This week:
Abigail had her first acting lesson this week! She did SO awesome!!! She is such a hard worker - I was very impressed!
We worked on:
1. Beats
2. Paraphrasing
3. Building a character
Beats
This week we started by introducing a few things that will help us map out and execute a scene better, and more easily. The first thing we learned how to do was separate our monologue or scene into "beats". A beat is pause - (natural pauses and/or pauses to add emphasis, comedic timing, or added for some sort of effect). We started mapping out our scene by looking first for the natural pauses marked with punctuation (a period, coma, or a line break). We marked each natural beat with 2 lines like this: //. We mark all of our beats so that while we read and act a scene out, we remember to pause and slow down. Then, we read through our scene, clapping at each beat, allowing time to pause and move between each one. From there, we talked about extra beats we wanted to add to our scene - or times we decided to pause without any previous direction! We use these beats to emphasize different parts of our scene - and we move and act in the pauses - taking our scene from something that sounds and looks like we're reading off of a piece of paper, to an acted monologue or dialogue between 2 or more people - complete with character choices and action. We use each beat as an opportunity to move the scene forward with weight shifts, different movements or actions. Each beat = a pause, and a new action.
Paraphrasing
Because sometimes scripts tend to sound like someone is reading a book out loud - we do things in order to make it feel and sound more natural for the actor! In order to do this, we get main plot points and ideas - and I have Abigail put them into her own words, making it sound more natural and like something she would say. We add these paraphrased lines into the script by replacing and adding words that feel more natural to the student/actor (for example, in our monologue it had the word "entire" and Abigail would pause every time she came to it, so we changed it to "whole" because it felt more like something she would say!). I have the students make the lines their own to take out all rigidness and uncomfortableness that comes from saying someone else's words.
Building a character
The last thing we worked on was building a character! In order to make our choices and actions more natural and seamless, we add motivation and reasons our character would act and react that way by creating a short back story. We write a few bullet points that help us build a more interesting character. The choices we decided on were:
She knows everything and is narrating the whole play or musical
She is small and wants to appear big on the stage
She is a very happy fairy
By adding these small things, Abigail is given a few motivating factors to move her words forward!
Wow. She did so great! I can’t wait for next week!
Here are our videos from today!
Before/End of our lesson:
Great job Abigail! See you soon!