BCA Week 5

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

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

Blood Brothers

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

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

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

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

Chicago - Cell Block Tango

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

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

BCA Week 4

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

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

The facts:

* working class; housekeeper/cleaning lady of Mrs Lyons

* very young (about 30 years old)

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

* religious (Catholic)

* her husband left her

* family-oriented; loves her children more than anything

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

Some conclusions:

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

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

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

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

Stratford High School's Stratford Playhouse, 2014:

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

Broadway Backwards, 2015:

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

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

BCA Week 1 and 2

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

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

WEEK 1

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

WEEK 2

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

WEEK 3

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

I Should Update More Often

Featured in Darren Harkin's upcoming film Ghost Sleuth. Here is the trailer:

Hayfield

I didn't have internet this evening. Nor friends around, or anyone to talk to. So I just...

"Do not cross the hayfield, the hayfield, the hayfield,

Do not cross the hayfield as sinks the blood red sun.

Ghosts glide from the hayrick on the hayfield, the hayfield,

Ghosts glide from the hayrick in the eerie glow."

The Living And The Dead – Charlotte and Nathan Appleby. Best pairing ever. Best soundtrack ever. Most gorgeous film set ever. And weirdest cliffhanger ever.
Besides, I didn't know I was still able to use Photoshop properly. This is good news.

Special thanks to IKEA for the pencil.

Some Acting News

It's been a while again.

Since the last time I wrote here, I have finished a short film, Connection in Letterkenny, the town where I first lived when I moved to Ireland. It brought back good memories, especially about the An Grianán Theatre and the acting group I was a member of more than a year ago. I didn't meet old friends unfortunately, but I got to know a lot of cool people during the filming, and I enjoyed the whole thing.

I started a new acting course, a Stanislavski workshop series lead by Tom Finlay, our director from Belfast Tempest. The group is more or less the same from BT, with a couple of new members, and it's fun. I remember learning about Stanislavski in the university; I had to read An Actor Prepares for a theoretical course a couple of years ago, but I couldn't really make any sense of it. I think Stanislavski can't really be understood unless you try the method in practice when you act.

Also, I'll attend a stage combat course in less than one month – something I've been dreaming of doing for a long time! I used to do fencing in secondary school for a few years, and I always enjoyed it. Hopefully stage combat is something similar; I was sent the course desrciption and we're going to use a rapier amongst other stuff, so it's super exciting for me.

I keep auditioning all the time, and I've had tons of good experiences so far. For example, at first I thought that I'd have no chance at all with my weird native accent, but I realised that people actually enjoy listening to my accent. I always get positive feedback on auditions; last month I read for a character with Southern Irish accent, and I wasn't really able to do it. But the casting director was like "actually it's not that important for your character to have Southern Irish accent" and I was asked for a callback this week. Wow. The auditions are held in Derry, and I love taking the train from Belfast to Derry because of this:

And this:

And did I mention this?

And it seems that Shakespeare just won't leave me alone (I'll be the next Kenneth Branagh, ha ha ha); I was recently cast in a stage adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. It's not a big role, but an important one, and considering that English is not my first language and I didn't go to drama school, it is a huge thing indeed. Besides, it is acting, and I haven't done acting for weeks now, and I hate having breaks, so I'm happy to play any part, no matter how small it is.

Garden of Cats

I didn't know this garden existed, I just happened to take a walk at Cave Hill yesterday. I remembered one of my friends had suggested that I visit the Belfast Castle, and so I did.

image source

(Sorry about not using my own picture. Unfortunately I couldn't take a good quality photo of this sign, but it's quite an important part of the garden, so I really wanted to put it here.)

This garden is one of the best places I've ever seen in my life. Not only because I love cats; this would be a gorgeous sight even without the sculptures and all the other stuff. The view is amazing, the castle itself is adorable, not to mention the road up to the top of the hill, which is like walking in a peaceful and lovely forest far from the city. Definitely must see. It's called, as you can read above, the Cat Garden, and is located right next to the Belfast Castle. It's free to visit, though it's a bit far from the city centre, you might just want to take a bus or cycle instead of walking.

I didn't stay to find all of the nine cats, because it was already getting dark by the time I got there, but I took photos of a couple of them.

This is my absolute favourite:

Really; those whiskers are just so hilarious, and so is the tail – I wish I had a garden so that I could have a bush like this. And here's the next one:

This fellow is having a nap at the edge of the fountain in the middle of the garden. You can just sit next to the cat and literally spend hours enjoying the view of the sea.

I just wanted to take a photo of those pretty stairs when I noticed there was a sculpture of a white cat on the pic:

Can you spot it?

The castle, the wall and the garden. Fancy.

The legend says that anyone who visits the castle will have good fortune as long as a cat lives nearby. I haven't seen a single cat apart from the sculptures and mosaics, but I had mine with me, so I hope that's enough for my good fortune.

My dear friend enjoyed this garden just as much as I :) The view is stunning, I'm just so sad I didn't go earlier, it was too dark... I could have done so much better photos.

Man Plans

Brilliant new trailer to our upcoming show, including a tiny piece of opportunity to take an admiring glance at the back of my hair as well as at the most ridiculous facial expression I've ever made:

I just really hope I'll be able to get through this whole thing properly. I enjoy the rehearsals so much and I don't want to let all those wonderful people at Terra Nova down.

But man plans... And who knows what's going to happen in a month.

My future in this town seems to be completely gone anyways. And I guess it will take a while to build myself a new one. But I will.

Life-Update and Advertisements

It's been a while.

Here is my latest work ‒ a music video of Tusks - For You:

Great shots, I think. And I really enjoyed working with those guys. Being the only female cast member definitely has its benefits, you can have your own dressing room and all.

Also, if you're a Shakespeare fan, you can see me in Terra Nova Productions' Belfast Tempest in April. Check this out for more information:
http://www.terranovaproductions.net/belfast-tempest/

Anyway, tomorrow is Patrick's Day. I'm planning to see the parade, I've never been to one in my life, but I just don't know if I'll feel like doing it. My flatmate has gone home for this week, which means I'll be celebrating on my own; but I'm working at night, so I'll hopefully have a good time with my colleagues.

Living with an Actor

Things you can expect when your flatmate is an actor:

• She will knock on your door in the middle of night to ask for random objects that no normal person owns in their household such as plastic flowers or a viking ship, claiming that she needs them urgently for work by next morning.
• She will leave the house around 11pm to go to Tesco (the only place still open) and buy clothes, shoes or jewelry.
• She will randomly begin to run around the corridors screaming "I'm in! I'm in!"
• She will walk around the place murmuring, shouting, singing or whatever. Also, she will listen to very creepy random recordings.
• After a couple of months of living together with her, you will definitely know some full Shakespeare plays by heart.
• She will move around with a huge backpack all the time. Or with a folder. Or anything else that is capable of keeping CVs and headshots in it.
• She will talk to you in a different accent each time you start a conversation.

Get ready.