BCA Week 6

This week was mostly about the songs rather than working on the play scenes. Apart from practicing Cell Block Tango from last week, we also started to work on All That Jazz (also from Chicago).

Chicago - Cell Block Tango

First of all, my classmate who got the Hungarian monologue was not very happy and she sort of struggles with learning her lines, so our teachers asked me to do the Hungarian lines and she will do mine. However, I was told this only at the end of the session, so I was still working on the "Pop" monologue this week, and I took all my notes at school in reflection of that, though it's mostly about general ideas that anybody can use. Nonetheless, I already started to work on my new character's analysis, so it should be okay.

I mentioned in my last post that I'm having difficulties with timing my monologue lines. Most of my groupmates have the same problem with this song, so we started to share our ideas about how to solve this.

What I'd been thinking of is to use certain words in the spoken text and match them with certain parts of the rhythm. Because I was never really able to learn how to read music sheets properly, I kind of have my own system of marking rhythm in songs, and this might be a bit difficult for others to understand, but according to my system, the rhythm pattern of Cell Block Tango is generally 8[1457] with an exception of some parts (including the Hungarian monologue's part, unfortunately). All I have to do is to listen to the monologue with the background music and mark the parts that are easy to memorise.

We also got some background information about the musical from my teacher, and I realised that I should have done research on the story earlier (especially because I've never seen Chicago), so I did now. The story is set in the 1920s, in the USA, Illinois. At this time, female criminals, especially murderesses are a cultural phenomenon; because people are generally more suspicious of men than of women, they tend to remember a criminal better if it's a woman. Some of the main characters are actually based on real people, one of them is Belva Gaertner, whose murder case from 1924 was the model for Velma's case.

About the Hunyak:

* her real name is Katalin Helinski

* Hungarian immigrant (though her surname is actually Polish), doesn't speak English

* doesn't have enough money to hire a lawyer

* accused of decapitating her husband
I tried to look up the meaning of the name "Hunyak", but the only thing I was able to find is that Hunyák is a real (but not very common) Hungarian surname, there was no information on the origin or meaning of the word. I'm not quite sure, but it might be in connection with the verb "huny", which means "close" (eyes) or "sleep" or sometimes even "die". It's a word used only by old people nowadays, but maybe it was more common in the 1920s.

In her Hungarian monologue she's trying to explain that she's actually innocent, and there are many clues in the musical that show that she is telling the truth. For example, the meaning of the name Katalin is "purity" or "innocence", and also, in the song Cell Block Tango, her monologue is the only one which is not supported by the other women singing "he had it coming..." in the background. However, she is still executed during the play because her English is very poor and this makes her unable to prove that she is innocent. So, my fellow foreigners, let me give you a good advice: please don't come to any English speaking country unless your level of spoken English is at least intermediate, otherwise you might just end up being hanged for murder.
So, even though it doesn't give me the opportunity to practice any foreign language, I think I still got the most interesting character of this play and I'm looking forward to portraying her on the next session.

Chicago - All That Jazz
We haven't done much with this song apart from listening to it a couple of times and dividing it into four parts as there's four people in the group, Unfortunately, I didn't even have time to do any research on it yet, but I will do it very soon.

Blood Brothers
We didn't work particularly on my dialogue, but there was a general discussion about working with a script, which included topics like making a character analysis and learning lines.

Different people have different methods for learning lines. Some of my classmates said that they are visual learners, which means that reading their scripts many times helps them with memorising their lines. Other people are auditive learners, they usually record themselves and their partners saying the lines and then listen to those recordings; or they have to read the lines out loud several times to learn them.
As for me, I'm kind of the mixture of a visual and an auditive learner. I normally don't spend that much time at home memorising my lines (except for the bigger roles when I have a lot of lines to say), because if I read them a couple of times during my character research/analysis and do a couple of rehearsals, I usually learn the text in just a few days. Sometimes I'm even able to memorise other people's lines if I watch some of their rehearsals.
Also, because I have quite a lot of experience in Shakespearean plays, I must note that Shakespeare normally used iambic pentameter, which gives a very unique rhythm to his lines, so I think those lines are generally easier to memorise auditively, speaking out loud or listening to voice recordings.

