Today we worked on setting a scene - or building context for our character and scene without any physical objects or pantomiming. When doing a monologue (especially at an audition), it's important to be able to add as many things to a scene to make it more interesting, make sense, and build things to make our acting even more natural - like things to react to. The worst thing we could do for our acting is to pretend to pick up a bottle that isn't there, pantomime walking into a different room, pretend to eat, or drive an invisible car - because doing these things creates an extra layer of unnatural behavior between the actor and the audience. The actor would be showing the audience that it is not only a made up scene - but that all parts of it are to be thought of as an extension of the physical person in front of them reading or reciting lines - rather than a character telling a story. It makes for bad acting.
The way that we get around these kinds of direction or additions to our scene (such as “picks up bottle”, “drives away”, “picks up pie”) without sacrificing the integrity of the writing - is we set a scene around us.
We can show that our friend is in another room by talking to them over our shoulder in the same direction every time and speaking as if they're far away. We can show that we are snooping around by simply looking around as if there were bottles and different things on different surfaces. We can show that there is a pie in front of us full of ants by assigning an area that the pie would be in - and observe what is happening without touching it (smelling it, watching it, pointing at it - but not picking up a fake fork and pretending to eat it. And not picking up an invisible pie to smell it or see the “ants in the pie”.
The difference is - the audience experiences the scene with the actor - seeing everything they're setting up - while the actor never does anything that shows or says "none of this could really happen because i'm holding an invisible bottle that you have to imagine is more than my hand".
We place things in the scene as if it is a room, a car, a picnic table or whatever scene is necessary - with things that add - like a pie that our character is obviously looking at, below the actor’s eye-line; a mirror that our character is obviously looking at by how she is admiring herself, several tables full of things she is snooping around - careful not to touch or disturb any of it, and a friend or mom in another room whom which is her direct audience - or the other character in the scene she is talking to.
Abigail did so awesome!!!!
Here are our videos from today!
Before/End of our lesson:
Great job Abigail!!!! See you soon for voice lessons! Can't wait!!