Little Woman Week One

Candidate Declaration - I confirm that the attached portfolio is all my own workTo start off our final performance of the year we proceeded with what we thought would be the hardest for us as actors. Which was the fact that in this production we had to dance, this was always going to be scary for some of us. A lot of us aren’t really dancers and in this case, I am of course talking about myself. However, it wasn't anything actually that bad, Tom taught us how to do a period dance and it was actually quite easy to learn. Alan was the first person to show me how to do it and I thought I picked it up pretty quickly. I then moved to a different partner, Millie, who is my ‘Jo’ in the production so that worked out well. Nevertheless, I soon was told that I was apparently not the best dancer, as Millie just couldn’t stop laughing at me when we were practicing. I was determined to get this right, so after a couple more practices I had a greater understanding of it and felt that I had it down.

Furthermore, on this day we worked on our own little dance as ours was different to everyone else’. The dance between my character of ‘Laurie’ and ‘Jo’ had to be freer, we were to take the mick out of it. We had fun practicing our dance, trying different things, and messing around with it, laughing, and looking as if we might be falling for each other. Kelly said we had really good chemistry and it looked great, so we were very happy with that. 

For the rest of the week, we had a guest in called David, who used to go to our college a few years ago. Kelly knew him, so he came back to talk about the life of an actor and what he had experienced in his time. David was also going to be teaching us some tips and techniques for the future in order for us to further help us understand our characters. On the first day, he taught us about being animals and all about how they moved and interacted in certain situations. So, to start with we had to pick an animal from a zoo and become that animal. We had to sleep like that animal and wake up like that animal and move around like that animal. It was all very confusing at the time, the reason as to why we were doing it. Then we mixed switching from that animal but then we had to tone it down, so we went from ten being fully that animal, to a 5 being part human and part that animal, to 1 being barley that animal. We had to move around the room switching between them, this was so we knew how to change from being dramatic to less so quickly if we needed to. As well as this we had a scene where we needed to go into a night club as these animals, I guess it was really about taking us out of our comfort zones. We had to be a mix of human and animal for this which was interesting to try and handle. 

On day two we started off with a workout session, which was fun for me. I like a good workout, not everyone however loved it. The workout itself was very easy and a good way to have our energy pumping. For the rest of the day, we worked on ‘Last Resort’, David ran through one scene that we all had and offered us some advice about how to go big on these characters. For example, we had our surfer dude scene, and I wanted my character to be the high one. David offered me some advice and that was to just to go bigger with it, don’t hold back and make it as funny as possible. Even though it was simple advice, it helped me a lot, to just put me in the right headspace and it went really well. Everyone was laughing their heads off, so it went really well. Everything David did with us was a great help.