BCA Week 16

This week we mostly worked on Evita and the exam dialogues.

Oh What a Circus

We made a couple of changes in the choreography, such as a bit more movements and walking around on stage during the instrumental parts of the track. The plan is to carry candles in our hands while walking, which, I thing, would be an awesome sight from the audience.

Blood Brothers

There's little to do about this scene apart from practicing it as many times as possible with my partner. We made some experiments with different movements and positions, and we decided which one to go for. Also, my teacher told me that I have the habit of looking down all the time, which I need to fix, because if I don't lift my head up, the audience doesn't see my expressions and reactions. So that's another thing for me to work on.

The Maids

We performed our scene to our teacher, who was quite impressed. Though we still need to plan the positions, movements, props etc. properly, I also think we did quite well for the first try. The other thing I have to practice is my short monologue at the end of the scene. As I still haven't finished reading the whole play, I didn't have a chance to make notes about my character's objectives, but I think once I do that, the monologue will be easier to perform, too.

BCA Week 14 and 15

Due to private life issues (moving to a new home and other things) I didn't have enough time to finish my entry of week 14 and 15, and I'm feeling quite bad about it, because such a lot had happened during the last two weeks, including a discussion and reading of The Maids and getting some more background roles in musical pieces.

Week 14
This week I spent most of my time at the rehearsals on my solo song Let It Go. I worked on my vocals as well as the visuals of the song. My teacher and one of my classmates gave me some advices on the movements, which was a great help as I am not really good at moving on stage without any given instructions at all. I made a list of their tips so that I can remember them and use them later when I'm working on other projects:
* Use the space around you, don't stay in one place all the time.
* Avoid turning back to the audience unless it's really necessary for the choreography.
* Don't start a song too strong, because if you do so, you won't be able to get even stronger later. This goes for movements and also vocals.

We didn't work much on the dialogue scenes this week, but I started to read The Maids and later I will also start doing my character analysis. The reason why I haven't started doing it is that my partner and I are not really sure which parts of the scene will stay and which will be cut, and also the teachers haven't confirmed yet which one of us is playing which character.

Week 15
We started this week with working on the two exam dialogues, then moved on and started to make the choreography ofthe two songs from Evita: Oh What A Circus and Don't Cry for Me, Argentina.

Blood Brothers
This week we worked on the small details of the scene such as positions, movements and gestures. Also, my teacher advised me to use my own accent instead of trying to go for the English accent which is required for the play. I originally planned to learn the English one once I was absolutely comfortable with everything else about the scene, but since we don't have much time left until the exam, I agreed with her.

The Maids
We had the first discussion with one of our teachers about the scene from The Maids this week. First we had to read the dialogue with my partner, then the teacher talked a little bit about the play itself. I have not finished reading it yet, but I've read summaries so I had a rough idea of what is going on during our scene, and I also found some information about the characters:
* Madame is a rich and very beautiful lady. She's very young, around 25, and she has quite an immoral lifestyle, she goes out often at night and all.
* Claire and Solange are her housemaids. They're sisters, and their age is somewhere between 30 and 35. Their appearance is quite ugly and grotesque, they're not attractive at all. They both hate and envy Madame and often think of murdering her.

The relationship between Claire and Solange:
* Claire is the younger sister of Solange
* codependence on each other
* Claire is afraid of Solange
* taking turns of playing Madame in their roleplaying rituals

Originally my partner and I planned that I would play Claire and she would be Solange, but our teacher advised us to swap roles because in Blood Brothers I'm playing the less dominant character, so in this scene it should be the opposite. So now that I know for sure that my character is going to be Solange, I will soon start working on the analysis.

Evita
The main idea is that we're going to be people at a public mourning for Eva Perón. Since I know very little about the musical Evita, I still need to look it up, but I don't really have time for that at the moment. All I know is that Eva Perón was a real person from Argentina, who lived in the 20th century and was a politician and also an actress.

BCA Week 13

This week we finally started to put the whole show together. The first song on the list is my solo song from Frozen, followed by a couple of other solos and then the group songs.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

This one is still one of the best exam pieces; even our teachers said that this week. Since the choreography is already complete, we have nothing else to do with it apart from practising a lot.

