Research on English Renaissance Theatre

English Renaissance theatre is considered to be the period between the years 1562 - 1642, Also known as Elizabethan theatre and is mostly known by plays of writers and directors like; William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and Ben Jonson. In the early days of theatre in England the practice of theatre was prohibited in London, so all plays took place and were performed outside of the city unlike the London we all know in today's day and age. Almost all of the performances were like a circus in the sense that they were constantly on the move from town to town. Only getting paid after the performance by those who enjoyed it. All of this changed when the first successful theatre opened in London in 1576 “The Theatre” The theatre was very much in likeness to the colosseum in Rome but was way smaller and could only host around 1000 people. The theatre was open and plays were only performed during the day. This forced the actors to be larger than life, meaning that they had to portray and really show what was going on to an unreal extent. For example; If the characters were whispering they had to do so in a very loud manner of fashion, or if they enter a dark room they had to point out the fact that is was dark “OH! It is so dark in here I can’t find you!” even if it was broad daylight and everyone could see everyone. It was the spark that England needed to begin the play and theatre culture that we know today. And sometime around the early 1590’s William Shakespeare started releasing his plays for the public to see and what he did changed theatrical plays forever. He combined Tragedies and comedies into “Tragic-Comedy” This was the start of Theatre as we know it today, multiple elements and conventions that made you feel different emotions and think different thoughts. 

The plays were built up in a certain way, there were still certain characters just like almost every play before. There was always a King, A princess of some sort, a Leading male character who searches for love and the clown. The convention in English renaissance theatre I will be focusing on is the ‘clown/fool/jester’  The clown in all of these plays always seems to be the most simple one but is always the most clever, mischievous, evil or helpful. The character could always be a platform to turn the plot around, he was always unpredictable or could make things worse or better for any of the characters to get what he wanted. The clown was almost always on the “Kings” side (take The 12th night by William Shakespeare for example) In that play the clown “Feste” is the voice for the play's most important themes. Yet he could fit in and morph into any group to get what he wanted. The clown was the only character with an unclear goal in almost all of these renaissance place, he could also switch is goals multiple times throughout the course of the play. While the other characters usually followed along with the main plotline. He was always the wisest yet the funniest and the crowd depended on him for entertainment.

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/britlit1/chapter/english-renaissance-theatre/                          

https://blog.oup.com/2016/09/shakespeare-clowns-fools-infographic/

https://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/blog/ultimate-guide-shakespeares-fools/

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/English_Renaissance_theatre

I'm Sorry Christopher

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hz-Z7DCutQ

Official first draft, Solo project

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mJpf4oL-cXQeWVoLskhh1UZP_UrkowbpPNO8y8h4G64/edit?usp=sharing

Solo Performance Reflection

Over the course of working on my solo project I learned and refined a lot of my acting and some directing techniques. I studied Stanislavkis methods of acting with strong emotions and how to make everything more believable. And putting all of his methods into my character was so much fun, especially the magic if. This method makes you imagine how your character would react to certain situations. This is a great way to find out more about your characters: habits, feelings, emotions, mindset, values and thinking process. So preparing when I was preparing for my solo performance during the entire previous week I would go about my day as usual and when something interesting happened or was said I would of course react or think as myself but then i would always backtrack and think “ what would Ed have said or done in the same situation” This is a great way to connect to a character and it really helped me connect to mine. 

So when performance day finally came around I felt really prepared to express all of Ed’s emotions to my best abilities. And I was really pleased with the way things turned out in the end. The performance went great and I felt really into the character and based on the response from the audience during the talkback I could confirm that my connection to the character could be seen on stage as well. I was also so happy to hear so many different people notice my commitment to the character and how they liked what I did with my performance. Something that was a bit of a challenge at first was finding a way to show Ed’s darker side to the audience without anyone else on stage. So I decided not to SHOW it at all, but let the audience hear it instead. I started the performance by screaming and smashing thing backstage with headlights on stage. This instantly grabbed everyone's attention (basing this on what was said during the talkback) and made everyone interested in what was going on and why it was happening. Then I come out of the backstage door in the far back and breakdown right by the door. I decided to do this to give the audience even more time to be confused and make them want an explanation. But also to show the audience that it is not something that my character is used to doing or likes doing (getting mad, beating up his child, ect.) Then I started Ed’s monologue from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the nighttime. The monologue takes place right after Christopher (Ed’s son) finds letters from his to be believed dead mother. And it went great, the Only thing I wish I had done different would have been to slow the performance down a bit so that I could have had more time to show a bit more variety of emotions such as pure sadness. This would have helped even further to show Ed’s good side. And also showing how deeply sorry he is for lying to his son. 