As for the character analysis, I've already done mine on Mrs Johnston a couple of weeks ago (it's normally the first thing I do whenever I get a role), but we also had to read the whole play again for this week and copy some quotes in three categories:
* I by me (everything my character says about herself)
* Me by others (everything other characters say about my character)
* Everything I say
It was quite an interesting task, because I got different results in all three cases. I wouldn't say it's like three different characters, but some quotes (especially in "I by me" and "Me by others") say quite different things about the very same character, mostly because a character doesn't always know everything about the other character, so they see each other very differently.
As for the third category ("everything I say"), it mostly helped me find my character's objectives during the play.
Though I didn't copy all the stage directions, I think it's still very important to use those as well. I noticed during the lessons that most of my classmates simply skip those lines and focus on the spoken words only. A character in a play never says or does anything without an objective, and I think this includes the stage directions, too. We shouldn't forget about them as sometimes they contain essential information (another Shakespearean example, from The Winter's Tale : "Exit, pursued by a bear").

BCA Week 5

This week we mostly focused on the dialogue from Blood Brothers, but we had a chance to practice Cell Block Tango as well. Also, I got a new exam piece, which is Hairspray, though we didn't really go into details about that yet.

The chorus songs (Grease - We Go Together and Greased Lighting/Summer Nights) need a bit more practice, but I think it's not bad, considering that some of us have never taken singing lessons and have no experience in singing in a choir. I'm lucky because I was always a choir member in school and I also sang in the choir of my local church as a teenager, so I have quite a lot of experience. I think it's just a matter of memorising the lyrics and putting the songs together.

Blood Brothers

My character, Mrs Johnston is a modest and very patient lady, and I think I kind of overdid that part of her personality until this week. My teacher suggested that I try to be a bit more energetic and lively (she really is like that, she's loves dancing for example, and she's normally quite loud), at the beginning of the sceen and move line by line towards the fear of losing the child. I did so. I don't know what it looks like from the outside because we didn't record the rehearsals, but my teacher and also my partner said that it looks a lot better, and that was my impression as well. I think it would be a good idea to make videos of our performance and check how different two rehearsals can be when we're changing just very tiny things in our acting.

Another important fact about Mrs Johnston is that, since she's been a manual worker for all her life and raised up seven kids, she is able to do several things at one time. I was told this by my teacher, and I also noticed it in the performance of two other classmates who chose the same scene of the play as us when we performed our scenes to each other: my classmate who played Mrs Johnston spoke her lines while cleaning the walls, minding the baby and generally walking around doing this and that. There's a lot less actions that this my performance, because I mostly focus on the baby. It's interesting to see how two people can deliver the exact same scene in two completely different ways.

Also, my teacher said that an interesting thing about acting is that you need to find things in your character that are very different from your personality, and you need to be able to show those features on stage. In other words, a good actor does things that he would never ever do. Actually, I kept this in mind this week when I was doing an audition for Lady Macbeth (the sleepwalking monologue from Act 5 Scene 1) and it helped me a lot to define what type of character I want to create exactly.

I think my biggest problem is that it's kind of difficult for me to create and show a character's personality and feelings without instructions. If the director tells me what to do, I can do it perfectly, but if I'm free to do it my own way, I tend to mess it up sometimes.

Chicago - Cell Block Tango

Since I can speak fluent Hungarian, and there is a short Hungarian monologue in the song, my first task was to help my classmate who got this monologue and speaks no Hungarian. We worked a little bit on the pronunciation (we made a voice recording as well as a phonetic transcription of the text), and I also translated the text into English for her. I've learnt this on one of my previous drama workshops with Tom Finlay: an actor can act in whatever language, but if he doesn't understand what he's saying, it's just not going to work at all. When we've worked on the Belfast Tempest, we've started the first rehearsal by "translating" the script word by word from Early Modern English ("Shakespearean" English) to Modern English, and it was then that I realised how useful English historical linguistics is for playing in a Shakespearean drama, because I was able to understand words and phrases that native English speakers didn't understand. We were asked by the director to do the same when I did Romeo and Juliet, by the way. I think it's always essential, even if the language you're going to perform in is your native language, but for me, as English is my second language, it's just natural to do this with all the scripts I ever touch.

