Stage fright: fear of facing the audience
-Fear of failure
-Physical tension
-Mental tension
Fear of failure: in order to overcome that you need to learn the lines and rehearse. Practice until you feel secure
Physical tension: you need to relax your body muscles before a performance. Physical tension normally leads to mental tension
Mental tension: can overload your mind and therefore causes you to loose concentration. Relax your mental mind by thinking about what is happening right now rather than what may happen later
E.g. what line I should say now rather than, if I walk over to that side I may slip and people will laugh.
Moving/Blocking and Gesturing: it needs to be smooth and natural therefore it can only be done by learning how the body naturally expresses itself. Then learn how to use this expression in a natural sense.
E.g. even if you’re acting as a robot you need to show them that your robot walk is natural.
Warming up: to get your body ready to work you have to warm up.
Isolating: Using each part of the body alone. E.g. moving only your fingers on your hands without moving the wrist.
Centering: Feelings, gestures and general movements only look/sound/and feel genuine if they come from the center of your body. Relax the body and let the emotions come from the center.
E.g. trying to act as excited and going “hello…” won’t work. You need to flap your arms around and yell it. In other words, show emotion and let the act come from your heart as if you actually feel that way.
Expressing [be careful there are 2 types of expressing, the body related one and the speaking one]: is using your body to express feelings.
Pantomime: Expressing through purely physical means to create illusions of reality.
-With props: if you have a glass of water you create the illusion that the water is really there and that you are drinking it
-Without props: if you don’t have the glass of water you create the illusion that it is in you hand and that it is filled with water and that you want to drink it.
Mime: like pantomime, it can be narrative or abstract. They can both be performed with or without music, sound effects, costumes or scenery. With and without props.
Narrative: tells a story
Abstract: is about an experience or situation e.g. washing your car
Speaking: to be heard and understood.
Warming up: just like warming up before using your body you need to warm up before you use your voice.
Activity- imagine you are lying on the ground and you are blowing a ‘pink’ ping-pong ball. You need to relax and blow at it again so it doesn’t come crashing on your nose.
Breathing: Every thing about your voice depends on the way you use your breath. Learn to expand and control the amount of air that passes through your vocal cords.
Articulation: forming the words correctly in your mouth so people can understand what you say. Depends on how you pronounce the word.
-Exaggerating consonants
-Exaggerating vowels
Regional Accents: Where it’s spoken the same way by most people in one place.
Ethnic Accents: Influenced from their fathers, in reference they are the French or Chinese etc…
Class Accents: these depend on the social class you are in
Projection: talking loud enough for the audience to hear you without shouting.
-
Articulation
- Volume: degree of loudness
- Focus: aiming your voice at a particular spot.
Expressing [this is the other expressing guys ^_^]: saying what you want to say with variation, emotion and meaning
Vocal Expression depends
on 3 things:
-Speed: how fast or slow you deliver your words. And how many pauses you use.
-Inflection: variation of pitch
-Pitch: how high or low you make the range of your voice. [do not confuse this with loudness] e.g. When you are happy your voice’s pitch is normally higher than when you are sad or bored.
Imagination: thinking that something is happening that it is really not.
Imagination depends on 2
things:
- ‘As if’: we pretend to be in a situation and ask what if it was true.
- Concentration: to focus your attention completely on one thing.
Imagining Sensations: when you get familiar with the world around you [noticing how people react when they get strange/happy/vulgar calls. Or how they wait in lines for something. Generally just get familiar with the world around you] you need to acquire the sensations and check carefully how people react in different situations.
Imagining Situations: an actor has to act some scenes that he never did in real life e.g. dieing scenes. So you need to depend on your memory with imagining situations.
Improvising: is performing with out rehearsal.
Improvising leads to the 3
following things:
-Stimulates imagination
-Stimulates skill
-Makes the performance more interesting when done right – comedy uses improvising a lot
Chapter 21 The Ancient Greek and Roman Theater
Performances: these usually started as religious rituals.
Dionysus: he was the god of fertility and wine
Thespis: was a poet and he wrote some lines for a special person in the chorus. He allegedly invented dialogue.
Satyr Plays: They were funny comedies, but were disgusting at the same time; and they made fun of the gods instead of respecting them e.g. they showed Dionysus drunk and running away from a goat. 'satyr plays' as distinct from 'satyrs'
Theater:
plays were performed in an enormous outdoor theater at the base of the hill with
audience at the side. In the middle was the orchestra where the chorus
sang and danced. At the back of this was a platform on witch the
individual actors stood which a narrow building behind them. This was the
skene.
The 3 typed of scenes in a
performance:
- Actors speaking to each other: dialogue
- Actors speaking to the chorus: monologue
- Chorus singing and dancing while the actors are off stage
Actors: because people on the audience wouldn’t be able to watch the actors far away they wore masks [which had holes for the eyes and mouth] and high platform shoes to be seen.
3 important reasons why
they wore masks:
- They could act women parts
- There was a megaphone in the mouth hole – magnifies sound
- Few actors could play a lot of different roles.
-Orestiea by Aeschylus: this tells you how the great Greek king, was murdered by his wife; and how the son and daughter take revenge on their mother the queen
-Oedipus by Sophocles: the guy who killed his dad and married his mom
Aristophanes was known for his comedies
Satyres
slowly disappeared and were replaced by Old comedy
Aristotle liked the theater. He liked tragedy because it 'purged' the audience of
Destabilizing emotions like pity and fear. he called
This catharsis.
Plato
hated
it for the following reasons
- It’s an imitation rather than the real things therefore deceives all of us
-
Distracts people from their proper duties
-
Encourages us to do immoral things
Greek
Comedy: A dramatic work that is light and often humorous. Has a happy ending
and normally it’s a wedding.
Greek Tragedy:
A
drama or literary work in which the main character is brought to ruin or suffers
extreme sorrow, especially as a consequence of a tragic flaw, moral weakness, or
inability to cope with unfavorable circumstances.
You have to be able to
tell apart the following three
Good Luck Guys ^_^