Beetlejuice The Musical - review

Beetlejuice The Musical

On October, 10. Me and the rest of the IB theatre students saw Beetlejuice The Musical (Written by Scott Brown and Anthony King and directed by Alex Timbers) It was a great experience and I really liked it. The play starts off with Beetlejuice himself needing help from the living, he needs a living person to say his name 3 times in order to gain more power. He finds the perfect house were the owners are just about to die from a tragic accident, how does he know this? Don’t ask me. Adam and Barbara Maitland become the recently deceased couple, and they died in their own house which gives them even more power as ghosts. When they pass they meet beetlejuice, they agree to work together to scare the new owners of their house. Only to find out that one member of the new family, Lydia can see beetlejuice. She is a very depressed girl who recently lost her mother. Beetlejuice tells her to say his name 3 times, she sees opportunity to use Beetlejuice to her own advantage against her father and his new fiance. But after many scary efforts she finally gives in and says the magic words “BEETLEJUICE, BEETLEJUICE, BEETLEJUICE” He then becomes visible and more powerful than ever before. This is where things start going down hill. They both scare her family out of the house and live on their own for a while. Until Lydia decides to try and find her mother in the nether-world (the after life) She searches the nether-world but she does not find her, but she does find a new bond with her father who followed her there. But when they return Beetlejuice wants more, for he can become mortal again if he marries another mortal. He decides to marry Lydia against her will, she gives in with the intention to kill him when the opportunity arises. And at the end of the wedding she kills him with a stake through his heart, poor Beetlejuice got to be alive again for 6 whole seconds.

 Mr. Brightman did an amazing job with the character of Beetlejuice. He captured the audience in so many different ways. Comedy was of course his main choice but the voice, movement, delivery of lines, look and feel was what really made him such a lovable character. What was most memorable about the play was surely the moment after intermission when they open up in the nether world. The lights was like nothing I had ever seen before in a play and it was completely unexpected, there were squared lights that kept getting smaller and it really created a sense of infinity for the audience. The entire stage had this crooked vibe to it for the entire play, everything was angled wrong and slanted. At first it was very irritating for me to look at but after a while it created this funny feeling that really rubbed off on everyone. This was for sure one of the more important director choices made my Alex Timbers to capture the audience in this fantasy world which is a little crooked overall. Also the songs for the play were sometimes oddly placed after each other. For example; in the nether world Lydia has 2 songs nearly right after eachother were she is just standing on stage singing with no background show or anything else happening. This is fine once or twice in a musical in my opinion, but right after eachother is probably not a good choice. A quick way to make an audience uninterested in her words and the meaning behind her songs. This didn’t happen but it was a pretty close call for me. On the other hand i really liked the Maitland home setting and how it changed when Lydia’s family moved in. It really went from a cozy family home to a small mansion feel when they changed all of the furniture and the walls.

I liked the musical, I would have liked to have fewer songs and focus more on the story. Some songs felt forced and unnecessary, we didn’t need all those songs in the first act. Save some for the second instead of squeezing them all into the first act.

I would rate Beetlejuice The Musical  a solid 8/10.

Talkback questions

What emotions did this performance bring out in you?

Anything that worked well?

What could have been done better?

What was your initial thought and feeling when the line " I killed Wellington" was delivered on stage?

What was your opinion of the character In the beginning compared to the end?

ISTA reflection

What were the most memorable experiences you had and what did you learn?

