Blog post 3

Character Profile
We began the week by creating our character profiles in note form; my basic acknowledgements of Rachel is that she is confident, loud, fiery and not afraid to be individual. She protests for what she believes in which at the time is student fees.
We then went on to explore into the different relationships that Rachel has with the other characters. For example;
Amir and Rachel (boyfriend and girlfriend). They have a good relationship however in some scenes it wavers. They know each other well and they also know how to tease the other and they enjoy each others company.

Workshops
Our first activity was "balancing the plate". All 18 of us stood in a circle with a water bottle as our center point. Two or three people start to create a smaller circle which is the rim of our plate. We then had to balance out the plate; whilst adding more weight to different points on the plate. This exercise got us to use teamwork between those on the plate. We had to concentrate on where the other people were stood to ensure that the plate wasn't unbalanced. This could be used for some scenes in '13' as it keeps the scene interesting and moving instead of static. Stories can be told from just the movement of circling each other such as confrontation or an disagreement. This could be used in one of the scenes with Rachel and Amir because the circling could represent looking out for one another and the circle of the plate meaning infinitive love and care.

We learnt about stagecraft in Principles of Acting. Stagecraft is the balance of a performance with actors.
We played around with actors being an obstacle for the others objective. We had two actors on stage and one had to stop the other from leaving the room. This gave us an insight in what bits we had to dig into for our character profiles. We had to identify our personal characters objectives in a selection of scenes and also what their obstacle is whether it be a person or a scenario that just took place ie Amir getting arrested would be an obstacle for Rachel and her objective is to find out where he is.

We then continued to develop 13...
We each had to research a certain topic related to '13', we then had to put this into a form of presentation and present it. My group, Hannah, Soph and I researched a mixture of sections. Soph decided to put this all onto a poster to make it more interesting for the audience adding images, 3-D objects and using lots of coloured pens. We researched into Mike Bartlett himself, such as the fact that he studied Theatre and English at the University of Leeds and we listed a few of his plays and his awards for these plays. We then spoke about our individual characters, talking about their characteristics. We then focussed on the political side of '13' such as the London riots, the coalition of David Cameron and Nick Clegg and the influences of Margaret Thatcher; also basing these political views around the character Ruth. We then pin pointed the three countries in geographical problems. The three being Britain, America and Iran. The religious views of '13' were then discussed, such as Christianity, Sir Christopher. I, then personally added my own views on '13' such as how I pictured '13' as a huge jigsaw puzzle with the mixtures of all the characters and then once John returns he is like the last piece to the puzzle whom then fits the play together as such. I then wrote bullet points of the themes in the play as a summary and also featured the topic of Love Actually (the film) which was used in class as similar to '13' due to the insights of the characters.

In our rehearsal session this week we covered Act One Scene Fifteen as a group (Me, Brandon, Frank, Milo and Soph.) Previously, I found this scene very static and boring as the actors, including me, were just stood speaking and not much movement was featured. However after the 'balancing the plate' exercise. I came up with the idea that we layed out our scene like the 'balancing the plate'. The scene began (as you can see in the video attached) with me and Brandon entering the stage. The circle is created by Brandon (playing Amir) rushing over to the other side of the circle when he gets frustrated with Rachel. We then slowly walk round the edge of the circle and then meet in the middle when he asks me "is he ok?". We do this because it shows that we care about John and finally agree on helping him. The scene continues in the plate effect as John and Mark enter and meet in the middle when they have their own two-way conversation. However, when Shannon enters, out of breath and in a hurry the circle explodes outwardly as though she has just jumped on the plate making it jump too. At the end of the scene, as John leaves Rachel and Amir stand together on the right side of the stage as John exits from the left side. Shouting his last few lines as he goes. When we showed this to Karen she helped us neaten it up but apart from that she really liked it. I felt so pleased with myself because I managed to change the scene that I disliked to one of my favourites, partly knowing because it was my idea but because its now more interesting for the audience as they have plenty of things to be watching.