’d need to change the wording and the way I say it to ‘vat’ which would make it seem as if I’m saying ‘that’. Doing that clashes with diction however, diction is to know, and use the correct pronunciation of a word, so me saying ‘vat’ instead of ‘that’ is not correct diction but the correct articulation if used with a nasal resonator. We worked on multiple exercises, to help us improve our articulation, and diction, one of them being the siren exercise which also helps us distinguish the resonators we’re supposed, and meant to be using, a really good exercise we did was tongue twisters, tongue twisters help us improve our articulation, diction, and delivery of words, and how they are meant to be pronounced. A couple examples of tongue twisters we did are; Betty bought butter, but the butter was bitter so Betty had to buy more butter to make the bitter butter better, (something like that) and A big black bug, bit a big black bear, and the big black bear bled black blood. Finally our final exercise was a physical one as well, it involved us being in a tennis ball throwing position, and whenever we delivered the word ‘HEY’ we had to project so that the entire theatre heard us, every time we did so we would extend our arms outwards and throw out the word as if it were a tennis ball.

This week we didn’t learn any key techniques, however we improved our work with the techniques we already knew.
we improved the starting scenes from Grimm Tales, we started to think more in-depth on how the play way written, and how the audience would perceive it, so it’s got a more cartoony feel about it so we decided that we’d make our gestures really big and over exaggerate everything about our characters so they are more comedic and funnier for the audience. Further more, we improved the ‘goat’ character by, instead of walking on all fours, we made it so the goat only had to walk on two. We also gave a more comedic scene to the goat where, when the goat is hungry and goes out to ‘graze’ the goat goes right up to the audience/camera and starts nibbling at them. To improve everything this way we used magic if, to analyse the play and the characters and give them a deeper characteristic that could improve our performance in a whole.

magic if, is the technique of imagination, it allows us to enter a world that doesn’t exist in the play, or we weren’t informed about so we can get a more in-depth analysis on our characters.

we also used given circumstances to read through the play and point out the facts given about our characters, so we could potentially use that to our advantage and make our play more comedic; for example, the opening line of the play, father says “once there was a tailor who had three sons and one goat” the given circumstances here are that the father is a tailor, has three sons, and has one goat. We used this with a pause at, three sons, [pause] and one goat. This made the scene seem comedic because at first the goat thought that it was one of the sons but then is moody when it turns out to be a goat.

with Olexandra we did a couple, and by a couple I mean many breathing/diction/projection vocal exercises, we got a sheet that had several exercises for us to try out, we did them all and recorded ourselves doing them and we got given a homework task to do them at home too.

I will add the videos of myself doing these exercises at a later date

We started week five like every other week, with a warmup to get us through the week. And since it was the last week before half term everyone was happy and anxious to get the week over and done with.

with Mike, we decided to put our fairy tale inspired performances aside and work on an actual performance. We got separated into 2 groups, one group got Hansel & Gretel and the other group [us] got Grimm tales. So we read through the script learning about it and familiarising ourself with the characters, I was quite happy, because I got to play the villain, and I love being the villain. We familiarised ourselves with the script/play and the characters all that we had to do now was start performing.

with Richard we started the same way as we always do.. in semi supine, warming up our vocals and resonators although we also had to do a few staring exercises with Jess just so that she learns or names and familiarises with us. Moving on from the warmups Richard told us a story about a old man who woke up one day and had no breakfast and was very hungry, he went out to fish, and ended up fishing a magical fish, this magical fish claimed that in exchange for his life he’d give the old man more riches than he could ever imagine. The old man free’d the fish and I’m the water he saw a gold chain, he pulled and pulled but it was all to heavy for the boat to stay a-lift and then the boat sunk and the old man drowned, and greed was his sin, and his demise. We had to act out this story and in my personal opinion we did very well we acted it out and told the story, we used a lot of physical theatre to showcase the house, the water, the gold chain, etc.. and in the end the whole point of that exercise was for us to think about how we could act out our plays (Hansel &Gretel, Grimm tales) and it really helped we’re now using a more physical theatre approach and its going very well, we also went through the given circumstances In our scripts highlighting them. Later on in a different lesson Jess taught us about actions, and then we had to also identify the actions in our scripts we understood the gist of it eventually but we struggled at first.

with Olexandra we didn’t do anything special we just went through our music scripts, different stage types, and performing skills as well as work skills that can help our everyday lives. Apart from that we just got a bunch of homework to do which has and will stress everyone out.

I started week four off strong, by performing my Shakespearean monologue from ‘Othello’ My monologue was Iago’s on act 1 page 13. I feel like I could have done much better but at the same time I feel like I did better than I was supposed to.