The ISTA experience was great overall, disregarding that I had a devastating cold the last day which made me miss the last day's classes.  Other than the shows we saw I really loved to see what life will be like in college for me when I'm doing my BFA. I know that it probably won't be the same but it really brought back that mindset of acting every day which I will most certainly do in College. All the classes we took except for the masterclasses involved using a script, the purpose was to create our own versions of them in groups. This was very fun and we saw so many different ways a script can be interpreted depending on the different actors and directors. This really reminded me of how a script is just a guideline to your performance. Meaning that you create what you want with what you are given. The most memorable experience for me was the master class with tectonic. We learned about how a director looks for ways to capture an audience and how one gets the message they want to deliver across to the audience as well. Then he (the man from tectonic) talked about how we create magical moments in theatre. Those moments were your heart just fills up with warmth at the end of a play. And the answer to that was to really focus on the plotline. We have to focus on the goal of our characters, why do they need to do this or that. There has to be a clear sense of accomplishment and failure if you want to capture as many people as possible. Yes ending a play without closure is an artistic choice but it will leave many viewers mad, confused or disappointed. So we learned a lot about the meaningful aspects of theatre as an art form from tectonic. This was not the case with the regular classes, they focused only on the acting and performance aspects. We acted out the scripts we were given but never really broke down the meaning behind each one of them. Because there was no meaning, they were simply (to me) acting exercises. Stuff I've been doing for almost my whole life. That does not mean that it wasn't fun tho ;) What I would have wanted would to be thought and criticized on my acting abilities. I really want to grow as an actor and doing exercises is a way to stay in "acting shape" but it is hard to develop as an actor without being given directions on how to better my acting itself. But I did learn about how and why we do certain things at different times in different plays to capture an audience. And to sum it up, creating a good play is all about finding the right emotions at the right time and showing a clear goal/mission that the characters are striving for. Thanks for making this happen and letting us go on such a fun and cool trip, peace.

Progress in Solo project

In the past weeks, I have really begun to explore the character "Ed" for my solo piece. I have been experimenting a lot with the "magic if" method to build on the characters' emotions and trying to find what sets him off. During class I've been guided a lot by my "mentor" Olivia, she has helped me find the words, the emotions, and the stage directions for my performance. And with the magic if being implemented for my preparations it is all coming together nicely. In the beginning, I did not have a lot of ideas for my solo project. But over the past 2 weeks, I have had an overload of ideas. Now it is simply a process of elimination to get to where I want. I am swinging between staging the performance as an interrogation, a confession or a direct conversation between Ed and his son. If I did it as an interrogation I would have him sit center stage and start talking slowly about his wrongdoing. If done as a confession I want him to stand center stage and use the lights (Left, center, Right) as the truth he doesn't want to confess to. Then when he says the line " I killed Wellington" all the lights will light up the entire stage and he will have a moment of extreme realization of what he just said. If I do it as a conversation I will have him on stage with the light just turned blue and do the monologue.

In class writing

What do you intend to set as your intention(s)? What do you hope the impact(s) on the audience will be? How might you assess the efficacy of that in the talkback (what questions can you ask, etc.)?

9/2

My intention for the solo project will be to bring the audience/viewer into the mind of the character in a short period of time.  Succeeding with this task may be a bit of a stretch due to how little time 4-7 minutes is to develop a character. But it will be the main focus, after all, method acting is meant to make the character more believable, understandable & make the entire performance more truthful. I hope the audience feels compassion or sympathy for the character. I don't think they will feel any disgust as you might feel when you watch the whole play "The curious incident of the Dog in the Nighttime"  This is due to the fact that you haven't seen the character before this intense moment, the solo project will be Ed's monologue to Christopher on page 46.  This is Ed's most emotional moment in the play, we find out that all along it was he that killed the dog. So in the moment of the play, I hope that the audience feels shook at first and then slowly fall into sympathy or just hate him, that is up to the audience I think. But for the solo project there really is no build up in the words "I killed Wellington". The solo project could start with that and it would have no significant impact on the viewer.  So I will have to focus on the performance itself instead and make the most out of my abilities as an actor to bring the words from the book into the hearts of the viewer. 

