Blog 8

8.) Evaluate your performance in your first scene. Were you happy with your performance and the audience reaction? How well do you think you created a physical performance for your character? How well did you and your partner work together? How successful do you think you were about establishing clear tactics for your character? What would you do to improve your performance? What did you learn that you will apply to later assignments?

Overall I feel my performance was done pretty well, but there were some parts that I would change about it if I could. About halfway through our scene, Aaron’s character insults mine, by saying, “Why does everything you say sound like it crept out of your ass covered in cellophane?”  Some of the audience found this remark amusing, as I had when we first read the script weeks ago.  Hearing other people find it funny though weeks later kind of threw me off, and I sort of laughed at the joke too, before saying my next line.  I’m not sure how noticeable it was, as I did try to blend it into my next line.  Honestly, I’m still not sure how Marty was supposed to react to that comment in hindsight.  The chair we used in our performance was on wheels, while the chairs we rehearsed with did not.  This was a miniscule problem, only when I shoot up out of my seat when I see Aaron holding the box of ashes and is about to dump them. The chair kinda rolled out from under me and I may have lost my balance a bit.  I think I created a pretty good physical performance of my character.  I was experiencing a pretty bad day on the day of our performance, but Marty is also having a pretty bad day, too.  I think already being pretty angry ahead of time made it easier to be angry in character, I was already comfortable wearing a frown and screaming when the lines called for it.  Aaron and I worked together pretty well, I’d say.  I think we got along pretty well, even if our characters didn’t.  I feel I was relatively successful displaying tactics for my character. I managed to change my tone throughout the play through sarcastic, angry, and apologetic.  To improve the performance, I would probably have spent more time on my last big paragraph I had at the end of our scene.  I had spent enough time on it to memorize the lines, but I feel I could have spent more time deciding on how to deliver the lines.  I learned to expect audience reactions and to not let them distract you from your performance.  I also learned to spend more time on perfecting delivery, even if perfection is a cruel mistress.

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7.) How are your rehearsals going with your partner? What has successful has your collaboration been? What have you done to contribute to the success or failure of your collaboration?

Overall I would say that our rehearsals have went quite well.  I truly feel that Aaron and I are going to be able to give a good performance.  Collaborating with other students was actually very helpful.  There were certain parts of our script that I wasn’t completely sure of how to act out, and my classmates were able to help us out with those parts just by witnessing how we were doing them, and then told us how we could improve it.  Louis was particularly helpful.  For the part of our scene where Aaron takes our dad’s box of ashes and threatens to dump them out in the lobby, I never really knew how to react to that.  Mostly because I’ve never been in that situation myself.  At first, I just shot up out of my seat and shouted, “Put him down!” while Aaron stood several feet away from me.  Louis made a good point that if I really wanted those ashes, I would be trying to get those ashes from Aaron, and Aaron would be trying to keep me from getting the box of ashes as well.  It was pretty much like playing keep away when you’re a kid.  It helped that Aaron is taller than me, too.  Louis also gave Aaron some advice on maintaining eye contact with me during out scene.  I understand eye contact can be weird, I can barely hold it myself typically for more than a few seconds.  Louis said the trick to appearing to keep eye contact is to look at the bridge of my glasses.  That way, we don’t feel awkward, and to the audience, it still looks like we’re maintaining eye contact.  Witnessing other group’s presentation rehearsals was interesting, too.  It kind of made me realise how much more prepared Aaron and I were compared to everyone else we witnessed, and that we had a skit relatively shorter than most of the other groups, too.  Carlos and David’s rehearsal showed that they needed to memorize their lines better, but they did have a lot of lines in paragraphs, and a lot more of them than do Aaron and I.  Overall, I think Monday’s performances will be on point.

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6. How easy or hard has it been for you to identify objectives, tactics, and beats for your scene? What do you and your partner still need to work on for this scene?

Up until this week, I had not been identifying objectives, tactics, and beats for our scene.  The main reason for this was that I did not know what they were.  After learning during class what these are, I have found it prety interesting that virtually every scene in any media ever has this same structure supporting it all the way through.  It has been relatively easy to find the objectives for Marty and Bobby.  It seems their main goal is to spread their father’s ashes at the Burning Man festival like their father had wanted. Marty seems to be more concerned as having this as his main objective, as when Bobby gets aggravated at him and threatens to simply pour out their father’s ashes in the hotel lobby, Marty freaks out.  Marty now has a second objective which is to calm his brother down and make him be rational about what is going on in that moment instead of looking to the main goal in the future.  Marty tries to calm Bobby using calming tactics by leveling with Bobby and saying things like, “I know we don’t get along, okay? I know we’re not buddies anymore...but...we’re going to get through this as quickly and cleanly as possible, and then we can go back to pretending we don’t know each other for the rest of our lives.  Now, please, put him down, and be reasonable.”  It is unclear if these calming tactics have worked for Marty, as this is where our scene ends.  I think my scene partner and I still need to work on fully understanding these guys that we will be portraying at the end of the month.  However, given the recent exercises, I feel that we probably will be able to understand and portray these characters by the end of the month.

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5. How has the script analysis helped you prepare for your scene? How are you putting what you learned about your character and your scene to practice in your rehearsals?

