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.