In the first term of Theatre at the Brit school I have learnt a whole host of new skills, exercises and abilities. The exercises for character creation are paramount to making an effective piece and character We must research a character's time period densley to work out the given circumstances. You do this by searching the web for key historical events e.g. a war, political changes, government changes, olympics at the time to get a real sense about the worries or hopes of your character. Society and culture changes every single day so if the play is set yesterday or 40,000 years ago you must see what's happening in their present day and how it would affect their behaviour. Hot seating provides a way for you to speak as your character and be asked question of relevance that doesn't just make you think what would my character say but I am the character what would I say? Because I am the character! It also unlocks a character's innermost thoughts. Take for example Joseph, he is very emotionally closed off especially in the text so when we can find out what's really going on in the brain of your character!
Using improvisations as an actor we have to think on our feet making us instinctually be the character. We play off each other like we really are the character. We are alive as the character! A specific exercise we did was the 3 word improv. Which limits us to what we can say giving us a bigger opportunity to use "physical lines" through the way we move revealing more about character making us even more so in tuned into what our character is thinking about. Using 3 words makes us hack down the characters thoughts to the bare essentials and that's where you find the truth in a character Creating the previous scene gives us context in the scene that we are performing. It gives us a sharper objective because we actually know what has driven us to this point in time. It's an excellent way to find out why things are the way they are caused them to be this way. There has been a very huge influence from Mr. Rennison to always be working with our physical objectives he always make sure we have a rough idea even though it may not be the right one but to simply try a physical objective. It has to have an effect on an object or person so under no circumstances can it be cerebral or selfish. It gives something for the text to ride on and makes a scene 10x more interesting and believable.
Taking direction has had very important role in us getting better as actors. If we take constructive criticism on board with no fuss and move on we will improve much faster. If someone points out something even if you think it's wrong just try it. Taking direction is letting your ego go and just letting yourself be molded by people who want to help whether that be peers, a teacher or a director. Before we even start class we are always instructed and assisted to warm up in the appropriate manner to get our muscles, brains and voices ready for the demanding challenges we are getting ready face.
Muscle warm ups:
Cat stretch - Loosens up the hips and lower back stretching out the muscles we use to rotate our bodies and walk naturally so we don't have knots when we move around.
Rolling down the spine and breathe exercise - One of the most important thing an actor needs to be is in tune with his breathing and movements but even more better is when they beat as one. This exercise not only unlocks the spine vertebrae by vertebrae teach coordination and stretch almost the entire body but it makes you use your breathe simultaneously with your movements helping you onto that stage where as an actor you can naturally breathe as well as move.
Shoulder Rolls - A lot of status and subtext can be shown through the shoulders so it's very good to make sure that they are loose and not locked up. It can stop us from hunching your shoulders which is bad for us and anyway and melt away some of that tension that is within our being that naturally comes from our shoulders.
Vocal warm ups:
Tongue twisters/Tongue rolls - The tongue is probably the most important muscle an actor has at his disposal. It is responsible for creating different and exciting sounds and should be thoroughly warmed up. If we roll it round our mouth push it out 'til it aches we get used to a constant strain and it makes using out tongue much easier. Tongue twisters are also good to help us with enunciating and to get the muscles in our mouths buzzing and alive ready to project and make noise! It also helps to focus the mind in prep for the work.
Sirening - Sirening help us warm up and gage our vocal range. It makes us dive down to the deepest noise we can make sharply bringing us up and through to the top sounds we can manage. This is very effective warm up considering that different people speak in different key registers so if we can learn to effectively use the top of our range and the bottom the more we can master every single pitch in between.
Breathing - As I've mentioned before breathing is very important as an actor and you should always have absolute control over his breathing. We did an exercise involving pretending there was a light feather on our lips and lightly blowing it to different heights. At some points we were restricted only blowing it a few inches off the ground but then we took it up to the ceiling using a mixture of staccato breathes and long breathes. This helped to physicalize our breathing so we could physically see how I breathe could affect our environment and controlling how little and how much air we let out of our lungs.
Energy, Status, Emotional State, Physicality
Those are some of the key things that we need to create a character. We need to to know about the energy levels of your character in the scene because this affects the way they talk and the way they move and how they interact with the other characters. Status shows who's in charge on stage. Your status can change depending on who the scene is with. Things that could give you high status are puffing out your chest, lifting your chin above everyone elses, looking down upon others. Status is very cerebral but it still has a physical effect on others. Emotional state simply means the state in which someones emotions are at. If you're doing a scene which saddening and the character is experiencing emotional trauma you're not going to have them going round smiling and using a high energetic voice because it was clash and the scene would become mediocre. I've been told many times that actions speak louder than words and that we get so much more from a characters actions than we do from the text. Text lies but actions don't. So because in this particular unit we are looking at being a naturalistic as possible our physicality has to be purely human. Physicality is the root of characters purpose. A character should not move without purpose so as actors we must suse out what that purpose is and use it to enhance out movements.
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