Audition Workshop 8th January

In this lesson we continued the audition process, we began the workshop by doing a warm up where we had to change our levels of tension as we were walking around the room, This then linked to 'The Wonderful World of Dissocia' as during the play it begin off quite funny then moves to anger with high tension, then finishing with a serious, sad tone to the play.

We were then given the task of creating three seperet scenes, each with the theme of Funny, Anger and Sadness. In terms of what was in the scene we were given a vague story lines. For example my groups comeical scene we were given the storyline of a man in an office on his first day at a new job, and were given possible characters that may be in the scene. For our scene we came up with the storyline that my character of the man at his first day at a new job, went to the wrong office, This office then turned out to be a striper agency. My character then became confused with what his job role was with the office and everything went wrong. To make it comical we used over animated characters and loud voices. I think that i used good comic timing and used suspence to create an effective comical performance

The second scene was to carry an angry tone, our story line was to be at a football match. I played the part of the commentator and a hot dog sales man. In this scene my character got very angry with the customers, as they would not buy from him and they kept messing him around. To show my characters anger I used big body language, and used a low pitch to my voice and really projected it with a fast pace. This then raised the levels of tension as the scene went on, until it came to the end where it exploded.

The final scene that we had to do was a very serious sad scene, this was a huge contrast to the other two scenes, and i found it very hard to get into this mind set, so that my character could come across as emotional. Our scene was set at grave side, i played the character of a widowed husband, i was sat by the grave at the start then my daughter came in. As i played a father figure i could not make it clear that my character was upset by just crying, as i was to be there for my daughter, so to show that my character was sad I had to use the tone in my voice to tell the audience that i was grieving i spoke with a soft voice with a high pitch. I feel that this brought my character across as sad, yet still remaining control to support others.

After had devised these three scenes we had to put them together to make a full play, and showing a complete story line and a clear character(s) for the audience to follow. To do this we had to come up with little scenes to put between the scenes that would explain the story and how each scene leads to one another. One of the main changes that we made was with the football scene, was setting it during the 1964 Hillsborough accident. We did this by using physical theatre to show the character of Jess getting crushed, this then led into the the grave scene where Jess' husband is by her grave and talking about his regrets.

I really enjoyed this workshop as it was good to explore the different themes running through the play and coming up with new techniques, before going into the play with our characters.