Performance Log #1

While I was absent, I spent a lot of time going over in my head what I wanted to achieve in my scene and with my partners. While I was gone, I thought that despite having amazing group partners, it would be harder for me to use my ideas in the scene since they had been working on it without me. However, I was overjoyed when I returned to class; my scene partners are not only amazing, they are open to change. When we finally got to work together, everything seemed to fall into place.

When I returned to class, the first thing my group did was discuss our ideas for costuming. While this may seem not as important as blocking, it actually helped us analyze and visualize our characters together. We were able to incorporate our ideas together, and create something that made us all equally as happy. Now that we had a goal for what we wanted our characters to look like, we did decided to focus more on our set. When we finished discussing costumes, we moved on to what staple items we wanted to have on the set. We decided that in order to establish the fact that the scene takes place in Juliet’s bedroom that we would need a bed, a dresser and two different doors (or in this case, exists).  

However, what really made our scene click is when we drew out our staging. This not only gave my group a physical idea of what we wanted our stage to look like, it also made it easier to block our movements. As we went through the scene with our “new” set, we could really focus in on each individual line and figure out what movements and blocking we wanted to happen during them. Nothing was decided without talking about it, we discussed our propose for moving when we did and how it would help the other actors in the scene.

When we began to read through the script multiple times with the blocking, more emotion was developing in our lines. Anger (Lord Capulet), despair (Juliet), and hopefulness (Lady Capulet), three main feelings from each of the characters, were starting to show in our scene. Because we now had the fundamentals to our blocking precisely as we wanted them, there was more room to include the emotion.

I also think that once we are able to run through our scene on the actual stage, it will fall even more into place. However, not one strategy we have tried has failed and think overall, we are a great group that is open to change, works well, and understands who are characters are. That being said, I want us to push ourselves in our scene. There is always room for improvement, and I would like to see us always trying to make the scene better. So far, I think my group is off to a great start and I look forward to seeing what we do with together.