BCA Week 11

Instead of working on our exam pieces, this week we took part in a workshop run by Nicole Faraday, who told us a little bit about acting for camera and working in the film industry. I have a little bit of professional filming experience and I know some of the terminology as I have tried directing myself (not in a professional way, though), but still, I learnt a couple of things about TV acting I hadn't known before.

The workshop had two parts. The first one was the theory, which was about discussing the main differences between acting on stage and on screen, some useful tips about attending auditions, learning lines and preparing for a role, and also learning some basic words and expressions of film terminology. I took quite a lot of notes, because I found the lecture really interesting, detailed and useful.

When acting for camera, you must:

• Give less of everything: don't project your voice as much as you do on stage, don't make your character's emotions so strong, don't let too many of them appear on your face, try to make them more internal instead.
• Be aware of that the directions in scripts for films are a lot less flexible. Because there's so many people and department working on the film, you have to follow the instructions all the time. In theatre, you have more freedom and the directors are normally a lot more open to ideas coming from the actors.
• Be familiar with the film and TV terminology, which is completely different from theatre terminology.
• Be prepared to learn new lines at short notice or alter previously learned things, because scripts are often changed.
• Use your short term memory rather than your long term memory. You need to remember your lines only for a couple of hours until the scenes are filmed, then you don't have to remember them anymore.
• Always be prompt and stick to the call sheet, because all the different tasks on set are connected to each other, and if somebody is late, there might be a need for changing the whole schedule.

Useful tips for auditioning for TV or film:

• If you know who exactly you're auditioning for and have a good amount of information about the character, try to dress for the character. This wasn't mentioned on the workshop, but I've read an article about Evanna Lynch, who played Luna Lovegood in the Harry Potter movies; she went to the auditions wearing a pair of handmade earrings that looked like Luna's weird earrings in the books. The same earrings were actually used later as a part of her costume in the films.
• If you don't have enough information about the character you're auditioning for, wear neutral clothes of neutral colour.
• Do some research on the character, their background, profession etc. A personal example (though I didn't do this for an audition but for the actual filming): when I played a deaf girl, I looked up different websites and youtube videos for basic tutorials of British Sign Language. I also tried to contact a local deaf association to arrange a meeting before the filming, but unfortunately we couldn't do it in the end because I got the job on short notice.
• Be confident and open to anything the casting directors say, and follow their instructions.
• If they're filming your audition, turn your face towards the camera, but never look straight into the the lens.

Learning lines:

• If you are sent the script before the audition, learn it at home instead of reading it. If you see the script only at the audition, try to memorise as much of it as you can while preparing to do the audition.
• Improve your short term memory by doing exercises. This will make auditions and acting work easier for you.

I also found out that the way I normally play a character is called "method acting", and it was first introduced by, how surprising, Stanislavski. I looked up the term and found out that method actors are generally considered to be very annoying and difficult to work with. So much for me :D

By the way, I got interested and did some further research on different acting techniques, and I found out that I don't only use method acting but some practical aesthetics stuff as well (which was created by David Mamet and William H. Macy based on the works of, oh, how surprising again, Stanislavski), for example, I like "as-if". This is really interesting, because they are said to be two completely different points of view. Here is a basic but still very informative article about the differences between the two techniques.

After the introduction part, we got a list of terms and some time to try to find out what the words mean. A couple of years ago I had a media terminology course at the university. That course was actually meant to be for translation students who were interested in translating media related texts, and I never really intended to do that, but, as we studied about camera angles, cuts, different job titles on film sets, expresions used by directors and many other things, I found that course material pretty useful later, when I started to work as an actor here in the UK and got my first professional filming job. Yet, there were many words and phrases on Nicole's list that I didn't know or had already forgotten about. 