Solo project revision

My solo project last year was very rushed and not very well thought trough. For instance I choose to do a phone call... Not the best choice for a solo piece. I would like to do a real monologue this year from a play that I actually like. Something that shows off my good abilities as an actor but also something that is relatable too the audience sense I really like method acting. This year is going to have to be all theatre for me due to my injured knee, soo there won't be any excuses this year for not going all in and doing my best job with every performance I do. I really hope to become a better actor this year, now when I have the time and have chosen to commit to theatre I really have no choice but to become better. This is what I wanna do for the rest of my life. Be that movies or theatre, I really just love acting.  The solo piece was in no other words a disgrace by my own standards of myself. It was bad due to how I didn't put my hear and soul into it, it wasn't "important" to me.

This year I will focus more on character development for my performance. Show of the characters strengths and weaknesses. Focus on emotion and delivery of words.

final project performance

https://youtu.be/GXMky9EmLEA

Final report

For my solo project i decided to focus on realism. The text i chose for the project was from the play ‘lose ends’ its from page 26 when Paul and Ben are arguing over Pauls style of life. I decided to have the text as inspiration to my performance. For my performance i wanted to do a phone call, just a simple phone call. This due to how the simple stuff is usually where most people don’t focus as much or pay as much attention. However i did not live up to my own expectations, I didn’t prepare as much as i should have. I should have spent more time on the actual performance instead of spending most of my time looking for a text to work with. Overall it didn’t go as well as i hoped, peace.

Theorist background info, context and discussion.

Konstantin Stanislavskij, born in Russia 1863. He is considered to be the man who “created” method acting. He is also the co-founder of the Moscow art theatre (MAT) His system, methods and techniques are still used today to train actors. He grew up in a wealthy family and was introduced to theatre at an early age. His family even had their own little theatre were Konstantin grew up acting, writing and performing. He wanted to be a great actor himself but ended up being one the greatest directors ever. What fascinates me the most is the fact that one man changed the standard of theatre in itself. He gave the world what is today know as just “acting” to many. All the big movie actors use his methods to portray a believable character.  
Two of my favorite examples of this is Heath Ledger’s “Joker” in Batman: The dark knight (2008) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWgyKDfFC_U  and John Bernthal's Punisher (Frank Castle) in Netflix’s “The Punisher” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWh6A6ZIpfo  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czxlWXqaIzo

The Scene from Batman: The dark knight with the joker (The interrogation scene) is considered to be one of the best scenes in movie history. What is displayed in the scene is the many months that Heath Ledger put into his character. Heath locked himself in a hotel room for weeks on end and perfected the insanity of the Joker. His character and his work with it is considered to be one of the best examples ever of pure and perfect method acting. John Bernthal’s Punisher is also a great one but not equally as critically acclaimed as Heath Ledger’s Joker. Yet his job as The Punisher is one of my favorites and is a great job of method acting. The first scene is The Punisher (real name: Frank Castle) showing Daredevil his place in this world. We see and hear the pain in his voice as he explains why all these bad people have to die. In the second scene we see The Punisher in court, explaining the same thing to the courthouse. And just like Ledger, Bernthal perfected his character using the same methods.

The realism within the characters is what Stanislavkij’s directing style, method, theory and artistic beliefs is all about. He always wanted to show the most believable characters to the audience. He wanted us to feel what the character was feeling and wanted us to be able to relate to him/her,

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wDcYxpxjFS9NAmMVoRB04OSb5aDh7fLp7tHoLyxrsP8/edit?usp=sharing

Solo project 1.

Konstantin Stanislavskij: 
His base concept was realism, considered the purest form of acting. Method acting changed the way  actors created their characters. Gone where the days of exaggerating movements and words. With method acting it was all about being real and making the audience believe everything you said or did.

The Stanislavski System:

1. Relaxation, relax while performing.

2. Concentration, respond to your imagination.

3. Work with senses. Recall sensations.

4. sense of truth, trust your instincts.

