9/10/23 - 12/10/23

 Week 38 of Milly's acting journey

On Monday, we spent the day in the theatre like every Monday. We began with some warm-up games like 13, which deals with our listening skills and being strategic in the amount of numbers you decided to say. On Thursday, last week, we obviously had our auditions for the globe, and we knew that Kelly would be working on the script and cast list over the weekend and into the following week. Due to this, on Monday we learnt that there was some slight issues that she was struggling with, like deciding on the two Mary Ann Cotton and knowing where to place the historic events to make an impact.  Kelly talked to me and Keira, about bringing in Hannah who also went for the role of Child Recruiter and mentioned the idea of a news boy wearing a sandwich board to advertise perhaps Jack the Ripper's face. Kelly also mentioned that there is no scripted piece happening now and it's more a chance to focus on improvising, which I didn't mind as I love any chance to be outside of my comfort zone which usually is when I'm taking part in improvising. During the morning, we also spent time watching some of my peers audition monologues. We watched the Guy Fawkes group scene which included Adam as the titular role, and I honestly loved how expressive and in your face the piece was, and seeing Adam in a shouting, scary role was amazing to see as I can't recall seeing him in one like it. We watched George from first year, who amazingly improvised his halfway through but I didn't even realise until he had told me. He was a titanic character who died due to the shipwreck, and he used his knowledge in improvisation and became someone different using his body language and accent. After lunch, we watched all 5 of the Mary Ann Cotton's and we were asked to choose just two that we thought portrayed the role the best. I voted for Millie and Gracie, as I felt they were slightly different in performing in character but they were both very creepy which I think Mary Ann Cotton would act. We focused on our enrichment classes after lunch, so I had my first writers group with Kelly. I learnt a lot on the objective of the class, and techniques we can use to further help us script write. We had our first 6 word story with the theme being writers advertisement in which I wrote 'A secretive writer who keeps to themselves'. I tried to make it like Bridgerton-esque Lady Whistledown, as in there is a secret writer who can't tell anyone who they are and what they do. Kelly had given us a piece of homework which was to write a formal letter of complaint based on a pet peeve or something that really annoys you. I straight away thought of someone talking during the cinema, and I knew I could write about a personal experience there as I've been sat next to people that chat and chat and chat. The New Views writing group is all about writing a script, and the secret to it is writing about your own personal experiences, so I have a few in mind that I could perhaps speak about. 

On Tuesday, we did more singing with Tom, and went through all the songs we have focused on so far. We went through all of Peter Pans songs, Wendy's songs and even Hook's. To keep our harmony and tune going strong as a group, Tom gave us a little song to sing. he song was 'To stop the train, incases of emergencies, pull down he chain, pull down the train, penalty for improper use five pounds.' Three people at a time would go forward and sing it but syncopated so you could hear if it went wrong or carried on going right. I find singing on my own the most nerve-wracking thing, so I didn't go forward which really told me that I shouldn't go for a role in Peter Pan that focuses heavily on it's singing aspect. In the next month, I might discover some confidence within me but whenever I'm, singing only on my own, my mind goes into people are going to judge me mode, which results in my voice shaking and not being very good. Tuesdays are spent on progression and University work. With Tom, we focused on finding a contemporary monologue and he showed us two websites that allow finding one that's close to our age and is similar in experiences much easier. We saw the rest of the Shakespeare monologues and I really enjoyed seeing how everyone else was really finding learning them and knowing what Shakespeare was on about. With Kelly, we looked further into our directing pieces in which I'm in the 'Girls Like That' group with Gracie, Millie, Adam, Pheebs, Alayah, Keira and Emily H. We spent a lot of the lesson deciding whose lines were whose, and felt that we needed to get it up on it's feet so that we had a beginning structure. There was an idea of pretending we are all on the group chat in our own rooms and we are just saying all of these horrible words about Scarlet via text instead of standing in a line and saying it. We found from rehearsing it, we need more time as it still felt rather wooden and not how we imagined it. I talked to my group and said that one morning we should sit and highlight the lines then so that it's no affecting our rehearsal time at all. 

On Wednesday, we focused on our Globe performance. Before that, we played a devising game in groups where we were given a line from our team leader, who in our group was Elliott. I was in a scene with Emily and we managed to link our weird line with our topic of conversation. When we focused on the Globe, there was a lot of people who are unaware of what they are doing and some people who went for a role but lost it to someone else, resulting in them doing nothing. Since me and Keira were understanding of what we had been asked, we decided to write a structured script that lasts around 1-2 minutes long when performing so that Kelly knew we knew what we would be doing on the day. It's also good for us as it allows us to rehearse a piece and know it'll be creepy and scary, and not something rubbish if we go blank on the day. During our script writing, we were sent the draft script via Teams, and we saw that there was a person called Charlie would be speaking to the audience before us. Thankfully, before we could ask who Charlie was, Sienna from Year 1 came over and told us that she was now Charlie. She came and helped us with our script and we made sure she had some feared interaction with us to highlight how intimidating the child recruiters are. Hannah is also meant to help us out as another child recruiter, but since she wasn't in, we decided to add in some lines for her anyway. Ash came over as well when we were in the LRC, and told us how she's now helping us out as a child that we have maybe stolen. Before Ash came along, Sienna was telling me and Keira about this girl who would dress all nice and act like there was nothing wrong with her, but in actual fact her name was Lottie, and she was made to look nice so that the children would think that the child recruiters weren't all bad. It was all a plan so that she was the example when it came to it, of how they treat their children and enter in Lottie. When Ash came along, we knew immediately the type of character she could play and we added in more stage directions for her than lines. Before the end of the day, I sent it off to Kelly to see what she thought of it. 

On Thursday, we spent the afternoon with Josh from Stockton Globe. I was able to perform the scene I had scripted in front of Kelly and Josh alongside Sienna, Hannah and Keira. Since Hannah wasn't in the previous day, we talked her through the script and what our ideas were for how we would perform it. She was very onboard with it all so we practised and practised before we could actually perform it. Josh really liked it once we had done it, and he loved the interaction with the audience a lot more so we left very happy. We made sure to learn all of our lines by Monday the next week as it'll allow us to be more open and in character.