Remember: The role of the audience is described to be a social participant. Whether people believe it or not, the audience actually contribute to playing a big part at a production. This is due to them and their opinions coming into full effect once they walk in. Without an audience there’s no show; if the audience didn’t show up, the actors wouldn’t be able to perform as they have nobody to watch their performance.

We were given the opportunity to use the rosters and pick anything we wanted to make with them. My group and I chose to make a train to demonstrate what most of us go through every morning in this city of London. I thought the train would’ve actually worked well for Love and Information because when we would run a couple of the scenes, we didn’t think of using this idea, we mostly sat on chairs or stood up during the scenes. This would’ve been a different and amazing addition overall.

The task we were set to do in this photo was to take a selfie of ourselves. We were given 10 seconds to find a space around the theatre, and when Lee got to 1, we had to pose and take a selfie. The purpose of this task was so we could be more familiar with the characters, and to showcase the general obsession and use of technology nowadays.

#MySelfie

An idea that came into my mind while Jeanette, Milan, Ally and I were leading was exaggeration vs non-exaggeration for ‘God’s Voice’. We implemented that by instructing the rest of the class to write down silly lies they believed when they were children for e.g. if you kiss a boy you’ll get pregnant. The next task was to get into pairs and act out what they wrote down (first exaggerated then non-exaggerated version). The three scenes we picked were God’s Voice, Mother, and Terminal. Additionally, everybody got onto their feet and acted out the scene (God’s Voice) and showed everybody what they came up with.

I believe we made good use of the lighting because it contributed to everyone’s performance and completes the atmosphere and creates emotion for the audience. On the other hand, the fact that this scene is based around religion and the spotlight is directly shining on Lia as she explains her experience and communication with God, really works well. The style of acting that I think would be perfect is naturalism. To support this idea, we spoke about including props to make the scenes more realistic and to enable the characters to tap into their roles more easily along with tapping into the scene.

In this session, we mainly focused on freeze frames and trying to convey a story without dialogue but with mostly body language and body levels. In the photo below, we were asked to stand on the black rosters and pretend we were in rival gangs or cliques to depict real scenarios in order to build familiarity. We needed to be familiar with real life situations and put ourselves in other people’s shoes to complete this exercise. In continuation, we then proceeded to fight in slow motion, resulting in Lia dying (fake) caused by me shooting her in slow motion.

As I mentioned previously, I picked to specialise in both performance and costume which are both very important. My role in costume was to plan out and come up with ideas on what each character would be wearing depending on what the scene was and what location we pictured, as well as what colours they would be wearing. During the ending of week 3 (Friday), Lia, Jess, Chloe and Morgan led the session where they picked out three scenes for the rest of the class to work on; Fired, Dream, and Schizo. Our aim was to stage these scenes and get into roles while using huge props such as; tables (as desks in an office).

While exploring this play in more depth, we undertook tasks in which we were assigned partners and had to research them via social media; our task was to then write down anything about our findings. This task was relevant because prior to this, we had discussed the role of technology and social media as well as protecting certain pieces of information. During the rehearsal process, I decided to specialise in performance and costume because I felt it would’ve been a fascinating experience to play around with some of the scenes especially ‘Fan’ which I practised with Maya. It was a fun and fast paced scene and I honestly enjoyed changing my voice and using more body movements even while sitting down on a chair. This scene revolves around two characters who are obsessing over a “him” and are competing with each other to see who knows “him” more. Our peers were very supportive and gave us helpful  feedback on how we could make the scene more effective and to over exaggerate the ‘fan girl’ stereotype by delivering eager movement and changes in our voices.

Nevertheless, Maya and I still managed to showcase the naturalistic style despite our advised exaggeration. The behaviour we acted out was a normal and common type of behaviour as there are people who act like this especially when discussing a celebrity or a public figure that they love.

At the beginning of this module, we were alerted that we were going to be studying Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information. This play is split into 8 acts which all contain 7 scenes apart from the last act which contains 8 scenes. These scenes cover different relatable topics as well as different natures of conversations and relationships in this complicated world we live in. I find Love and Information interesting because the communication that has been displayed is super sped up and tends to explore political views in society, as well as topics we maybe haven’t even thought about or even been sceptical to discuss. Furthermore, I have never come across a play like this; some may say that Churchill’s writing (especially in this play) is simple but poetic which is very accurate, and I think that’s what makes her writing style totally unique and different from other writers. The scenes don’t tend to be in continuation with one another, they are random and have different titles to highlight the different genres that are included. As a class and theatre company, we have read the scenes together and have physically performed them in class to experiment and to identify what works best for us.

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