5. Given circumstances, great the world

6. Contact and communication, improvise with the world.

7. Units and objectives. Divide role into individual units, defined by character goals.

8. Logic and believability, objective = consistency.

9. Work with the text, Uncover and perform the social, political and artistic meaning of the world,

10. The creative state of mind: An automatic culmination of all the previous steps.

Stanislavski’s working method could be compared to his system, it started from within and eventually was displayed on the outside. The method is obviously to project naturalism, the way his method starts is by asking himself all the questions that link him and the character together, these questions would be answered and the answers would activate psychologically and eventually be displayed physically. His working method is about starting from within and eventually finishing on the outside 

monologue reflection

My monologue was very challenging to perform. The words made no real sense and the character had no clear back round. It was fun and challenging at the same time. But for next time I think I'm going to choose something a lot less "theatre" meaning I would perform something more clear. Something that has more of a clear story and have me depend on acting out certain emotions. For this monologue I could perform the words however I liked due to how the words made no real sense :)

Monologue

https://youtu.be/8eJg0n2QJIo

Twelfth night review

Let me start things of by saying that i found the play very boring. Now here’s the reason why.

The play starts of with a cool VR scene showing of the see through canvas by displaying images on it. This was a smart move by them, it got me intrigued and thinking that the rest of the play might be as cool...it was not. The rest of the play was very very confusing and filled with long boring conversation. And that's with disregard of the fact that they were talking in so called “Shakespeare talk”  The fact that the whole play was extremely confusing truly ruined the play for me. And yeah yeah people will say “ oooh but its shakespeare!” get outta here. If a play is so confusing that you have to read a whole book beforehand to understand it then i'm sorry to tell you, it's not a very good play. Now i know that i’m coming of as super aggressive + i sound like a real Shakespeare hater but hear me out. Shakespeare is one of the greatest play writers of all time, there is no argument there in my opinion. His plays have been shown all over the world and are know by almost everyone. But that does not make his plays the most watchable plays. The main function of a play is to entertain you or to make you think. This play does both of that, only that it makes you think so much that (at least I) did not understand what was going on. Listening to 10 minute conversations in “shakespeare talk” really made my head hurt. I truly had no idea what was going on. And yeah i guess you could connect that to the fact that i’m from a county where english is not the first language or that i'm a teenager. But i have been involved with theatre sense the age of 8. So to say that i don’t fully understand theatre would not be reasonable either. At the end of the day i guess the thing that dragged the play down for me was all the confusion and the shake talk.

Afropunk

Collaborative project

I started acting at the age of 8 and fell in love right away. The fact that I was doing improv theatre for the most part really engaged me and opened up my mind and forced me to be creative. My acting career hasn't really been influenced by any play at all. Instead iv'e been in constant amazement by my fellow actors in improv. It really is a wonderful sight to see someone come up with something hilarious on the spot and make you laugh your guts out. The west side Stockholm community where I grew up always had many different ways of engaging the youth with positive activities to stay out of trouble, and my theatre club really stood by that. And then I came here to CA and continued acting, and I ended up in a great theatre class and I'm so happy to still act on a regular basis.

And then our group consisting of (Me, Olivia, Linda and Ray) got the assignment to make a short play based on this stimulus:

We had complete freedom and where allowed to make a play based on any ideas that we got from this art piece.

In the beginning it was really hard finding a starting point for our play, we had no idea in what direction we where going other than that we wanted to do some type of love drama. Something with love slipping away was our main idea. So we started off with that, a love square (cus there's 4 of us...get it?) we started building characters based on our strengths as actors. Linda was the first one to be given a solid role, we all felt that Linda would be the best out of us 4 to be the young lady slipping away from her husband due to her strength of playing sad and confused characters. Next up was Ray, we put him in a position where he could be given a lot of freedom on how his character could be sense we didn't really have a plan for how his character was going to behave. In the sense of, should he be the bad guy? or the good guy? in this play. We all knew that Ray could do both so we let it sit on the stove for a bit. We decided to give me the role of the man Linda was cheating on her husband with. Then We needed a perfect spot for Olivia, and that came to be the wife of my character. It was perfect for her due to how she is really good at displaying her emotions on stage.

Now we had a base for our project, we could finally get started and find comfortable ground.