The second part of the workshop was a bit of practice. We were given out short scripts and played a sort of pretend audition. We could decide if we wanted to work on our own or with the person who got the other part of our scripts, and also whether we wanted to do the audition paired up with one of the teachers or with another student. As for me, I started familiarising myself with my lines alone, but then the boy who got the same script as me came around, so we started to practice together and in the end, we did the audition together, too. The role I got was a female priest, and I'd never played anything like that before and I didn't even have a wide knowledge on English priests. The most I could do to be as convincing as possible was a technique I often use in similar situations: to pick a character from a movie or show I've previously watched which is very similar to the one I have to play, and try to copy their attitude and way of speaking (I'd say I made this technique up, but I'm pretty sure Stanislavski already created it before me :D). The first priest I could think of was Reverend Denning from The Living And The Dead, a short series I've seen last summer. He even had an English accent, so I also tried to go for that. And it went quite well, Nicole actually said that I did sound like a real priest. I'm not sure the accent was okay, though, because I kind of forgot about focusing on it in the middle of the audition.

At the end of the workshop, we had an opportunity to ask questions and all, and I wanted to ask for advices on cold reading, but I completely forgot about it because we talked about so many things that my attention was distracted, so I just looked it up at home after the workshop. I found some pretty clever tips, such as these.

BCA Week 10

Grease

This week we went on with the choreography of We Go Together. I'm not at all a professional dancer; in fact, the only professional course I did was a compulsory "Drama and Dancing" class in grammar school, and the only time I had to perform a professionally choreographed dance (which was actually a very simple waltz) was my prom dance about ten years ago. It's a tradition in Hungarian grammar schools that final year students perform a short dance with their class at their prom.

Anyway, I'm not saying that I hate doing it, because I kind of enjoy it sometimes, but I tend to be quite clumsy when it comes to dancing. So I think the dancing part of our exam performance, however small it is, will be a great challenge for me. I'm sure I'll need to ask one of my classmates to practice the choreography with me a couple of times, because I tried doing it at home on my own and I kind of messed up the whole thing.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

The dance choreography of The Time Warp, however, seems to be a lot easier, maybe because I feel that there's a lot more acting involved. Because I haven't done so yet, I spent some time reading a little bit about the play and the film. I'm pretty sure I hadn't heard the title before the course, but the story is quite familiar.

The story is about a young couple being stuck in the middle of nowhere when their car breaks down. There's a castle nearby, so they go there to ask for help. However, the place is owned by a  crazy transvestite, Frank N. Furter and some other really weird people. Unfortunately I didn't have time to watch the whole film, but I checked some videos on Youtube and I found the mood of it really dark and abstract, but, at the same time, very funny.

Knowing that the film was made in the '70s and includes such topics as LGBT+ and sexuality, I think it must have been quite a shock at that time. It got indeed a lot of negative feedback.

Blood Brothers

We started this session with an exercise, during which we had to read the lines of our character three times.

1. Just read out the lines loud.
2. Read out the lines loud while walking around in the classroom. Stop and change direction every time you come to a punctuation mark.
3. Read out lines loud while walking around in the classroom. Stop, do a pose and then change direction every time you come to a punctuation mark.

The teacher also asked us to think about why we had to do this exercise. I found several different possible reasons why it can be useful. My guesses were:

• space awareness
• body awareness
• practicing speaking and doing certain movements at the same time
• intonation and punctuation of the text

After this, we had to try reading out our lines without relying on our script. For me it was not too difficult because I've been off book for a while, but the tricky thing was that I had to read only my own lines in the right order without hearing my partner's lines in between them. In case of dialogues, I normally learn my lines kind of connected to my partner's previous line, because my line is a sort of reaction to their line according to the script. Besides, it can happen on stage that they don't say exactly what's written in the script but something really close to it, and if I answer by saying my next line word by word, it wouldn't make sense to the audience, so I think it's really important to hear my partner's lines as well and not to focus on my own lines only.

The last task, which we had to do at home, was to read over the script once again and underline the most important words in it. This, I think, helps us with knowing the feelings and thoughts of our characters, and it's also useful for the intonation of the lines.

My partner and I finally had a chance to work on our scene with the teacher, which was very helpful for me. At this point, both of us are already off book, so instead of focusing on the spoken words onla, we've started to include more actions and movements while saying our lines, and because of this, the scene is kind of beginning to "come alive". After that at home I read my notes from a couple of weeks before when I listed the parts of the scene I wasn't happy with, and I think I managed to improve most of those parts during the session.

Frozen

I've been living with kids for a few years now, so I've already memorized the lyrics of my solo song Let It Go years ago, and I watched the movie several times. However, I've never taken time to look for background information about the story and the characters, so I did this now. The movie is still very popular, so it was super easy to find information and interesting facts about it. Since my song is sung by Elsa, I mainly focused on her, but I also found some other things about the story in general.

