What is my contribution?
My main focus when working on the tempest was working with others in the cast, who i had stage contact with, to look into and work on the scenes to give them more than just a surface performance and find meaning for each scene. For an example my self and two others put some extra time into our character entrances in our first scene as we knew that we were going to be performing this scene as the Shakespeare festival in Shoreham. We looked into each line and thought about why we were doing it. For example i helped a girl with her lines and breaking her speech down into units to determine where the mood changes. This helped her to give context to the lines in order for an audience to understand what was going on. One thing that i found really worked from the Shoreham Shakespeare Festival this year was ourselves introducing the acts and speeches that were going to happen. This gave the audience a brief understanding to what was happening, as they were not a seated audience, giving them a brief overview of the scene that was about to happen, gave them a chance to catch up with the scene and gave us as actors help to understand the scenes.
When it came to the BOAT performance of the tempest i feel that i took on a big role when it came to organisation of set, costumes and props. I did this right from our last rehearsal at the studios, i made a list of everything that was needed in the show, including set and what we needed to make it and what we would need in the case of a repair. This meant that when we got to the theatre as we unpacked all of the set we could check off everything that came out of the van, and make sure that we had brought everything before it was put into the playing area.
How did i help with the content of the Tempest?
For this production i was 100% independent when it came to the construction of my costume, after a introductory meeting with the director, finding out the colour scheme and any ideas that she had in terms of my costume i went on to look into some inspiration pictures.I started off with plain colours of black, white and red. But i went on the top of all of my elements and added details, with extra stitching and embellishments such as sequins. I also felt that i played a big part within the other company members costumes and how they were constructing them. As one of the only members of the cast with sewing and textiles experience I started to give advise and help on the best ways to do things and the easiest ways to do it for someone that doesn't know sewing skills. For example one of the costumes incorporated a bustle under a floor length dress,i started to work with her giving some techniques on where to start and how to get the best look at the end.
At the start of the rehearsal process i took part in music rehearsals, were we looked into some of the different songs in the show, the one i looked into one of my songs in the show, where we came up with some basic choreography and then found all of the different harmonies in the song. Coming up with four harmony lines to teach to the rest of the cast.
When it came to my own work outside of rehearsals i put a lot of effort into making my character a well rounded person, thinking about how and why he would do things. This all started off my researching other actors playing this role, and then also looking into how drunken characters are portrayed in theatre and film and real life, then looking into what parts of these characters i wanted to take forward to my role.
How did you make the most of the creative and artistic possibilities fully?
When it comes to site specific and performing in a theatre that you haven't rehearsed in there are always changes that need to be made to help the show fit around the space used. One of the big changes made to all of my scenes was the spacing, and having to bring everything down stage towards the front of the thrust stage, to bring the action closer to the audience, as once you past half way point a lot of the sound was lost as we were not helped with the wind blowing through the stage,
Finally i had planned to make some of my entrances through the audience, from the back of the performance space. This was a part of the show that i would have to play guess work with until the performance as i couldn't predict where the audience were going to sit.
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