Unit 8 - Love and Information by Caryl Churchill
Unit 8 project proposal
Candidate Name: Diamontea Burton
Pathway: Level 3 Acting
Project Title: Final Major Project
Review
Throughout the course, I gave myself different objectives and what I'd want the audience to feel about my perspective. I believe I have conveyed exactly all the emotions I wanted to, I have developed useful skills throughout this unit such as empathy, honesty but respecting others views, becoming open minded, and understanding towards texts. I've worked on Brecht theories, such as minimalist sets, multi rolling and lighting. I have also worked on Stanislavski's techniques such as breaking the fourth wall; this is my favourite techniques as it gives you a chance to speak to the audience without breaking character. I feel as if I have gained more confidence within this year not through just my performances but also through my work as I have gained an understanding of what is required of an actor. I have also noticed I am interested in plays and writing plays because I look beyond just the lines, I pay attention to the subtext, genre and historic background the play.
Project Concept
Candidate Name: Diamontea Burton
Pathway: Level 3 Acting
Project Title: Final Major Project
Review
Throughout the course, I gave myself different objectives and what I'd want the audience to feel about my perspective. I believe I have conveyed exactly all the emotions I wanted to, I have developed useful skills throughout this unit such as empathy, honesty but respecting others views, becoming open minded, and understanding towards texts. I've worked on Brecht theories, such as minimalist sets, multi rolling and lighting. I have also worked on Stanislavski's techniques such as breaking the fourth wall; this is my favourite techniques as it gives you a chance to speak to the audience without breaking character. I feel as if I have gained more confidence within this year not through just my performances but also through my work as I have gained an understanding of what is required of an actor. I have also noticed I am interested in plays and writing plays because I look beyond just the lines, I pay attention to the subtext, genre and historic background the play.
Project Concept
Within this unit I would like to explore using techniques, structure and audiences perception within theatre. I intend to do this by making my character someone worth watching and someone you can learn from. I would also like to explore the issues of gender and sexuality by creating diversity within my cast and story lines. The play we are studying, love and information. We were given our scripts and looked at devising it into our own which allows us to add our own interpretations towards the scripts which is a technique from Brecht "Art is not a mirror with which to reflect reality but a hammer with which to shape it." This inspired me throughout the unit as it allowed me to use my own creative ability that I have gained through the year and not only educate the audience just on the sub-textual meanings within Love, Friendship, Pain, War, Mental Health; But educating them as a whole so they're aware of these things I have began to research these topics and will feedback to the rest of my group about what I've learnt and how this could be portrayed within our work.
Evaluation
When evaluating my work for this unit I will be looking back at previous notes, what I've learnt and collecting feedback from others on how the performance went. I will be making a summary on each scene I perform in just briefly just to show my progress. I will be looking at the negatives and positives of my performance. Also writing a 'what if' as in what would I have changed during the performance to make it better so next time when I perform, I can learn from previously
Evaluation
When evaluating my work for this unit I will be looking back at previous notes, what I've learnt and collecting feedback from others on how the performance went. I will be making a summary on each scene I perform in just briefly just to show my progress. I will be looking at the negatives and positives of my performance. Also writing a 'what if' as in what would I have changed during the performance to make it better so next time when I perform, I can learn from previously
Churchill, Caryl
Churchill is a British playwright, she was born 1938, London but spent majority of her childhood in Canada. During the 1950s studying in oxford she began to write her first ever plays but as she grew older she began to write for BBC Radio. She also worked within the Joint Stock Company and a radical feminist group monstrous regiment during the 1970s, which you could tell where most of her influences for her plays came from. Love and Information is a play written by the British playwright Churchill. The play is written in an episodic structure which creates a compilation of seven sections each with a number of scenes. The Play was first performed at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre, directed by James Macdonald. Churchill developed Brecht's modernist dramatic and theatrical techniques of Epic theatre to explore issues of gender and sexuality. Churchill wrote the play in an episodic structure to break the constructs between linear and non- linear structure, she does this to give those who read the play to make their own perceptions and add their own creativity towards the play. When first reading love and information it allows you to go off on a tangent, it allows you to explore your mind and make your own decisions.
I chose the scenes:
I am very happy with being able to make the choice of multi rolling and showing the audience different interpretations of how you could explore each scene. During rehearsals we chose to keep the same episodic structure as Churchill. The characters are not always clearly gendered, the scenes can appear in a different order, and there are some random scenes which can be inserted anywhere in the play and because of this. We decided as a group to keep everything as the format within the script, only changing the wedding video to be at the end. This was a group decision because we wanted every character to be together for our last scene, this was then changed because we tried out different ideas and it didn’t work. We chose a minimalistic set with very few lighting, props or costume change because we wanted the audience to focus on our acting instead of being drawn to staging. We also wanted to keep true to the author and how she would direct the play.
