Looking back on the journey that was undertaken by both the entire group and myself individually throughout the course of this assignment, I was struck by what a stark progression the scene took. We started out with nothing more than some paintings, a friend and the words "La Mer", and we ended up with a performance about a group of friends, with multi-dimensional, complex dynamics and emotions. This performance was perhaps one of the most enjoyable that I have done in y life, despite the fact that it lasted a mere 15 minutes, and now - with the rush of performing fading and the experience slowly becoming a memory - I started to think about what led to that. What choices did we make? What was it about this performance that I feel so attached to and remember so fondly?
Our story was simple: we were becalmed on a boat in the middle of a sea during a traditional holiday away together. We sit and talk, we reconnect, we realise that we have disconnected, we slowly peel back the layers of each others lives. The only real "drama" comes at the end when one of us, Rick, suddenly and tragically dies. We leave the audience thinking about how well do we - as a society - really know our friends and neighbours?
What really worked about our performance and what I really loved was how true our characters were. We spent more time than usual exploring our characters, sitting for hours discussing and improvising, playing games and connecting, all the time in character. To make such a low drama performance work we had to know our characters better than we knew ourselves and I think that was something our group did really well. We created lives and histories. Our piece started out, during the first stages of improvisation, with us all waking up on a cruise ship without any memory of the night before. This, however, we felt should be before the events of the performance. This improvisation became more subplot to the scene, we improvised multiple "memories" for our characters and when we were finally putting together our scene we used these memories as jigsaw pieces. We could then justify WHY our characters would do something in the final scene, such as "Oh, in this improvisation my character did this, she would therefor have this fear/emotion/relationship with this character and would act accordingly."
We were constantly rehearsing to perfect certain aspect of the scene. Our group wanted to perfect character and the emotion or feeling onstage. We spent hours working to get the perfect "Vibe", so to speak, whereas some groups would have worked hard at other things such as plot. We did this because we really cared about how our audience would feel after the performance. Obviously, we could easily have done it in other ways, but we wanted to go deeper than just asking or portraying a message. We wanted to make the emotions feel real, to make the audience almost feel it too. I think this worked because when, for example, we started out and we built up the boredom onstage at the beginning of the scene I was sat at the very front of the stage. As I was acting and the boredom and tension was building I could feel the audience starting to react. People cracked their necks and started shuffling their feet, and I felt like this was a brilliant reaction to our work, since it showed that all our hard work had paid off and we'd got the reaction we wanted.
One thing that I liked about my own personal progression was how my character changed. At the start Xanthe was angry and defensive, she had a wall up and very few friends because of her witty, sarky nature. By the end however, after my exploration and development of her, she had become so much more dependent. She was like a small animal that could break at any point. She was desperate and quiet. This was a huge stretch for me to act, since I am nothing like that! However I used my own past experience and emotional memory to portray depression, and I feel that that was what made it believable. Often it is very difficult to portray something that you have never felt or understood, and the fact that I knew exactly what someone like Xanthe would be feeling and thinking - since I had felt and thought it myself - I was able to make her actions more truthful. I could explain it all and I actually went to my friends and family and others who had known someone in depression and asked what it was like being someone on the OUTSIDE watching someone else go through it. They mentioned how useless it can feeling not being able to help someone you care about, and to not be able to give them happiness. I feel like this was a turning point for me, since I hadn't thought about it that way before. This was incredibly helpful for those working around me in the scene, we discussed how the other characters would feel about it and how some of them may have less patience and want me to just help myself. I was subtle about it, I didn't run around screaming and crying and telling everyone about how depressed I was, since I'm a huge believer in the saying "Less is more" in the style in which we were performing.
As in any performance, however, not everything went to plan. One thing that really threw us was Max being in a car accident just two weeks before our performance. This created a huge difficulty for us,and I feel like we lost a lot of time that we could have spent on devising instead on rewriting parts of the piece to accommodate the loss of one of the characters. We did work round it, and I think that was a credit to our group, however in the end it was all unnecessary since Max ended up being able to perform.This taught me a great lesson in performing, which was that you can't always control circumstances. Things can go wrong, and I'll take a lot from this experience, and I'll have to prepare myself for any eventuality in the future. I think that in the future, should anything like this go wrong again in a performance, I'll be able to work around it much easier having had this experience.
Something that I didn't really like was the moment just before Rick gets hit in the scene. My idea for this bit was a sense of unity among the characters. I think that if we'd worked harder to capture the emotion of us all finally getting on a starting to recapture the strong relationships that our characters once had, then Ric dying would have seemed even more poignant. Luckily it was a very effective piece of drama and the audience reacted really well, however had we had more time to work on the scene then that's what I would have liked to perfect. Next time I think I'll have better time management to make sure I get everything in that I want to. Looking back on the previous performance however, when there were far more things that I was unsatisfied with and wanted to work on more, I am happy with how well our performance went.
Something that I didn't really like was the moment just before Rick gets hit in the scene. My idea for this bit was a sense of unity among the characters. I think that if we'd worked harder to capture the emotion of us all finally getting on a starting to recapture the strong relationships that our characters once had, then Ric dying would have seemed even more poignant. Luckily it was a very effective piece of drama and the audience reacted really well, however had we had more time to work on the scene then that's what I would have liked to perfect. Next time I think I'll have better time management to make sure I get everything in that I want to. Looking back on the previous performance however, when there were far more things that I was unsatisfied with and wanted to work on more, I am happy with how well our performance went.
