Task 2: A midsummer nights dream performance: performing a classical role : rehearsals and performance

 A midsummer nights dream 

Group members: Lola Miller, Chloe Holt

Scenes we chose 
as me and Chloe were ill on this lesson we got given our duologues the following day. we were chosen to perform a duologue between Bottom and Quince in act 1 scene 2 this extracts shows quince giving out the roles for the play that is being shown to royals and bottom showing him how its meant to be done and saying he deserves to play a tyrant, in this scene i play bottom and Chloe plays Quince 

what happens in the scene?

in this scene 6 locals of the village are meeting to rehearse a production which they are going to perform to the royals (Theseus and Hippolyta) on the day of their wedding, Nick Bottom very quickly instructs Peter Quince who is directing the play which he describes as 'the most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby', Bottom then instructs Quince to announce the cast list to them all and informs Bottom that he will be playing Pyramus ('a lover that kills himself most gallant for love'). Bottom then puts on his own show by stating that he needs to cry to make a good performance and goes on to say that he will make the audience cry and goes on to question if he can play a tyrant, after his big performance he states how good he was and again goes back to instructing Quince to carry on with the rest of the cast list.


Establishing my character
i play bottom who asks to play every character in the performance.
he also makes many claims about his strength as an actor 
he is originally cast as Pyrymus in the play but he claim he could easily take on the role of 'Ercles' 
who he is? 

Rehearsals
me and Chloe aim to have 1-2 out of lesson rehearsals a week if we have more than one rehearsal the other rehearsal is more of a discussion rehearsal rather than physically performing. in these we have discussed lighting props costumes and staging

obstacles 
on of the main obstacles we faced was  the language barrier, since we aren't used to Shakespearian language me and Chloe found this very difficult especially some pronunciations. to overcome this watched some demonstrations on YouTube.

another obstacle we faces was conveying the emotion and understanding the scene as we felt we were just reading the words off the page and not performing them. to overcome this we translated the script into 'nowadays language' to help us understand this really helped as we connected more this the characters and the scene to help this 
we began to think about the four areas of focus 

1. Establishing the world.
2. Telling the story.
3. Discovering the characters.
4. Exploring the language

Costume
for costume i decided a brown long sleeved jumpsuit would work as we try to convey a more modern approach to the classic text we decided to add some twigs and foliage to convey the status of bottom and his relationships with the woods that happens later in the play 



Questions 

where in the story in your duologue
our scene comes at the beginning of the play in act 1 scene 2 where we are introduced to these characters talking about the royal play. 
where is it set?
originally this scene is set in a woods in Athens but when me and Chloe discussed this we figured this was hard to convey so decided to keep the classic feel to it but let the audience imagine the woods while keeping the set simple with a block.
who is it between?
our scene is between peter quince and bottom. they are discussing the play and the roles are being given out. 



annotated script





Rehersal and feedback 










Character development 

Week 1 
This week was our first week so i decided to focus on the translation into modern day english to see what my character was like. i took the words far to literally and further realised that Bottom was making fun and talking down to Quince 
Week 2 
This week i really worked on understanding the humour of the piece and working on where to pause for laughs, also what is funny in the scene. i wanted the piece to have rise and fall but make sure the audience didn't get bored.
Week 3 & 4
In week 3 and 4 i worked on the character itself. everyone knows bottom as the the character with the donkey head, but as i play bottom in an early scene -where he is not yet a donkey- i had to show his traits. with this i really worked n the body language of bottom and how he moved i decided he was very dramatic and over the top with everything so i worked on moving franticly and over doing all my lines and movements 
Week 5
This week i worked on bring the character of bottom together as a whole putting all our character work together and rehearsing together. my costume also came together and we were cleaning and polishing the last few bits 
























week 6 - assessment week 
with tech week in full swing we have had lots of rehearsals , after our first tech rehearsal me and chloes feedback was to really work and exaggerate our facial expressions and work on being MORE over the top. after the feedback we really took that on board and it ended up getting many laughs 

we also got asked to perform a transition between two scenes where we open the black curtain. we didn't want to be boring so we really used our comedic characters to play with the audience in which i bow to the audience and really get as much stage time as possible until peter quince (chloe) has to end up dragging me off the stage much to my annoyance. i found this really fun to perform and i could take the mick out of it which was what made it really funny and entertaining while helping prepare for the next scene                                                                 




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