Lesson 5 - Monologues

Lesson 5 - Monologues
In this lesson we performed our monologues to the whole class. As usual, we started with two warm ups which got us into the mood of theatre. Splat and the improvisation game were our two picks for today, of which the improvisation game helped me the most because our Monday lessons are based on the topic improvisation. It also helps actors react to any situation they come across. For example, I was in a situation where my character jumped off a building on a burning trampoline. This kind of scenario is extremely different from what we are studying in class. This shows that acting isn't always the same character types: sad, happy or angry. It shows that there are so many different personalities in the world and to be able to portray the effectively we first need to know how they act and what they sense.

After we moved onto the monologues and I especially liked Amiya's performance. She built her monologue up with her character, not her. She used what she learned in class to accurately perform, in my opinion, the best monologue. The emotion that ran through her body clearly showed her character that she was acted which is very important in performing a monologue.

On the other hand, what I feel that most people, including myself, did while performing was trying to show emotion by using big actions. Although this can be effective while showing emotions related to happiness, most were sad or angry. To make the scenes better we need to be more subtle in our actions when showing sadness especially anger. A lot of people were throwing down chairs when the scene they were doing didn't have enough emotion in it for them to do this action. In reality, the characters would be more still and silent during sadness and if they were angry they would build up their feelings in the scene leading up to the final climax to release the emotion and return to a calmer state.

In conclusion, looking at other people's scenes has really made me think that acting appears like animals, in all different shapes and sizes. You make acting what you want it to be, if you want happiness in your scene then act happy, vice versa if you want anger as the emotion.