Today we continued our work on mapping out and adding "beats" or pauses to our scene. We first, found where the natural pauses were - indicated by puncutation, and marked them up. Then, went through and clapped - making sure to add a distinct pause every time we marked a beat. Then, we found our "acting choice pauses", and marked them as well.
Abigail was so impressive! She remembered this from our last lesson so well! She immediately started clapping at all the periods during our first read through. She's such a fast learner!
Adding action to our beats
Today we also worked on adding actions during our pauses to emphasize different thing in our scene. This is really where most of the acting comes in. At each pause - I had Abigail add different actions that helped move the scene forward and show distinct character choices (body shifts, shrugs, arm movement, looking around). She did great!
Character development
Today we also elaborated on our character development - mapping out 4 things that made our character more interesting, mapping out reactions and motivations that our character would have. Today we picked:
1. Peggy the pirate is small
2. She doesn't like that she's small and doesn't want people to notice
3. She is nervous that she wont get chosen to be a pirate
4. She is paranoid that if she says "Small" out loud - that they wont pick her
5. She really wants to be a pirate
By giving Abigail all of these things to add to her scene - we made it easier for her to act it out, and move her character development and story forward.
Dynamics
Today we also added some emotional dynamics, by mapping out moments our character, Peggy, would go from being sad, to paranoid, to mad, to excited. At each of these different points, we would make sure our facial expressions, voice inflections, and actions were a little bit different to show all the different sides of our character.
Character shifts/changes
The last thing we worked on today was character shifts. In our monologue - we had one very distinct character shift where Peggy goes from really upset, to really excited. In order to smooth this transition we add an extra long pause, and a clear body shift to show that we are moving a different direction in our scene.