The character analysis worksheet has made me think deeper about the conversation that my character, marty, and his brother, Bobby are having. For my very first line in this scene, I say to bobby, “You set the car on fire.”  Most people do not ever have to say these words to one of their relatives during their lifetime, so it really shows how unbelievable Marty feels it is that Bobby has gone and done this.  My next lines consist of, “Not even noon.  And you’re smoking Mary Jane...The completely irresponsible loser who runs to mommy whenever things get rough.”  This reveals to the audience how Bobby has managed to set our car on fire.  I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around how smoking weed in a car can light it on fire, as many people have hotboxed before, and I haven’t heard of them setting their car on fire.  However, this also reveals just how irresponsible Bobby can be, and it shows that Marty is somewhat typical in the sense that he is the more responsible brother, as he is the older brother.  Another meaningful bit of dialogue that I have is, “Dad’s dying, and you go to the movies.”  Before thi point, it has been made clear that these two re on a mission to spread their father’s ashes at a particular place.  But this line has revealed that Bobby didn’t even care to take care of his father when he was on his death bed.  Probably the most powerful back and frth that Bobby and Marty share is when Bobby says, “At least I didn’t leave him alone in a room with a gun in it,” to which my character says, “You shut up about that! God, I hate you!”  So while revealing that their father was dying of a sickness that was too unbearable for him that he decided to end his own life, it also reveals that Marty is not always as responsible as he would like to think that he is, because leaving someone alone in a room with a gun can be argued as a very irresponsible thing to do.  Using all of this has helped me to better understand Marty, and hopefully to do a good representation of him during the final performance.

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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.

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3. What about your character do you think is the most interesting? What are you most excited or concerned about portraying about your character? How can you use the physical inventory to help you develop your performance?

I think it’s pretty interesting that Cindy is the secretary for the CEO of a successful shoe company at age 25.  It seems pretty young to have made it that far in life, and is something I think she should be proud of.  Right now, at age 20, I work at a grocery store and a library, at the bottom of both jobs.  I can’t imagine working for the CEO of any successful company in just five years.  One thing that I thought was interesting when Carlos was describing this character to me, was how much she reminded me of my old assistant manager when I used to work at Payless.  For some of the questions that I didn’t quite know how to answer as Cindy, I just guessed what my assistant manager, Shannon, would have said.  I think it is kind of fascinating to see how the final product of Cindy will be made up partially of what Carlos had imagined, and partially of a former assistant manager that I had to work with.

I think the thing that I am the most excited about portraying this character is that the character reminds me of someone who I used to know, and somehow that seems to give me a feeling that I know this character slightly more than I would without knowing someone in real life.  I think the thing that I am the most concerned about portraying this character is that I do not completely understand how to portray the voice of Cindy.  When I speak normally, It’s usually quite clear that it is a man’s voice.  I also do not want to do the generic female voice where a man just lazily talks in a high pitch.  I am hoping that I will somehow be able to find a happy medium of speaking in a slightly higher pitch than I normally do, and finding an accent that somewhat correlates with this proposed Cindy character.

Using the skills from the Physical Life Inventory to help develop my acting practice can be extremely handy as it nicely displays each side of representing a character.  A lot of these I would most likely overlook.  Reading some of the Physical Life Inventory questions reminded me of how we acted during our first silent performances in class.  I still need to focus on all of my movements when trying to play a different character.  However, I am sure with time and practice, it may just come to me more naturally than it does right now. 

blog prompt 2

How can you use the skills from your Physical Life Inventory to your acting practice? How would it help you as an actor more generally? How can you use it for a specific character?

When I was first handed the Physical Life Inventory, I figured that I would already know the answers about myself, having been myself for 20 years.  I was actually thoroughly surprised to find out that I needed to stand, walk around, and sit down and think about what I was doing to actually answer a good amount of the questions.  This especially applied to questions like the active motion questions, such as “Is your pattern of movement fluid and effortless or jerky and labored?  How obvious is the changing of gears as you accelerate or change direction?”

Applying the skills from the Physical Life Inventory to my acting practice can be very useful as it truly breaks down every single aspect of portraying a character, many of which I, and many other inexperienced actors would probably easily overlook.  I, myself, have never acted in any performances on stage, but I have seen many throughout high school as I worked backstage or lights during the performances.  Between watching the official shows with an audience, and the numerous rehearsals during tech week, I saw many of the performances several times over. I believe I saw footloose on stage a total of 11 times.   From witnessing these official performances, and numerous rehearsals, I did notice that the actors tended to be much more animated than they were when they were just at school during our classes.  Reading some of the Physical Life Inventory questions reminded me of how the actors would act during the shows.  For the time being, I really need to focus on all of my actions when attempting to portray another character, although I am sure over time, it will perhaps come to me more naturally than it does now.  

One might be able to use the Physical Life Inventory for a specific character the way we did for our performances in class on Wednesday, January 14th.  For the assignment, I had observed my sister.  I figured I had been mocking and imitating her for years just to annoy her, so I was probably somewhat decent at doing it for school purposes.  The Physical Life Inventory helped pinpoint certain aspects of how she acts that I otherwise would not have thought to have considered when portraying her.