Performance Blog #2

10/31

We do the first run-through of our scene today. From other groups’ performances and the feedbacks we get, I do learned a lot, and make a brief summary about the improvements can be progressed in the following. Firstly, while I am saying my lines, I should slow down, and pronounce each word more correctly and clearly in order to make my performance more natural and realistic instead of reading the lines really quick like a machine without emotion. For reaching this goal, I think me and my partner Marinda should do more practice on reading the lines out loud and slowly with following the video in the ebook since both of us are international students. We can find more videos on the Youtube to listen to those actors’ pronunciations in order to correct ours. Secondly, I should have more movements or body language to show Juliet’s feelings like desperation or hopefulness rather than just standing there. Gia and Dilyara’s group leaves me a deep impression on this point: Gia uses many movements like walking around, or stepping forward to Dilyara to show Juliet’s anxiety to hear the news about Romeo; Dilyara also applies many body language like sagging wearily back into the chair to show Nurse’s weariness at the beginning when she just comes back. We might need to further read between the lines as well as watching more videos of others’ performances about this scene so that we can catch up more details and have some natural reactions while saying the lines. Lastly,  we need to figure out many details about blocking that haven't set up yet, like what’s Friar doing before Juliet enters, as well as the props we haven't prepared such as the vail and knife. 

11/1

From a bunch of useful feedbacks we got from yesterday’s performance, we make a discussion on each of those points I listed above. To start our improving progress, we read through the lines over and over again with using the video from the ebook as a reference. We both take some notes in between the lines to further analyze the character’s feelings. For example, since we cut out the previous part about Paris in the scene, Juliet’s feelings would directly reach a climax from the beginning. Thus, at the start, I wrote down “rush into the door with crying — despair and sadness.” It is absolutely going to be very difficult to have such strong and full emotion from the beginning, and that is what I need to focus on practicing. I might need to figure out a way to lead myself into Juliet’s mind before the play. At the end of class, we also were asked to highlight some lines and mark the feelings which exist there, which further help us to understand our character and feel their feelings. 

11/3

Today, we start our practice with a brief run-through of the scene with adding many movements from the notes we wrote down yesterday as well as some pause, specific tone throughout the lines. Besides, we mostly focus on memorizing and writing down the lines. Shakespeare’s language is very tricky. There are many abbreviations or some words like old English such as “when thou hast done so” or “if what thou speak’st speak not or remedy”. It is a great challenge for us to read it fluently as well as memorizing it. But, we almost finished memorizing all the scripts at the end of the class.