With Mike, we further explored fairy tales we worked on our own fairy tale-like performances, my group didn’t do much considering we finished everything ahead of time, we had our scripts, we had our characters, and we had our scenes so we didn’t have anything to do.

with Richard, we continued working with the Meisner technique and developing it. Richard was training a woman called Jess to be a teacher, and she didn’t know us or our names so we did a couple of introduction exercises so she got to know us a bit better.

with Olexandra we got told about the units once again, and we rehearsed Hit the road Jack, Hallelujah, and believe.

During week three we followed the same routine that we always follow, start the day with a warmup to get us ready for the day so our bodies and voices are nice and healthy. After these warmups we usually start our lessons with Richard and Olexandra in semi supine, semi supine is a position of lying down on your back with your knees up and palms also facing upwards, with your body totally and completely relaxed. We du this to warmup our voice box and resonators. Resonators are the vibration that is caused in either your chest, throat, nasal, and even head, our voice passes through this vibration and is changed, to be low, or really high. During Olexandra’s lesson we rehearsed; hit the road jack, hallelujah, and believe. We had a look at our knowledge of different stage types and directions. We also had a quick look at the units we have to go through and what is expected of us. With Mike we did some stuff on fairy talas, storytelling and Greek mythology, we did this because we had to make our own little play with has the tropes of a fairy tale, and all in all I think I did pretty well, I wrote the script for my group’s play with their help, and as a collective we made all the actions, for scene 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, & 6. I thought I did particularly well on this considering I dwelled in fairy tales for a couple of years and heavily enjoy it. And finally with Richard we like always start the workshop with vocal and pulse raising exercises, we do dis to get us ready for drama school because they will likely make us do some of these activities to see if we’re giving it our all, and not holding off on them. After our warmups, we practised more techniques, for example the Meisner technique, this is when two people sit in front of each other and all that exists in that space and time is the two of them, one of them will point something out about them and the other will repeat, for example; your fidgeting, I’m fidgeting, your fidgeting, I’m fidgeting. This technique is useful because it helps us with learning our monologues better and being more confident in performing in front of people. We also did another technique which was to disband our diisbelief, basically we had a pencil and we had to imagine it was the most beloved person to us, we made a backstory with them, fell in love and at the end we could chose to snap the pencil, killing this imaginary person, or let it be unable to snap it. I instantly snapped it because, me myself are a very destructive being and I’m also quite synicall which means I don’t believe in the kind of stuff which it’s exactly why it’s a good exercise for me.

i wasn’t in during week two, due to covid-19 i was self isolating.

Richard taught us some techniques like; magic if, magic if is a technique developed by Stanislavsky, this technique is all about imagination and the way magic if is used is by asking yourself ‘what if?’ this allows you to think deeper about your character and about other characters and their relationship or how the play, plays out. Given circumstances is the act of reading around the play to find the ‘facts given’ so and example that we’d look for would be; how old is the character? oh here on page 4 line 73 it says they are 65 years old now that we know that and were not guessing stuff about characters or set/scenario, its the facts that we’ve been given and not the things we have guessed, it needs to be in the script to be a ‘given circumstances’. these techniques can benefit me as an actor because by knowing them I can improve my characters and add so much more creativity and flavor to them and just make them so much more interesting, to catch the audience of guard.

Konstantin Stanislavsky developed most of these techniques but also developed the ‘system’ for method acting, which was developed by practitioners like, Lee Strasburg, Stella Adler. Lee Strasburg created the ‘method’ after Stanislavsky created the system, inspired by curiosity, both Stanislavsky and Lee went into the profession of teaching, to teach young actors about their discoveries. Stella Adler developed “her own method”, built on the studies and discoveries of Stan & Lee. this wasn’t a hard task for her since she is the ‘only american actor who studied with Stanislavsky’. Stella Adler, and her techniques and her ‘unique method’ are all about imagination, techniques like ‘magic if’ are big on her method. She created a technique/exercise where you pour every ounce of imagination you can into one little object, you create a character/person out of the little object and your imagination , you create a backstory with this person get attached have good memories, and in the end you could choose to break and kill them, and if you kill/break them depending on how you feel and what emotion you felt at that exact moment the technique/exercise was perfect.

We worked on our voices during our music lesson with Olexandra, a fair amount. We researched and worked on our voice box’s, and our ‘voice print’. Voice print is the equivalent of our fingerprints but for our voices, it means that everyone has their own unique voice and no one else has the same exact voice as someone else. we also studied our voice box’s, and learnt that as we grow older our voice changes due to the Adams apple in our voice box, because when we’re children our Adams apple is smaller, our voice’s are higher pitched than when we are adults because our Adams apple grows and as it does our voices get lower, women don’t have such a big Adams apple so their voices are higher than men’s voices.