Since my Chicago monologue haven't been reviewed by my teacher yet, I didn't really get any feedback so far, but I performed it once for some of my classmates during a reherasing session and they said they liked it. I think the biggest challenge about this monologue is the "time limit" that I have: during my speech there's a background music that gives me a certain amount of time to perform, so I can't give myself a couple of spare seconds to think like I normally do when I forget a line, or else I run out of time. The other difficult thing is going to be the choreography, but we haven't started working on that yet. For start, I googled the basic steps of Argentine tango and tried to practice it, though I don't know if I'm going to need that for this show.

BCA Week 4

This week I got my first scene for the exam, which is Act 1 Scene 8 of Blood Brother, and the character I'm going to play is Mrs Johnston ("The Mother"). After presenting the scene with my partner to the teacher, I started to collect information about the character. I'd never seen nor read the whole play before this course, but I'd read several summaries about the story for the auditions, and I also saw some videos of a couple of scenes/songs, so I had a rough idea of who is who, but it is technically nothing when you're given a role to play. I've already started to read the play, but I'll reread it during the weekend, because now that I have my character I'll be able to focus on her and take notes while reading.

Along with those pieces of information that I got from my teachers, here is what I have so far. This is all about the character in general, not the scene I was given.

The facts:

* working class; housekeeper/cleaning lady of Mrs Lyons

* very young (about 30 years old)

* mother of 7 children (plus expecting a pair of twins in the beginning of the play)

* religious (Catholic)

* her husband left her

* family-oriented; loves her children more than anything

* sells one of her twins to Mrs Lyons because she can't afford to raise him up

Some conclusions:

* working class → very poor → agrees to sell Edward (doesn't know it's illegal)

* single mother of 7 (then 9) children → patient, responsible, maternal, caring, always very tired

Next I started to search for information about the life of the English working class in the 1960s, when the play is set. I mostly used short summaries about England's history, such as this site. I found out that working class people had a low status in society, and they were generally quite ignorant because they were not well educated.

The other thing that I got for the exam is Cell Block Tango from Chicago. I'm going to play the part of Liz ("Pop girl"). We listened to only one version of the song with the group, but I did a bit of research after that at home, and I realised that there is actually lots of different adaptations of the same thing, and most of them are slightly different from each other. I watched a couple of full performances, and so far, I found these two the best:

Stratford High School's Stratford Playhouse, 2014:

I particularly like the choreography of this one, though I think the girl who plays my character is overacting a little bit.

Broadway Backwards, 2015:

Here the set and the costumes are very good, and the way the male actors can deliver these roles is just awesome.

Though I'm mostly an actor, not a singer, I also found the tips of my teacher about using one's singing voice very useful. She said that most of singing coaches focus only on one particular side of their students' singing voice, and, because this sounded quite interesting for me, I googled it at home after that class. I found out that there's actually a great difference between the head voice and the chest voice (some of my sources also said that yodeling, for example, is based on switching from one to the other - that got me into trying to learn how to yodel, by the way). I'm not quite sure I got them right, but when I tried to feel the difference in my voice, I noticed that when I'm using my head voice, I can feel my throat resonating, and when I'm using my chest voice, the it's down in my chest. As a person who only had music lessons at nursery age but was a phonetics and phonology student decades later in the university, I find it quite interesting to discover the connections between the speech organs and singing voice.

BCA Week 1 and 2

I started an acting course last month, and one of the requirements for the end-of-term exam is to keep a diary about my experience of working on my characters of the exam pieces. It's quite an interesting task; I normally make tons of notes in my script about my character every time I'm in a play or film, but I've never actually thought about keeping a diary about the developement of the character and the changes I make during the rehearsals. I bet it will be pretty useful.

So, what I'm planning to do is to write an entry on this blog about each week's work in school and then copy it into a document at the end of this term to be able to submit it properly as an exam work. I'll start with summarising the first couple of weeks, and from now on I'll do my best taking as many notes during the classes as possible so that I'll hopefully be able to write more detailed entries about the following weeks.

WEEK 1

The first week (which actually was the second week of January) was about getting to know each other and doing some introduction games as well as some basic exercises of vocals, speech and movement.

WEEK 2

On the second week we started to get familiar with the first exam piece, which is the musical Blood Brothers by Willy Russell. The scenes that we are going to play on the exam were not chosen yet, we just had to perform short parts of the play with one or two partners. My characters were Linda and Mrs Lyons.

WEEK 3

Due to a previously planned holiday to my family, I missed this week, but it was mostly about giving out our exam songs and a little bit of work on more scenes from Blood Brothers.