blog 4

The first week of rehearsals with my partner, Aaron, went pretty well in my opinion.  We met at school on Friday during when class would be, and decided to rehearse our lines.  We started off with just us sitting down, reading our lines.  After that, we then tried reading our lines while standing up and using some body language.  after we got that down, we decided to try to follow the acting cues that went along with our dialogue.  Aaron has more of these than I do, I don’t recall if I even have any at all.  But Aaron had cues telling him to walk over to a table, grab a box of their father’s ashes, and to then sit down with the box of the father’s ashes.  We had to imagine a scene that we were walking into, and we had to make sure that we both were visualizing the same scene.  We were under the impression that someone would have to read jo’s lines, whose lines are always in parenthesis.  We  recently learned that that means that JO will not be having any lines in our final performance of this scene for the class.  But before we would take turns reading JO’s lines so that it would be easier for whoever had the next line, as well as imitating the sound of a car exploding.  As we progressed, we found ourselves not needing to look at our lines as much anymore, but we still have yet to have a clean rehearsal where we have recited each and every one of our lines from straight memory.  One of the hardest lines for me, is a paragraph at the end of our scene.  During our rehearsals, when we would reach that line, I would just say “Big paragraph about how we’re gonna get through this,” just to save some time.  I plan to memorize it on my own time, but during our more recent rehearsals, I have been reading off the entire paragraph as we get closer to our deadline.  Aaron likes to add certain words to his lines so that it feels more natural for him.  His character has some curse words in his script, and Aaron adds a few more into other lines to help it flow.  I have one particular line where I feel could use a curse word in it, but since my character does not have any curse words written into his script, I don’t want to be out-of-character by using even once since swearing doesn’t seem to be his style.  But all in all, I think we’ll be ready when the time comes to do a good performance.