10. March: This was the last class we had together before I went back home to Norway. We used this class to play out most of the scenes in the play even though we were only half of the class. We had all started to think about which characters we would like to play so we got to try out all the scenes with the character we wanted to play and using the rest of the class to step in as the other characters. We were all a bit fed up with people not showing up for the classes and we were a bit concerned about what to do when the strike is over and we haven’t gotten as far in the process as we wanted. We didn’t know that this would be the last class we had together before the world had to go into lockdown. When I heard about Norway locking down I was considered that this would affect my grade since the UK wasn’t at that point in the process. I talked to the schools before deciding to go back home to my family as they were concerned about all of this and wanted me home.

It didn’t go that long before everyone went into lockdown and thinking back I am really happy I went home since my airport closed the day after. When the strike was over we had our first zoom meeting with our class to discuss what we were going to do with the production when it looked like we weren’t going to be able to produce it together as we would have wanted. Before the Easter vacation we decided to come up with a suggestion to what we wanted to do with our production. We got the chance to choose between solo performance and writing a director or designer’s journal. I was already worried about all the writing assessments I had to do so it was an easy choice for me to go with the solo performance.

‘Silence is human reality; hence verbalization does not deserve the prominence granted it by a drama of activity.
Furthermore, by reducing the tempo to a slow walk of two meters per five
minutes, Ota breaks the dynamic propulsion of activity and enables the
attention to linger on seemingly trivial events, leading to a new perception of life.’

In the last couple of days I have been sat down writing all my assessments to get them delivered in time. As I finally have done with all of them I can start focusing on doing the one I have been most excited for. This last time has been hard for me since I do not like to write, but as the last months have gone by I have had the opportunity to start getting into writing since we have had so many written assessments because of everything happening in the world. Writing all of these assessments has gone by more easily than I would have thought but now I cant wait to get into the one I have been waiting to work with. At the start of this semester I was quite disappointed that we were not performing a play with any dialogue, but now I am really happy that I can put all my focus into my expressions and movements as I am performing a scene. In all the plays and scenes I have performed before I always had to focus on conveying the dialog as well as showing the right emotions and movements, but this time I need to convey that same message just without using any spoken word. In one way it sounds easier, but at the same time your focus needs to be put elsewhere to get that same message across to the audience without giving them any words to work with. My plan for this last week is to get all the clips done so I can start putting them together to my solo performance. Hopefully, my performance will turn out the way I want it to be, but my main goal now is to focus on conveying messages through my physical movements and be happy with the result either way.

 

The last couple of weeks we have had alot of assessments that has been due so this performance but the performance has been in the back of my mind. I have been taking into considiration that our reality is turh upside down and nobody knows how this will effect our future and how long we will be in the position we are now. I have been struggeling alot to stay motivated since I have to write all of my assessment and not being able to perform and act in the way I really would like. Acting for my has always been the form I could express my feelings, but at the same time be able to access other mindsets and step out of myself while I was performing as someone else. Not being able to use acting in my daily life as before has been hard and I have had a negative mindset towards all this the last few months. Nobody was preperad for this situation to happen, but we still need to work togheter to get through this. As I was feeling down I started to think about this play and what the water represents for all these characters. My interpratation of the water is that they see it as a hope in the difficult and challenging world we live in. Especially in this time we all need to find that hope to continue this life together even though our generation is facing the biggest epademic in decades. The characters has faced some difficults dilemmas but they are finally able to find their hope again as the see the water as the source of life. Going back into working with this performance now that all the other assessments are handed in will make it easier to focus on just this project and not having to think about every thing else.

26. April: Since the weather wasn’t ideal during the weekend, I decided to postpone the filming and start the next week. Even though I wasn’t filming the performance I managed to film some short videos of water all around Lofoten when I was out on my daily walk. My idea is to start the video with various clips of water to set the mode before the performance start. So I went on a walk with my family during the morning and even though the sun wasn’t out the weather was pretty great. Sometimes I forget the beautiful nature around my town but today  I couldn’t stop thinking about all the sounds, movements, and locations the nature surrounds.