The story is based on the Danish fairy tale The Snow Queen written by Andersen, but it is very different from the original tale. The characters are completely different, as well as the storyline itself, though if you know the original story, you will definitely be able to find the connections.

Despite the fact that Andersen was Danish, the set of Frozen is mostly based on Norway. Disney also hired linguists of Scandinavian languages to work with the scriptwriters to put as many Norse words and phrases in it as possible. If I had more time, I would check the lyrics of Le It Go looking for words like that, because I used to learn a little bit of Old Norse back in the university, but I think I'll have to leave that for later.

Anyway, back to the song. Going through a couple of site, I learnt that Elsa was originally meant to be a villain, just like the Snow Queen in Andersen's fairy tale. She was originally planned to have a lot darker appearance. Here's some early sketches:

Source

However, after the songwriters created Let It Go, they saw the song and the lyrics so positive and hopeful that the storyline and the script was eventually changed.

My teacher told me that she wants to hear my performance of Let It Go soon, and I hope there will be enough time for that in the next couple of weeks. I've been practicing the song for a while at home, so I hope the singing won't be a problem. As for the visuals, watching the scene from the movie again, I've already tried to come up with some choreography, but I'm not sure it will work well on stage.

BCA Week 9

We started this week with rehearsing the choreography of Time Warp, Since this took quite a while and was mainly about movements, I didn't really have anything to take notes of during this part of the class.

We also watched a couple of the solo songs, some of which I've never heard before. Meanwhile, I was reading the lines of my own solo and chorus songs of which I need a bit more practice.

My group for Chicago - All That Jazz had its first opportunity to perform the song, which didn't end up quite well because before this week we hadn't ever had any time for working together during the classes, but our teachers gave us some good advices. Instead of cutting the song into four equal parts and give a solo part for everybody, there's going to be a main solo singer and three of us supporting her with background vocals and a couple of solo lines. The choreography is another difficult part of the performance, but the group was promised to have some more time in the next couple of weeks for making something up.

The next thing to do was the Blood Brothers scenes. There wasn't enough time for my partner and me to perform ours, but we will do it next time. However, we still were able to watch other people perform their dialogues.

BCA Week 8

This week we started to work on the choreography of Grease - Greased Lighting and Summer Nights. This is something that's very exciting to do but very difficult to write about, though I've tried to make some notes of my movements in the performance, but I think the most effective way of learning a choreography is to repeat it as many times as possible so that my body gets used to it. I have no previous experience in singing and dancing on stage using a pre-composed choreography, but the process of learning it must be kind of similar to learning a stage combat choreography.

Also, we practiced the Blood Brother scenes, and I think both my partner and I have improved a lot. I've already been off book for a while. I have enough experience in acting to know that, for me, the actions and visuals during the scenes are the most difficult things to memorise, so I normally try to learn all my scenes by heart as early as possible no matter the deadlines we're given, because it makes things easier if I don't have to hold a bunch of sheets in one hand.

For next week we got another song to learn, which is Journey - Don't Stop Believin'. I think we will start working on it next week. But I decided to spend a bit more time on the exam pieces that we already been working on for a while.

All That Jazz
We were told that the teachers will see our performance of the Chicago songs next time, so I took some time at home to listen to them a couple of times, because we had very little opportunity to practice them with the groups. This applies to All That Jazz, because we didn't really have time to do anything about it apart from spliting it into four parts and giving a solo part to every member of the group. At home, without the other three group members, I couldn't really do anything but do some research on the song itself.

It's the opening song of the musical Chicago. The set is a night club. The song is sung by Velma and a chorus of people - possibly the customers of the club. It is followed by the police arresting Velma for murder.

The story is set in the 1920s when jazz was a relatively new and quite provocative style of music (probably in a similar way to heavy metal in the '90s), and knowing this (and of course the fact that she murdered her own sister and her partner) already tells us a thing or two about Velma's character.

Just like Cell Block Tango, this song also has several different versions, the one used in the movie is quite different from the one in the musical.
This is the movie version:

And some examples of the stage versions:

Performed by Jennifer Nettles and Carly Hughes, 2015

Performed by Amra-Faye Wright, 2014

These also gave me some ideas about the choreography, though we haven't had time to work that out with the group yet.

