Week Twenty-Four: The Third Assignment

Junk

Monday 24th and Tuesday 25th March 2014

     The beginning of another week, following us completing our 'Shakespeare House Party' assignment, now came to an introduction to our third assignment piece.  From our two previous assignment work pieces we gave performances of productions such as 'Scaramouche Jones' and Shakespearean comedies performed in the style of a modern day house party.  Both assignment work pieces had us focusing on our physical and vocal skills on stage, and on Monday's lesson we were given our next assignment.  Our third assignment is around a production, based off a novel with the same title, and it focus' on the harsh reality of life, highlighting the problems and consequences of drugs, squatters and prostitution.  The play is titled 'Junk' written by Melvin Burgess, and adapted to stage by John Retallack.

     The story follows two teenage characters named Tar and Gemma, both characters are in a relationship and the story is based around them both running away from their home town called “Minely-On-Sea” to Bristol.  When arriving at Bristol, they meet a group of characters who live the life of squatters and have possession and use of illegal drugs, such as Heroin which they refer to as “Junk”.  The plot follows the characters as their lives go from bad to worse and how they live in this harsh reality.

     Starting the lesson with a few warm up games to bring everyone back into focus and preparing us for the surprises that were in stall for us ahead.  Then spending the second half of the lesson being introduced to the play and we were all given our performing roles.  Going through each character and the job roles each cast member would have to take on; such as taking on more than one role, as well as having one character being played by two actors (this is known as a dual cast).  Our teacher explained that there were some lead characters that had a lot of script and stage choreography learning, thus making it too difficult for one actor to take on.  It also allows our teacher to view how capable these actors are in taking a lead role and withstanding the responsibility of delivering a decent performance.  I, on the other hand, was given the role of the character named 'Vonny'.  Originally written as a female character we were able to alter the script as to make the character a male so I would suit the role and make it more believable.  Once each cast member was listed we began our read through of the entire script.  With each member of the group reading their lines and our teacher reading the stage directions we managed to complete the read through and receive a full understanding of the plot and what type of characters we were to be portraying.  Monday’s lesson ended with each member of the tutor group feeling confident and excited with our new assignment piece.

     Tuesday’s lesson came, we started as per usual with a warm up exercise and game, these were essential for this assignment, as we received our results from our Shakespeare assignment and the main improvements highlighted for each member of the tutor group was our physical and vocal skills.  These warm up exercises had us increase the movement throughout our entire body, and vocal exercises such as the “why fly so high” technique which has us using different phrases with different tones of voices.  Once the exercises were finished we were given our assignment brief.  The assignment brief told us the plan of the production process and what was needed of us.  What we needed to accomplish for this assignment in particular was to have full attendance, total focus, deadline meetings and above all originality.  What our wanted us to appreciate was the originality that some actors take in performing roles, such as visually having their own ideas of what the setting of the play would look like and what their own character would look like and what their origins were.  For understanding their character they do have the script at hand to study and understand their character, but if there was little detail in where the character was from and what their past was like, the director of the play would have to rely on the actor’s originality to give a decent portrayal on stage.  

     Our teacher also explained that our Physical Theatre lessons would also have an input towards the production process.  The reason being is that physical theatre allows an individual to highlight, understand and notice what their physical structure is like and how they can alter it to the style of a character completely different to their own.  In the past physical theatre has helped vastly in making us understand our own physical movement and how we can alter our movement in the style of a character completely different to our own.  For example, in our ‘Scaramouche Jones’ assignment physical theatre helped us to understand what type of clown we were in our own physical movement, and how we could create our own clown to portray the character on stage for the main performance.  This helped vastly and assisted in achieving a decent grade for the assignment.  So how was physical theatre going to help us with our ‘Junk’ assignment?  The idea was to have our physical theatre sessions focusing on how we were to physically move on stage with showing the stages the characters were going through, being on drugs and resulting to prostitution.  As well as the session helping in increasing our visual imagery of how the staging would look for the main audience and make the story more convincing.

     As Tuesday’s lesson came to an end, we were given some homework.  Our task in the homework was to print off some images, from the Internet, looking at the following.  Bristol Town Centre, Squatters, Drugs, Domestic Violence, Prostitution, and Sea Side Towns.  We had to hand in images (a minimum of one) from each of these categories.  These categories all come from our understanding of the pay and they all represent the important themes in which bring the whole play to a structure to telling the story.  The reason being, for printing these images, is to help us get a decent understanding of what the setting would look like and what we could do to present this view on stage to give that extra bit of realism for the main performance.

     Finally our week ended on Wednesday with a physical theatre session with us watching video’s which look at the 1980s and 90s punk era and what people dressed like and who their heroes were.  This helped in us understanding what the people of that time were like and how we could, in some way, relate to it in making our characters on stage real.  With this video out of the way, our physical theatre teacher spoke to us all about convincing and improvised acting.  We then learnt how these elements can make a performance convincing to show emotions that bring a deeper feeling so the audience are on the characters side.  I felt this technique was very helpful as it was able to help in present a realistic performance.

     When this week came to an end I felt confident with the technique I learnt in Physical Theatre in how I could present a decent and slightly more convincing performance on stage.  But mainly I was excited for receiving both the results of our ‘Shakespeare’s House Party’ assignment, and of course receiving the assignment brief and script for ‘Junk’.