I then started putting together the idea I wanted to convey through my performance and how I would like to make this move. Since I have already filmed a lot of nature focusing on water in different spots, shapes, and forms I would like to dedicate some of the performance to show some of the short recordings of the water.  The idea was to have the recordings of the water as an intro and maybe and outro after I have performed my performance. Thinking about all the decisions I have to make I have gone back and found inspiration in Mari Boyd’s translation of the play. This outtake from the reading about The Water Stations says something about how this original play was thought to be performed and I have chosen to stick to this in my performance.

‘The Water Station is one of the best illustrations of his dramatic theory. Against a barren landscape with a heap of shoes in the background,
travelers pass by a broken faucet dripping constantly and stop to refresh
themselves in various ways. There is no dialogue and movement, though
natural, is slowed down. Stark images of divestiture, wandering, and bare survival are presented in their unrelenting entirety.’

27. April:

Since the weather was perfect for filming the next day, and my sister sat down to discuss the costume of the girl. My original idea was a long white shirt, shorts underneath, and walking barefoot, but since we had to consider that it is still wintering outside that wouldn’t be a realistic costume. So, I found a white t-shirt, a pair of grey sweatpants, an old fleece and some black sneakers.

This costume fits the description I have of the character as a homeless girl looking for a place to belong. She is close to giving up when she finally sees the water. The water for her represents the source of life. Choosing this spot had some consequences. Filming outside when it is finally great weather is tricking since people walk and drive by and for filming these scenes, I need it to be quiet. We had to be ready to film whenever nobody was in sight and that wasn’t often. We weren’t able to film the whole thing because we both got really cold and more and more people came in the way of getting the perfect background sound. We tried out filming in different angels to find the right perspective for the film. We also had to make some decisions about how I was going to go about it since we couldn’t film the whole scene in one, so we had to divide it into fragments of the scene and put them together later. We filmed all the clips where we had to focus on the view and the location so when we film the rest of the movie to focus lays within the acting and me. Now when we go back, we are not that dependent on the weather and if people interrupt us by walking by as we are filming.

24. April

Since my phone was out of battery the day before I took my younger siblings with me for a walk to take some pictures and videos of the spot, I had found the day before. As we walked up to the spot, I got a wider perspective of how I could put the performance together. I tried to film the nature and capture the beautiful sounds and motions of the landscape. Since the play is called The Water Station, I thought it could be fascinating to put together different motives of water to push the meaning of the play a bit further. One of the views I have on the meaning of the water in this play is that it represents the source of life. My younger sister asked kindly if she could help me out with the filming as it would be quite difficult to film it all by myself. We filmed different hand motions in the water trying to find the right angle and perspective. Walking home we discussed different costumes ideas and came up with an idea for the girl. I see the character as a struggling, disturbed, and young girl freezing in the cold weather. She is so hungry and thirsty and has no place to call home. The water station for her could be her free space to relax, explore, and don’t worry about the outside world and all her problems.

When I came back home, I read through the manuscript looking for the character I thought I would best perform. My first thought was to perform as the old lady, but in the end all the ideas and how I pictured the performance in my head fitted the description of the girl. I used the Friday night writing down the movements and trying them out in my room. It was also I while since I had practiced walking in slow motion, so I put on a timer for five minutes and practiced walking a step per minute. During this last month I have been really active and working on both my stability and my core for this performance. Working on this really helped when I was going through the movements in this scene.

Since the beginning of April I had started focusing on all my other assessments and hadn’t put that much effort into thinking about the performance. My first thought was to write a new scene that would fit into the play, but I never got any feedback on that idea so I just put it aside thinking that I had to come up with something else. My original idea was to perform the woman in scene 7 since that role looked like the most challenging and difficult role to perform. When I went into this production project I had a clear picture that I would use this class to challenge myself and try something out of my comfort zone. Since we all had to go back to our home country and work alone for the most part I found it even more challenging to figure out what I was supposed to do with this solo performance. Where would I locate it, who would film it and what character could I relate to the most at this time.

