New Project Rolling

Richard Cant

Day 1 – 22nd April 2009

Jaccobeans, yayy! Right, we’ve just started working on the New Project before we crack on with the last one before Summer holidays: the mythical History Living Project. This one will last us for six weeks. We are doing scenes out of “The Changeling” by Thomas Middletown and William Rowley. Now, how do these two guys write a play together? Because there are two plots, the main one and the sub-plot, one took over each of them. Cool beans! Our director is called Richard Cant. He says he’s graduated from Central School of Speech and Drama twenty years ago and for the last ten years he has worked in Telly as an actor and started directing shows. It’s good to know who you are working with, therefore we finished a bit earlier so he could have small ten-minute interviews just to get to know us a bit better.

Basically, I am fucked. I have failed my articulation module last term, for my RP is still not good enough to be called RP. It’s good though, for I have clear aims to work on. Fortunately, by the end of this year, I may be abble to speak RP as myself fluently. This play is definitely going to be a challenge (“changeling”, that was close!) for I believe it is going to help me to change (“changeling”, there it is, ha!) my natural accent. But for the moment I am fucked.

Our homework is to prepare the sightreading of the scenes for tomorrow. It’s quite a long play (three hours length) and, despite I remained quiet when Richard asked the whole group if anyone has not read the play, I read the wikipedia synopsis for now and am about to read the whole play from the top now. Hurray!

Now, the play itself is quite interesting. If you are really interested, you might as well just pop into wikipedia and pleasure yourself.

We did a physical workshop. Did we roll on the floor like Autumn leaves and jumped and threw ourselves again on the floor? No, that is just silly. A Physical workshop, in oposition to a voice workshop, is working focusing on the body as a way of expression, using a few words here and then, as the voice workshop you would be exploring different resonances within your body and vocal range.

So, we played with status/stakes for the play is pretty much about social status and who tells whom to do what. We had an exercise with cards (from Ace to 10) in which in pairs we would play our level of authority (without the partner knowing which level we are playing) and interact using just the words “Yes”, “No” and “You”. Then, in the end, you would have to guess the numbers. We also had to walk from one side of the class to the other playing a number.

We did some exercises focusing on the iambic pentameter like walking in five tempus in “and one, and two, and three, and four, and five” scheme. “shall I comPAre THEE to a SUmmer’s DAY?” kinda thing.

And that was pretty much it, apart from the long talk Richard had with us, and “all that kinda thing” like Jimi Hendrix would say. Off I am to read the play. Hopefully I’ll write a page after every rehearsal. Ha, but I am hopeless!