Grease

First of all, I think the choreography for Greased Lightning/Summer Nights works quite well. I'm not doing lots of movement in this one, so it was quite easy for me to learn it. We Go Together, however, didn't go very well this week. I had been struggling with the dancing part ever since the first time I saw it. It's only a couple of seconds, but still, it's a bit too fast for me, I was never really good at dancing. I'm not the only one though; when we rehearsed this piece this week, almost everybody in the class did the choreography incorrectly. We only did the first half of the song, so we still need to set up the rest of the choreography later.

Frozen - Let it Go

I performed my solo song again this week. My teachers are thinking about using a shortened version of the song instead of the original. To be honest, I'm not sure that would be as powerful as singing the whole song, but I'll go with whatever they say. As for the choreography, I'm still not sure what exactly to do. My teachers will probably get some more people from the class to support me in the backgound and/or join in the chorus the song, but we will discuss it next week. I like the idea because that would boost up the visuals a little bit.

Chicago

We couldn't rehearse Cell Block Tango this week because some people of the group were absent. I really hope they keep practising while being away; some people are still having issues with the backing track because it's faster than the one we had previously used, but I think it's only a matter of listening to it as many times as possible, and if it's still confusing, they can just look it up on the internet, I'm sure they'll find somebody covering that version of the backing track.

All That Jazz was eventually dropped from the programme,  I'm not very disappointed, to be honest, I'm not really a fan of that song, and I didn't even have a big part in it, but I know that some other people of the group worked really hard on it, especially the girl who takes the led in it, so I feel sorry for them.

Blood Brothers

We performed our scenes from Blood Brothers to the class and the teachers this week, and got some pretty useful feedback. I was told that I have too big face expressions; I overdo it sometimes, which can make a verious scene kind of funny. To improve this, I was advised to practise in front of a mirror.

The Maids

We did the first reading of our second drama scene with my partner. We haven't started working on the visuals yet - the teachers said that the scene is going to be cut later, so we're not going to perform the whole dialogie but some parts of it. I still need to do the analysis of my character and read a lot more about the play itself, but unfortunately I haven't had time for it and I don't think I will in the next two weeks or so.

BCA Week 12

The Rocky Horror Picture Show

This week we continued working on the choreography of Time Warp and Sweet Transvertite. At first I didn't really like Time Warp, but since we finished coreographing it and started to put it all together with everybody else, I kind of started to like it more and more, and eventually it became one of my favourite pieces from the whole exam show. The others must feel the same, because I can see that everybody truly enjoys performing this song.

Frozen - Let It Go

This week I performed my solo song for the first time with the teachers and my classmates being present. I think it was okay, my only problem is the choreography; it looks so amazing in the movie with all the special effects, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have the same result on stage. I looked up on Youtube if there is a stage version or anything of this song, and I found this pretty amazing video of  Disney's Hollywood Studios:

I think it will be useful for me to watch it again a couple of times for creating my own choreography.

Chicago

We performed All That Jazz and Cell Block Tango to the class and the teachers. Cell Block Tango went quite well despite the fact that eventually we'll use a different backing track during the exam than the one we'd been using when practicing with the group. The exam track is a lot faster that the one we got used to, but I didn't have any problem with that, since apart from the speed of the rhythm everything else is more or less the same. All That Jazz was a bit more confusing, though, because not only the track is very fast, but also the lyrics go differently, so it didn't go well at all.

The Maids

My partner and I've been working on our first dialogue from Blood Brothers since the beginning of the course, and we've improved quite a lot since we first rehearsed the scene, so it was time for us to get our second piece for the exam. After I got the script in class, I took some time to read through and try to find out what it could be about, but it looked so weird and meaningless that I decided to just leave it for later when I'm back home. The only thing we did with my partner was deciding who plays which character. Mine is going to be Claire. We didn't get any background information about the play from the teachers, the only thing I knew about the scene is the names of the two characters and the title of the play, which is "The Maids". I'd never heard about it before, but since we had some spare time in class to familiarize ourselves with the text, I tried to make a very basic character analysis based on only the information found in the script. This is what I got in class:

• the two girls are housemaids
• they are sisters
• they hate their employer
• in this scene they are about to perform a kind of weird secret ritual

After this, I looked it up at home and found out that it's a 20th century French play (the original title is Les Bonnes) written by Jean Genet, first performed in 1947. Later in 1974, a film of the same title was also made based on this play. It is indeed about two sisters who are both housemaids of the same house and secretly perform ritual role-plays about killing their Madame.