And it's fine that you're the one who stays with her at night,
And that each week, she checks your rota first, not mine.
But please,
I'm begging you,
Don't you ever let her down.
Keep her happy.
For me.
For you.
Because she's everything to me,
And, in a different way,
She's everything to you.
And you're everything to her.
So please.
Give her all the things I couldn't give her.
Be her soulmate.
Be her best friend.
Be her whole world.
Don't ever leave her.
Be her family.
Marry her.
Give her children.
Make her happy.
Make her forget about me,
Because I don't need her grief or her guilt.
I just need her to be happy
With you.
Long time no see.
I've spent some time today to go through a couple of old files, and I've found some interesting things including a poem I've written back in 2016, after my then-squish found a romantic partner and left me behind. Because yeah, I'm on the aromantic spectrum. I don't even know if this counts as coming out, I've been quite open about it on other platforms for the last couple of years. Oh, and I know Pride month is just about to be over, but better late than never.
Yes, I've seen that movie. No, this post is not about it.
I'd been thinking about creating a YouTube channel for a while, but I thought I wouldn't really use it for anything interesting and probably wouldn't have anyone interested in my stuff that much. But then I was told by a couple of people it'd be cool if they could listen to my originals online, so I uploaded my first video a couple of days ago. Not such a big thing, though, not even a professional recording, but still it's mine. Go ahead and enjoy. If you can. And share it to make your friends suffer, too.
My new short film The Two of Us by Kullas Media is out. One of my most enjoyed roles and definitely the most challenging filming process I've ever taken part in. Check out this gorgeous poster.
This weekend I'm going to play the Second Witch in The Bright Umbrella Drama Company's production of Macbeth at the Moira Calling festival. Tickets can be bought here. If you cannot make it this weekend, we'll also be performing at the end of September in the Accidental Theatre in Belfast.
I passed my drama exam. That was, let's see... two months ago. It wasn't as tough as I'd expected.
Also, some other things happened that I haven't written about yet. For example, I finally got an opportunity to visit the Giant's Causeway in, I guess, April or May (yes, I know, long time ago). I took some photos of course.
In June I made a very important decision in my life: I bought myself a ukulele. That's been the best thing I've done for my happiness in a while. It's a wonderful little instrument, very easy to play and carry around. Also, sounds lovely. I got a Makala MK-S, which is not too expensive but very basic. I'm planning to get an electro acoustic one as well so that I can play at open mic nights and all.
This was our last week before the performance of The Sound of Musicals, which means that we didn't really do anything else but practiced the whole show and fixed the details that had to be fixed. Also, I spent some time during the week to get a costume for Let It Go, and I was quite worried for a while because I found nothing, but in the last minute I managed to get a dress and also a tiara.
It was quite an exhausting week, especially the weekend, because I had to work all day on Friday and Saturday, and we had an extra rehearsal on Sunday right before the actual performance. I think the show went very well apart from some tiny mistakes, but those always happen, even with professional actors.
Frozen – Let It Go
The Rocky Horror Picture Show – Time Warp
On Friday I was extra busy, because I had a modelling job for the morning up at the north coast. It was quite interesting as I've never done any professional modelling before, but I got very tired by the end of it because the weather was unusually hot and the sunlight was very strong. I even got sunburnt pretty badly by the end of it even though I put on suncream in the morning before I left home. But it was worth, because the pictures are awesome. I'm even allowed to use them as headshots, so I'm really happy :)
As for Blood Brothers and The Maids, I didn't really have time to work on either of them before Sunday, but I tried to read the scene from The Maids as often as possible to memorise the lines.
On Monday I finally had enough time to work on that last monologue of The Maids. The first thing I did about it was finding out the objectives. The objective of the whole monologue is that Solange wants Claire to hurry up with the preparations so that they can start the actual ritual, because she wants it to be finished before Madame comes back home. Earlier in the play (not in our scene) she and Claire talk about spending too much time on the "preliminaries", the preparations and introduction of their roleplay, and that's why they don't ever get to the end of their ritual (which is the murder of Madame). She intends to skip those parts to have more time for the main part of the ceremony: the insults and then the actual murder. In the second part of the monologue she tells how excited she is about getting rid of Madame. The reason for her excitement must be that, as the sisters also mention in other parts of the play, killing Madame would make them "free". They sort of see themselves as slaves. On the other hand, I think Solange already knows during this monologue that she won't be strong enough to finish the ceremony and it has to be Claire who actually murders Madame.
