26/02/24 - 29/02/24

 Week 50 of Milly's acting journey 

Monday was our first week back from our week off and we began in the theatre getting into groups depending on what show we are spending our time on. The group for STUFF went into a small group and we picked given circumstances and what we can infer for each of our characters. With Stace, we all inferred that she likes to keep the peace and let everyone get along with everyone. For example, there are times someone will say something that's controversial and i'll step in to soften the blow and find the positivity out of it. I always got the vibe that Stace is a bright character and with her cousin Dani, she's trying to keep the balance between letting her be the person she wants to be and also stopping her from saying and doing things she would regret. After we had figured out the given circumstances and things we had inferred, we had to devise a small scene that wasn't scripted that gives us insight into our relationship as a group. For example, me and Dani come in later, and I make sure to present myself as someone who is excited and prepared as I drag Dani on who can't be bothered and wants to just stay home. We showed our scene and we chose to make it whilst everyone is entering the village hall for where the party will be taking place. We see Vinny, played by Zia, and Frankie, played by Noah enter in first as they are the ones to be setting up the place and making it a lot nicer than it originally was. The scene then carries on as other characters join the party and enter giving an insight into their characters. It was a fun activity to do and it helped us get a better understanding of our characters. After break, we spent time focusing on Connections so I went and carried on looking at my STUFF script to learn as many lines as possible ready for the first official rehearsal. 

Tuesdays are spent with Tom and Kelly on the afternoon, and instead of focusing on uni prep, we looked at an idea for our end of show performance. Kelly has chosen 'One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest' for us to perform as our end of show performance, and at lunch herself and Tom had an idea about gender swapping the roles, so that the girls would perform the male characters and the boys would play the female characters. Upon first hearing, I was slightly sceptical for a few reasons, selfishly as I wanted to try the role of Nurse Ratchet and I'm not sure if some of the themes brought up could be talked about by a boy with a girls perspective, vice versa. However, we got given a set of scripts and formed groups to try the gender swapping out. I was in the gender swapping group, so myself and a group of us girls played the boys at the mental asylum, and Elliott and Jack played the two female roles. It took a while for us to come up with some ideas to make it more entertaining and natural, but we slowly got into it and with our assigned characters, we acted the scene out multiple times. We had a chance to watch each other's interpretations of the script, and once we had watched the scene where the roles were normal, we performed our version where they were swapped based on gender. I enjoyed doing it, but I think we all collectively felt like it wasn't working to the point where it's a must that we swap the roles around. It was interesting to see how it would look however, and see if the boys changed how we previously saw the girl's characters. 

On Wednesday, we spent the entire morning diving straight into STUFF rehearsals. Due to Musical Theatre not using the theatre and Kelly not needing it, we were fortunate enough to use it which allowed for us to use a bigger space rather than using the black box room. We spent our time on the scene where Connor's character AJ has a disagreement with Millie's character Dani about the cigarettes she's holding as it's a sensitive subject matter at the moment. Stace spends that time feeling bad for not telling Dani sooner, and in that scene Dani storms off, leaving Stace feeling even worse. It's a really intense scene with comedic elements and we worked a lot on it getting it to the best it could be at. Going over that scene allowed me to learn the lines and eventually do a section of that scene, only holding my script but not looking at it. We only had the morning to rehearse so it did go by very quickly, but knowing we had one scene blocked off felt really good.  

Thursday was spent rehearsing more on STUFF. We couldn't use the theatre so instead used Tom's room which is the dance studio, and focused our afternoon on the final scene where we try and surprise 'Anita' but it actually turns out to be a sympathetic Frankie. We lost Millie and Connor as they had went to practise Shout with Kelly, but I made sure to remember where Millie moves as she's near me a lot in the scene so that she doesn't feel like she's missed anything. Noah's character Frankie only appears at the beginning and end of the scene so I was glad we were able to do one of his scenes, and one of the most important scenes as a whole. We did it numerous times over and over and I think the way it's been spaces is really lovely and compliments the meaning of the scene. Sophia asked everyone to go and learn their lines to the first few scenes ready for the following week, so I made sure to make that a priority at the weekend.