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.

BCA Week 6

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").

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.