20/3/22 - 23/3/23

 Week 25 of Milly's acting journey

On Monday 20th March, the entire cast 1 of Old Times planned to re-film our show as we felt like it needed polishing and could do with a re-film so that our best acting could be sent in to the National Theatre. We all collectively agreed on this as on our performance day, we ended up skipping a huge chunk of important text due to someone saying a line too early. Fortunately, as a group we were able to fix it and get our performance back on track, which we obviously were relieved about to move past the awkward silences. After we performed it and had filmed it, we all gathered round to talk about the achievements from last Thursday's performance and the feedback we had gotten from the representative from the National Theatre that came down and watched. Kelly gave some feedback to Cast 2's performance, which I stayed back to watch, and found it to be utterly amazing. You could see the hard work from everyone on the stage and those that worked backstage to help. It's been such an interesting experience and to be a part of it has been so fun! 

On Tuesday 21st, we spent the morning with Kane, where he gave us time to work further on our practitioner assignment due for the following week. I was paired up with Millie Trodden and we went into the LRC to work through as much as we could. I focused on the handout to save time and get more done and Millie focused on the power point. We both felt there were our strong areas of focus, as we are both into aesthetics and design so could make it all appealing to someone reading it. We focused on this for the entirety of the day and both felt that we got lots of work completed. Upon this assignment, I hadn't heard of Viola Spolin, and I feel like she is such a role model to young actors like myself to be more spontaneous and use improvisation more often.

On Wednesday 22nd, the Year 1's spent the morning with Kelly where we focused on duologue work. There were multiple pieces of script that included duologues, one was from Dear Evan Hansen, which myself and Emily Howard paired up to work on. I hadn't really worked with Emily much before so it was refreshing to work practically with her. The scene was full of deep emotions between a mother and a son, where I played the son and Emily acted as the mother. It was an argument as they realise they are separating from one another, and that there bond isn't as strong so it was very different to anything we both had done before. The rest of the day was spent practising, until Kelly revealed that the feedback had been sent to her from the National Theatre representative. We were all very excited about it, and in return were given lots of amazing feedback. Our group effort was seen as impressive and collective, and the character I played of Stefi was brought up. She had said how Stefi should almost narrate the olders as they fade into their past selves, which I took onboard when it came to the Sunderland performance, to be more clearer and over emphasise lines that hold key information. 

On Thursday 23rd, we started reading through our end of the show script 'Little Women' which was so exciting to read through. Going into it, I was uncertain with who I wanted to go for, and I feel like I left the read through, with both Amy and Meg in mind. So far, I've found the script quite different from the film adaptation with key scenes missing out, but Kelly reassured a few of us that she definitely wants to add them. All the characters are exactly how I picture them so that's really good to know as it makes my decision to choose which character a bit easier and can relate to them. We were also told about another script called 'The Last Resort' which is for other people that aren't really feeling the script from Little Women and would like to do something different. I made sure that my job for the weekend was to look over the entire script, as we hadn't gotten to the end, and read it as some characters I want to give a go.  I stayed back to work on the rest of my assignment based on the practitioner 'Viola Spolin' and I got lots of work done so left feeling productive and accomplished.