TED TALK Task One

·      Devising    

My first real devising experience was working for The Globe Theatre in Stockton at Halloween 2023. During this we had nothing to go off, we had no script or anything, no one to tell us what to do, all we had was the globe itself and the history it came with. Therefore, we used that to our advantage, we utilised all that amazing and creepy history of ‘The Globe’ to devise an amazing Halloween event. The event managed to take the audience through years and years of history and told a story of ‘The Globe’, where you see events that had occurred: like the Beatles fans going crazy, horror pictures, creepy owners and a weird bartender. Whom I happened to be playing. Everyone in the class all had a say in what happened, we all came up with ideas as we researched the history of ‘The Globe’. Once we had done our research, we came back to Kelly to convey our ideas of what we thought could go well. We developed our ideas to improve the piece and implemented so much into one night. 

·       Improvisation  

In terms of improvisation, I have experienced this quite a bit in class with various improv games. During these games you would enter a scene without anything and just run with the scene as best you could. This allowed us to practice our improvisation in case something were to happen on stage, you could forget a line and need to say anything to make the scene continue. One of the best examples of improvisation is forgetting your lines during a performance or when you have no script at all. This also happened at ‘The Globe’ when we created and performed for our Halloween Event. Now and again children or just members of the audience would say something or talk to me as it was an interactive experience, there was no script to run off and you had no idea what they would say to you. I had to manage to stay in character and go along with it. I did find this quite hard but, in the end, I managed to trust myself that I could do this and actually it worked out really well.

·       Directing

 Directing is something we nearly always end up doing as actors in a scene. We may have ideas and as a team we share practice these ideas, some of them may work and some may not. Nevertheless, it is good to share your ideas, as you never know if they could make a scene, that didn’t have much, and those ideas could make it amazing. Even when we do small group projects and have smaller scripts, I have taken charge and posited what could be done, ideas and directions for other actors of what I think would go well. Our biggest piece is our production of ‘Yolo’, which is our own creation for the theatre, one without Kelly helping us direct. We as a team have had to put a play together, we picked a National Theatre script and are all helping to direct and bring it all together. 

·       Writing

We have done some pieces for the National Theatre now, I was not a part of this group, but I did attend some of their lessons and taken the advice of Kelly to use it for some of my university auditions. For my audition at Royal Central School of Speech and Drama I had to devise my own monologue based on a piece of art and these lessons helped me with that. To see the devised piece I wrote for my audition please click here! 

·       Monologues

In the time I have spent at Stockton Riverside College I have performed many monologues. For every audition we had to perform a monologue, this has really helped me to develop and hone my skills. Over the past three years, the many monologues I have performed have helped me to understand monologues, to break them down, so that when it comes down to it, we can actually understand how to use them fully. For instance, my biggest monologue in my opinion was for ‘Blood Brothers’, which I confess was a struggle to master. In spite of this, I got there and was able to deliver my monologue and land one of the main parts, ‘Mickey’. In addition to this, the repeated exposure to auditioning with monologues had helped me to prepare and perform in my auditions for university. Furthermore, we have developed our understanding and skills via workshops on monologues with LAMDA.

·       Dialogues

We have done plenty of dialogue work, most notably in our previous end of year production ‘Blood Brothers’, where there are quite a few intense dialogues. We have also focused on a few this year from ‘Dear Evan Hansen’.

·       Voice Overs

This year we explored voice over work by performing a radio drama. We looked at how voice over work was done and then performed ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’, we not only had to be all the characters but all of the noises, even the animals.  

·       Singing

We have not done a great deal of singing in our work, the bits we have done include singing in a Christmas production at ‘The Globe’, Stockton. In this production we were singing Christmas carols. As well as this we have had lessons from Tom on singing whilst acting.

·       Stage Combat

Please click here to see a video of our stage combat

In terms of stage combat we haven’t had much experience apart from lessons with Tom. In these lessons Tom showed us how we could fight on stage and make it look realistic from certain angles.

·       Presentations or Practitioners

In our class we have created PowerPoint presentations on a variety of chosen practitioners. For example, I presented on Stanislavsky, in this presentation we had to learn about our practitioner and teach the rest of the class about them.  

 

·       Camera Work

We have done lots of work for camera. I have performed in short films, adverts and most recently, a pilot episode of a boxing series that Kelly wrote. Please see my previous blog posts for more information about my camera work.