wahh.

Finally got around to blogging and I'm sorry it's been so late. So its been an incredibily busy week and right now I feel rather shattered.
Last week we stayed behind on wednesday afternoon to do finish up our work on a Dolls House. Mr Fearnehough taught us some new exercises to help us with our rehearsals. The first was were we had to stand both facing forward and say our lines, line after line, we weren't allowed to turn around and look at our partner and kind of placed in a diaganol line so we couldn't see them and give them any visual ques. I didn't find this hard as I know my lines pretty well, however I can see how useful it is as sometimes instead of learning lines and using them as ques we learn another persons actions. We also did some Boal exercises, we used the same one that we had done in our drama tok session. We put ourselves into an exaggerated mask of our character and then acted out our scene in the mask. I took Noras superobjective of the scene being that she wants to manipulate rank and get him on side and decided to try and make my mask as flirty as possible. I have a problem with flirting being that I just can't seem to do it. I found myself breaking out of the mask quite a bit while rehearsing, I find it very difficult to ignore the cop in my head and just go for something, I worry a lot about what other people are thinking about me and how I look, I need to learn to let go a bit more and put my all into it. Another exercise we did which is popular with directors was to say the lines on our extract backwards, I found it very challenging but me and Spencer managed it, albiet going at a very slow pace and messing up a few times in the process. As well as doing some of these exercises we also continued just rehearsing using Stans system.
We performed to the english and spanish class friday morning and also had a surprise audience of the year 8s. While the rest of my group didn't find it easy to perform while having an audience sat in a different space to how we rehearsed it I didn't find it a problem as I just performed it how I had rehearsed it, using an end on theatre space. However, I did not think the performance went as well as it could have or should have. I know I set myself quite high standards to judge myself against but even taking that into account I don't think it went as good as I wanted. Personally, I found I could have looked at the audience more, not get as distracted by the audience (look above them slightly instead of making eye contact and getting frazzled) and I did not put in the actions or looks that I wanted too or had rehearsed. Then in our friday drama lesson we photographed both the pieces to make a storyboard of the piece and to annotate.
We performed again on Thursday lunchtime to an audience made up off our classmates and friends, this time I was less nervous with the performance and happier with the result, but still not sure that it was as good as it could have been, I think I remember the line "at least we didn't fail, thats a good place to be" which to me isn't, I need to know that I have done well. We are still waiting for feedback from the classes who came to see us, but so far people have only made positive comments.
Recently I have been involved back stage with the local pantomine, me and Demi have been doing the make up for dancers and also helped with the hair and wig changes. It was nice to be involved back stage in a performance and was great to see how everything happened. But the experience has tired me out greatly as I don't cope so well with late nights.
Because I don't like to have a social life or any free time I also decided to go and watch Bloody Mess on tuesday. And I am so glad I did, it was one of the best experiences of my life. I have lots and lots of notes written down on it but still am not fully sure of what I saw, so I think it is deserving of a later post purely dedicated to it.
In our class time we have started reading part of Tim Etchers book, and annotating it, we are going to continue that this week and also start writing a list of Forced Entertainments conventions as we plan on doing a devised piece based off it.
We performed again today at lunch time and I think it was a bit of a disaster. Spencer had forgotten his costume today so had to perform in clothes we found in the drama room , I've lost my stocking and feel so shattered that I knew I did not give the performance my all. We perfomed to some year 10s, Mr Fearnehough and my sister and her gang. it was nice to have some Stanley support there and bless her she still said it went well despite my effort.

Georgia Stanley