Within Mother, I am a 17 year old girl in my mothers waiting room at hospital with my eldest sister who has just told me that she is really my mother. I will be exploring the theme of love and family which is something very important to me as family hold a big place in my heart. I tried many ways on how I could feel about the story line and I have chosen to use stanislavski's methods of being true to the character in terms of acting as if this was real life situation, because I want the audience to understand that we all deal with our family matters in different ways and I'd want the audience to understand and empathize with not only me as a character but also whats underneath the character. I will portray my character as someone who is quite hard on the outside but truly soft on the inside. When performing my lines I make sure I project my voice as loud as I can and that I speak clearly so that the audience can hear exactly how I am feeling inside. I also react with my peer who plays my sister well so I can feed off exactly what shes saying and draw the audience into the performance. I will be also focusing on my spacial awareness to show my connections between me and my peer and facial expressions as this creates atmosphere.
Churchill is a British playwright, she was born 1938, London but spent majority of her childhood in Canada. During the 1950s studying in oxford she began to write her first ever plays but as she grew older she began to write for BBC Radio. She also worked within the Joint Stock Company and a radical feminist group monstrous regiment during the 1970s, which you could tell where most of her influences for her plays came from. Love and Information is a play written by the British playwright Churchill. The play is written in an episodic structure which creates a compilation of seven sections each with a number of scenes. The Play was first performed at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre, directed by James Macdonald. Churchill developed Brecht's modernist dramatic and theatrical techniques of Epic theatre to explore issues of gender and sexuality. Churchill wrote the play in an episodic structure to break the constructs between linear and non- linear structure, she does this to give those who read the play to make their own perceptions and add their own creativity towards the play. When first reading love and information it allows you to go off on a tangent, it allows you to explore your mind and make your own decisions.
I chose the scenes:
- Mother
- Dream
- Ex
- shrink
I am very happy with being able to make the choice of multi rolling and showing the audience different interpretations of how you could explore each scene. During rehearsals we chose to keep the same episodic structure as Churchill. The characters are not always clearly gendered, the scenes can appear in a different order, and there are some random scenes which can be inserted anywhere in the play and because of this. We decided as a group to keep everything as the format within the script, only changing the wedding video to be at the end. This was a group decision because we wanted every character to be together for our last scene, this was then changed because we tried out different ideas and it didn’t work. We chose a minimalistic set with very few lighting, props or costume change because we wanted the audience to focus on our acting instead of being drawn to staging. We also wanted to keep true to the author and how she would direct the play.
Within Mother, I am a 17 year old girl in my mothers waiting room at hospital with my eldest sister who has just told me that she is really my mother. I will be exploring the theme of love and family which is something very important to me as family hold a big place in my heart. I tried many ways on how I could feel about the story line and I have chosen to use stanislavski's methods of being true to the character in terms of acting as if this was real life situation, because I want the audience to understand that we all deal with our family matters in different ways and I'd want the audience to understand and empathize with not only me as a character but also whats underneath the character. I will portray my character as someone who is quite hard on the outside but truly soft on the inside. When performing my lines I make sure I project my voice as loud as I can and that I speak clearly so that the audience can hear exactly how I am feeling inside. I also react with my peer who plays my sister well so I can feed off exactly what shes saying and draw the audience into the performance. I will be also focusing on my spacial awareness to show my connections between me and my peer and facial expressions as this creates atmosphere.
In our performance Dream, I am a mid 20 year old who works in an office filled with just men who don't give us enough credit or respect so I end up falling in love with another one of my co- workers
who is also fed up by this mistreatment, I explore the abuse of gender and sexuality because this is something that we face everyday having to battle for equality and respect. I enjoy this performance because at the start it was quite flat until me and my peer collaborated ideas and how we could make this look natural but also creative. We then did some research into Brecht and found that one of his techniques were, using music and lighting to create pathetic fallacy. We decided to use quite fantasy sounds to make the audience feel as if they were also in this dream with us, but also to remind the audience that this isn't real.
Lastly in Shrink my role was a 18 year old girl who has been diagnosed with cyclothymia, mild bipolar and could potentially be getting worse. She has gone to her weekly checkup with her therapist. I really liked this performance because most audience members could connect with what mental health does to a person and how important it truly is. Throughout the overall performance I believe I conveyed my message and objectives clearly, I was able to educate and bring awareness to audience. My characters were all different but all conveyed and connected to the themes. Through this unit I have learnt Leadership skills in terms of being able to share and direct my creative ideas within my group. I believe within the performance my diction and articulation was great also I could have slowed down when speaking as it made me seem nervous. I believe I was spacially aware as in, using a wide range of the stage when performing. If I could change one thing about my performance it would be to add more physicality as that is one way of performing without speaking. I enjoyed performing the play of Caryl Churchill as I have learnt a lot of research and have become more self aware and open minded towards life.
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