BCA Week 7

This week was probably the busiest one we've had so far. We practiced a little bit of almost everything I have so far, and I also got some other exam pieces to do: Let It Go from Frozen and You Can't Stop The Beat from Hairspray. 

The full list of my exam pieces (just to make it easier for myself to keep everything in mind) so far:

• Blood Brothers Act 1 Scene 8 (Mrs Johnston)
• Chicago - Cell Block Tango (The Hunyak)
• Chicago - All That Jazz (solo)
• Grease - We Go Together (chorus)
• Grease - Greased Lighting/Summer Nights (chorus)
• Hairspray - You Can't Stop The Beat (chorus)
• Rocky Horror Picture Show - The Time Warp (chorus)
• Frozen - Let It Go (solo)

Let It Go

There was a sort of mini-audition this week for this song, and I didn't really expect it, so I was quite nervous (besides, I'm still suffering from the side effects of a concussion I had last weekend at work, but that's a story for another day) and I made lots of mistakes which I took notes of, including the feedback I got from my teacher.

For the first time, I really overacted the whole thing, which was really unnecessary and it kind of affected my voice and also my movements. I don't really remember if being tense was the reason or the result of this, but eventually, my teacher asked me to try again.

When I'm singing, the position of my head is very important, because it can also affect my voice and the way I project it to the audience, and sometimes it even makes controlling my volume very difficult.

I think I didn't get a feedback on this, but I made some notes about air control. I don't know what the professional way is for doing this, but I normally use the rhythm of the music as a guide for breathing. So when I'm singing without background music, it's really important for me to keep the rhythm in mind, because if I lose it, I might not be able to focus on breathing properly and might run out of air in the middle of a line, which sounds horrible and looks ridiculous on stage.

Blood Brothers

In my last post I mentioned the objectives, but I'd never really had a chance to work them out line by line until this week, while my partner was aways practicing something else with one of her other groups.

Objectives of Mrs Johnston in Act 1 Scene 8
Line 1: wants to start a conversation with Mrs Lyons, who enters the room
Line 2: wants to keep the conversation going and looks for a reason to hold her baby
Line 3: looks for another reason to pick up the baby
Line 4: looks for another reason to mind the baby
Line 5: wants to apologise for making Mrs Lyons angry
Line 6: still wants to apologise
Line 7: wants to know if Mrs Lyons is serious
Line 8: wants Mrs. Lyons to tell her the real reason
Line 9: wants Mrs Lyons to pity her and change her mind
Line 10: wants to take his son back
Line 11: wants to threaten Mrs Lyons
Line 12: wants to make excuses for her crime and put the blame on Mrs Lyons
Line 13: wants to know what Mrs Lyons is talking about

Later we had some time to work on the scene together with my partner, and we discussed a couple of things such as the objectives of her character and parts of the scene or lines that we are not really satisfied with. We also talked about the fluency of the conversation, which, I think, is still not perfect in our scene. Just like in real life, we can interrupt each other on stage as well, we don't have to wait until other characters stop speaking. This makes the conversation more realistic and fluent.

I got another homework to do: to write at least ten facts about Mrs Johnston based on the play. I have already done something like this earlier, but this time I have to write it in first person:
My name is Mrs Lyons. I love dancing. I met my husband in the club and we got married quickly after I realised that I was pregnant. I was the mother of seven kids by the age of twenty-five. I look a lot older than my age. My husband left me for a woman who is prettier than me. I am always very busy with work, and I am always tired. I am Catholic, and I am very religious. I love my children more than anything. I am from the working class, and my family is very poor. I got a job as a housekeeper in the house of a rich couple. I was expecting twins, but I couldn't afford having more than one baby, so I had no choice but to give one away to Mrs Lyons, my employer. I am not well educated and I am not really concerned about the education of my children. either.

Chorus songs

(the Grease songs and Time Warp)

I think I've already said this, but the only problem with the chorus songs is that we need to practice a lot more. Not only during the classes but also at home. As for me, I often listen to the tracks while I'm going to work or doing something at home, because it helps me memorising the tiny details of the background music and all.