23. April: I hadn’t spent so much time thinking about the performance since easter. I had just figured that I would have to perform my solo performance in a place inside my house. When I was going for my daily walk my phone suddenly stopped working an I had to walk an hour without any music. This got my thinking about solo performance. I was out of ideas for where to film the performance, which character I wanted to be, and how I would manage to make the performance when I must film and perform at the same time. I was just enjoying the view and all the sounds around me when it hit me that I could take advantage of the beautiful nature near my house. I could hear sounds of water dripping, the sounds of the birds singing, and how the wind blew through my hair. The spot I just walked by would be the perfect location to film a scene for The Water Station.

25. February:

This was the first week of the strike affecting our teaching. We had talked to the teacher about how we were going to continue to work with the play, but this was difficult since only a few classmates showed up for our class. We used the space and the few classmates who showed up to rehearse some of the scenes in the play. We started off by walking around the space and slowly moving into walking at a slower speed. We used this warm-up to focus on core exercises and included som breathing exercises towards the end of the warm-up.

After getting warmed up we started to play scene 2 with the two men and the girl and scene 3, with the woman and the parasol. I stepped in as the girl in both scenes because nobody else wanted to do something. The energy of this class has made it hard to stay motivated during this process since it is only some of us who come every time and the other ones just show up once in a while. We tried to work together to go through the scenes a few times each. We had someone read the directions for the two men as they did the scene in a normal speed a few times before we performed the scene on our own without any directions and slowly moving into a slower speed. After finishing the scene with the two men we continued to work with the woman with a parasol. This was the first time we worked with this scene so we went through all the directions and discussed the movements and emotions of the woman and how the girl related to this character. We had some disagreements on some of the directions and decided to try out the different ways we saw the performance take place. Since I had a character in mind I had never actually thought so much about the girl’s emotions in the first few scenes but has I had to step in and play the character I needed to start thinking about her feelings related to every scene. I had thought of her character as an easy part to play because she doesn’t do that much in her scenes, but through this rehearsal I started to reflect over why she was their and what the water meant to her.

18. February: This was the last class we had together before the strike. We sat down and talked deeply through every scene in the play and we all wrote down some notes that we could continue to work with during the strike. We have come so far into the process that we need to start making the big decisions about staging, directing, costumes, and which roles we would like to play. I started to think about which scene that spoke to me and after rereading the play a few times I decided that I would like to play the woman in scene 7. That scene sounds like the most challenging and fun scene to perform as they are doing a lot more than the other characters are doing. When reading the script this scene is the only one that caught my eyes from the beginning and I like to be challenged when performing.

19. February: In this rehearsal we started to discuss how we wanted to put on this performance. Since most of the class never shows up to rehearsals it has been hard getting things done since we haven’t divided the roles in the play and outside of the play. The few of us that showed up for this rehearsal decided that we had to look at the performance piece and try to figure out how we could work with it with only a few persons. We made a document together were everyone could write in what character they would like to play and what role you would contribute with in the production. We then started thinking about how we could cut the performance and which characters could be combined with other characters since we are so few people showing up. The system we made was pretty good and we came up with a solution to the problem of being too few.

11. February: In this week’s class, I came an hour late since I woke up with a migraine and tried to get rid of it before coming to class. When I came the rest of the class was walking around getting different directions from the teacher, so I just join what they were doing. walking in slow motions with different goals was harder than I thought. You have to focus on your whole body and keep in mind that every motion has to be done at the same speed. You cant walk in a slow speed and then move your hands our face at a faster speed. So think about how the whole body has to work together was interesting and educational for further research into this performance. We also had to start thinking about how we wanted to contribute to the production. I have always been into the acting aspect of a performance, but I was also thinking of joining both the costume group and help with giving directions in some scenes. Since starting this degree I have opened my eyes to both the writing and directing aspect of performance. Before last year I had never done anything else but acting when it comes to theatre. Acting will always be my passion, but this last semester I have realized that I could do so much more in the theatre industry besides acting.

This is a photo of two of my classmates trying out the scene of the girl. In this week’s rehearsal, we worked together to try to stage and perform the first scene in The Water Station. Some of us tried out this scene at normal speed first as we read through the directions. After performing the scene in a normal speed we started working with the 6 feet per 5 minute and we ended up using 11 minutes for performing the scene.