We had our first draft set up as a basic love drama, really dry and no real value at all. It was just Lindas character (Sara) cheating on her husband and my character (Marcus) cheating on my wife, and then Ray's character (Steve) and Olivia's character (Natalie) falling in love. No real message behind it other than " Cheating is bad "

So we all realized that we needed to expand it somehow.

Thats when I proposed to the group that we should change the script a little, we changed so that Marcus and Sara was not having an affair, but Sara was only looking for a close friend to hang her head on. This gave the play a little more depth which made it a lot easier for us to build upon.

Winter Musical footloose review

First of all I would like to thank all the cast members and teachers for an awesome atmosphere throughout the whole process. Even tho I came in late during production to play the role of Coach everybody welcomed me into the family instantly. It was truly a pleasure, thank you. 

Now, the review itself.

The tone of the play compared to the movie was a bit different. Ren was a bit more of a lanky awkward guy in the musical compared to the tuff rebel that he is portrayed as in the movie. But this worked out perfectly. We got the story of an outsider who really just wants to dance. Just like the movie the play gave us the same feeling of rebellion against adults who view fun and dancing as the devil.  The songs where performed well and they delivered the emotions they were designed to do. 

Holding out for a hero was definitely my favorite one and it was also the best performed song in my opinion. The fact that the cast was so big really helped to bring us many different actors to work with. The play had all types of actors and this made it easy to place them into the best role for them. So finding fitting actors to play certain characters seemed to not be a problem. 

The length of the play was good, not to long and not too short. Something that I did not like was the long church scenes. they felt dragged out and was probably the most boring scenes of the play. I feel as if this could have been fixed by adding more energy in the church song. Although this would not have worked due to how the town is supposed to be portrayed as a very uptight and boring town. But I can dream at least. Overall the play was very good and lived up to the Winter musical hype.

// Peace :D

 

Collaborative project final draft review

The final draft was finally filmed and uploaded yesterday, its been too long due but it is finally finally done. And I think we did a great job overall. There were some misses here and there when it came to scene changes with the stage light crew due to us actors improvising some of the lines in the script which made it hard for the crew to know when to cut the lights. But other than that everything went very smooth, we all did a great job with our characters and emphasizing their emotions during scenes. Ms G said that this whole play was very emotional driven, and that is something that is very true and we as actors prolly did not realize it. I think we wanted to show people how complicated love can be by showing the audience how the love you have for someone can quickly turn into doubt. I think we did a good job doing this even tho everyone who will see the play will probably interoperate the play I different ways.  But we hope that they get the basic message, "Don't break your relationship apart based on assumptions" Know the facts before accusing someone of cheating.

Looking at my character "Marcus" there was really not much going on emotion wise, he really only had  2 emotional states "confused" "angry"  So there was not really to  much in my opinion that could have gone wrong with that character. Biggest props go out to Linda "Sara"  for having to carry the play with 2 monologs and having to show many different emotions such as "love" "anxiety" " Sadness" we really threw a lot at her and she handled it very well. Olivia also did a great job on showing the upset and frustrated "Natalie" She showed great emotional acting skills during our scene together (scene 2) the way she pitched her voice up a notch when she said "how Marcus, how do you show me that you love me?!"  (something like that) was perfect. Really was a pleasure doing that scene with her. And last but far from least we have the drunken master Ray "Steve" To start of, the costume that we picked for him was perfect. It really helped to show the audience that "Steve" is your classical drunken husband.  One thing that I noticed with the way Ray did his character was how he moved as "Steve" it was a perfect blend of "drunk but in control" so big S/O to him for that.

So in conclusion, thank you guys and great job!

Progress

Since  the start of the second semester our group has mad a lot of progress on out short play now called “ A peculiar state of love”  We have changed a lot of the characters and the play now really represent our thought about how love can be very complicated and in some cases peculiar. Marcus in now just a regular guy trying to do his job and support for his wife. Sara is now a more relatable character who just envies the relationship that marcus has with his wife. We changed her husband Steve to a more likeable character, we did this by making him an alcoholic who does not support his wife and spends most of his time at the local bar. It really feels like a whole new play, but at the same time it feels like a upgraded improvement of our first draft. WE.ARE.MAKING.MOVES.