I'm struggling again with timekeeping for my diary, and I was sick for a few days, so I'll write only a short summary of the last three weeks. But to be honest, there's not really a lot to write about, because we didn't do much that's worth mentioning. This doesn't mean we're not working hard, we simply don't do many new things but mostly work on the existing pieces. As the performance is in a couple of weeks time, the teachers have been focusing mainly on the musical pieces rather than on the exam dialogues, but we still have plenty of time to practice our scenes with our partners on our own.
Week 17
This week we mostly focused on the choreographies of the group songs. We did a little bit of everything including both the solo songs and the group stuff. As somebody is always absent and we never have the full cast, it can be quite difficult sometimes to do the rehearsals of the group songs: one day you're standing between two people in a formation, then the next day there's somebody else next to you, which is really confusing. But apart from these difficulties, the whole show is getting better and better.
The Maids
I've finally finished reading the play, which took me surprisingly long. The language of the play is quite difficult to understand, and also the general idea is a little bit absurd and confusing, but it still helped me more to understand what exactly is going on in our exam scene and what sort of character I will be playing. Solange is very dominant, she's almost controlling her sister, but actually she is probably weaker than Claire – for example, she is definitely not brave enough to finish the ritual and murder Madame, in spite of hating her a lot more than her sister does. So she is quite a complex and interesting character.
Week 18
I didn't go to the rehearsal this week, so I used the extra time to work on my analysis of Solange. I did the same thing what I did for Mrs Johnston: writing at least ten fact about the character in first person:
My name is Solange. I work as a maid. I live in my madame's house. I have a younger sister Claire who also works at the same place. I am not very attractive-looking. I am more dominant than my sister, she usually obeys me because she is afraid of me. I love my sister. I hate Madame. I envy her youth and beauty and wealth. I am performing secret rituals with my sister about murdering Madame. I've never managed to finish these rituals, because I'm not brave enough to murder Madame.
Week 19
This week we went through the whole show from the beginning to the end. My solo song is going to be the first one, so my teacher said that is must be as powerful as possible. I hope I'll be able to manage. I got a couple of general advices about moving on stage such as:
* I should try to picturize the lyrics using my hands, body movements, gestures etc.
* when I have to stand still, I have to try to stay completely still without moving with the rhythm of the song
One huge difference between playing in a play and singing in a musical is that you have to use a lot more gestures and move a lot more in general while you're performing a song. When you're acting, you normally don't have walk around that much. Because I haven't had many experience in professional singing before (in this case singing in a church choir doesn't really count as experience, I think, even if it was a professional choir), I still need to get used to this, so I spent pretty much of my free time practicing Let It Go during the last few weeks.
The Maids
Since my partner and I had some time on our own this week, we sat down and discussed the play and I also had enough time to work on the objectives of Solange during the scene. Here they are:
Line 1: wants to play Madame
Line 2: doesn't want to take the apron
Line 3: wants to insult her (as a part of the roleplay)
Line 4: doesn't want the apron, but wants the ritual to be realistic – wants Claire to put out the light
Line 5: wants her to obey
Line 6: wants her to stop saying those things
Line 7: wants to know what she means
Line 8: wants her not to care about Madame
Line 9: wants her to be quiet
Line 10: wants her to take her seriously
Line 11: wants her to continue
Line 12: wants her to feel scared
Line 13: wants her to be scared and ashamed
Line 14: wants her to stop talking about God
Line 15: wants her to calm down
Line 16: wants to perform the ritual and this time eventually finish it
As for Line 16, which is the short monologue, I'm planning to make a more detailed analysis, because that's the part of the scene I'm struggling the most with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just read out the lines loud.
Read out the lines loud while walking around in the classroom. Stop and change direction every time you come to a punctuation mark.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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").
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.
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.
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.
