Making The tempest - Gdansk Day 3

into
Ok first lesson people. if you ever come to Poland bear this in mind. These people eat big. They don't believe in small portions. For example, I had a huge grilled Salmon salad for lunch but couldn't resist the pancake..it had yogurt, bannana, pineapple, blueberries, strawberries and who knows what else...here take a look for yourselfThe point is I gotta stop ordering more than one course because there is no such thing as a small portion over here. Oh and a different lady laughed at me today.

I must learn my lines, I must learn my lines, I must......

I am so so tired right now. The busyness of the past few weeks is finally catching up with me and its making it hard to learn lines. This worries me because i'm not brilliant at learning lines anyway and evryone else is far ahead of me. However I have no choice. I've given myself up till the end of Thursday to be of book, which is scary as our first show is Saturday.

Stagecraft

But things are starting to take shape. This is my area. The place where Ariel stands for the whole play. You can see the video camera that will be pointed at me, two microphones (as well as the radio mic in my hair), a light facing me and the sail behind me, the other side of which faces the audience. this makes for an interesting dynamic for the actor - me. The audience can see me a little, they can see whatever the camera picks up and they can see my shadow through the sail. It means I have to deliver a performance which is mndful of all 3 things. I have to perform to the camera whilst moving my body to make the image on the sail evocative and interesting and maintain character for the times that I can be directly seen by the audience. Quite a challenge to master in a few days, but thanks to Aysha our movement coach I think we can do this. This picture on the right should give you a feel for the stage as a whole. On the right, the big black thing is a screen where inages will be shown, to the left you can just about see the rostra covered by the sail which forms the front of the area I'll be behind. And to the right of that you can just make out a wide screen tv which will also have film on it.

A big part of this is trying to work out how the staging will work especially as everybody is doubling up. This is the cast trying out a scene while Scott films it during and as part of the performance. And the desired product, a symbolic meeting of hands is broad cast. This forms part of the scene being performed simultaneously.

As I think you can see the execution of this show is very complicated.






Language Watch

Today I learned 2 phrases - "What is your name? "and "My name is ". Magda and Suzanne were very impressed except for the fact that we already knew each other's name.

Black in Gdansk

I have manged to recruit techie David into playing the spot the person spotting the black guy game. My aim is to get a smile out of people but David has decided he somehow wants to take pictures of the people reacting to my presence.

Did you know?

You can get done for Jaywalking over here. You actually have to wait for the green man!!!

Coming soon

In yesterday's post, I mentioned the subtext and someone emailed me asking what exactly I meant by that. Exploring the sub text is a vital part of the actors toolkit. I'll explain about it tomorrow because right now I'm too tired to do aquareobics, so I'm gone to bed. Later.