Londoners take Halloween to a whole new level. This special Halloween edition blog post will feature some wicked and deadly things: murderous Jacobean tragedies from drama class and LAMDA's annual Halloween Sleazy.
For the past 5 weeks I've worked with London short film director William Oldroyd.
He's pretty legit: http://www.williamoldroyd.com (Check it out.)
Will employs some unorthodox directing tactics to help us work through Jacobean tragedies, plays from the era of James I that specialize in whoredom, murder, backstabbing, and incest. How juicy! For example, one group is doing a play called 'Tis Pity She's A Whore (the main woman character leaves her husband for her brother) and my group is performing a piece called Women Beware Women, complete with a big shabang in the ending scene that results in 12 deaths (one character is killed by flaming gold). These plays were written without the graceful and poetic writing of Shakespeare, yet they attempt to deliver similarly complex thoughts and plots (revolving around some weirder topics). Many times one might appear more like a pirate instead of a character of the Jacobean era since the playwrights often shortened phrases like "you are" into "y'are." In context: "Y'are a damned bawd" (that line comes up quite a bit). There is one specifically extreme example of this shortening of phrases: guess what " 'slid " stands for?
Did you guess "God's eye lid?" I thought so.
Besides the oddness of the writing style and plots, Jacobean theatre grew exciting during rehearsal because of Will's determination that we bring alive the emotions and objectives of the characters through physical work and what's written in the text. In the ending scene of our play, I find out that my brother has killed my love, Leantio. Here's what I logged into my personal journal after rehearsing that scene under Will's direction:
"In order to run into the murder scene with fury and surprise, as soon as I entered the scene Will would begin to drop a blue ribbon to the floor from the chair he was standing on. My objective was to run and catch the ribbon before it hit the floor. Next, we ditched the ribbon-dropping exercise and I still had to replicate the same rush and intention of hurrying into the scene, this time with the objective of finding out who has been murdered. Then, in order to get Livia's disappointment and shock when she finds Leantio dead, Will blindfolded me and made me find Leantio in the room, saying my line of text "Leantio? My love's joy?" while I did the activity of searching for him. Eventually I found him lying on the floor and the connection changed. Will lifted my blindfold and I felt the burning hurt of losing the one you love after optimistically searching for them for so long. Then I turned to see Ben, playing my brother, who murdered my love. Will told me to go get this wooden bat and hit this large green punching bag with the frustration I felt for Ben while saying my lines of text, really putting the energy of the physical activity into the words. Then I had to convince everyone else in the room to "run for officers" so we could arrest my brother for the murder of my love, but they weren't allowed to leave the room and obey me until they truly felt compelled to do so, and Will made me use the emotion in the text to move them into action. Will said the connection in that moment was definite, and that now we must transfer that energy into the performance without the punching bag and the ribbon dropping to the floor. I must remember the feeling of those moments."
Will's strategies follow the foundation we've been given at LAMDA: emotion starts from the body, not the head. Physically energizing the text does more for your voice and emotion than thinking so hard about it.
But we can't leave the bloody murders and gore of the Jacobean tragedies yet, since British people don't think of Halloween as the day when you dress up like a movie character or something funny; for them, it's all about the scary fancy dress. The week leading up to Halloween I kept seeing posters around school saying "wear your fancy dress to the Sleazy" and I was so confused why I was going to get dressed up all nice for Halloween...fancy dress means costume, y'all. Last night I went to the annual LAMDA Sleazy, a talent show/dance/venue for cheap alcohol. I planned to go as a hippie, but realizing that the Brits wouldn't accept that as scary enough, I began to come up with titles that would make me sound scary: Hippie from Hell was definitely the winner. I'll tell you what: I seriously underestimated the scariness factor of my British peers. Brits must just have a container at home labeled "Halloween Blood" in their medicine cabinets; if I had 50 pence for every fake stitch, wound, and gash I saw last night, I could maybe rent a room in Buckingham Palace. Somebody went as Mario the video game character, and then of course they had to put a fake knife going through his hat, dripping with blood. The talent show was amazing, going to school with multitalented drama kids always means you're in for a good performance--where else could you get a dance off between traditional Indian dancing and 1920s dancing and then have the dance off battle resolved with the Thriller dance? After the performances, the music seemed to last all night and we literally danced the night away. Even though it was on November 1, it was the best Halloween I've had yet.
 |
| Yola and Me! You can catch a glimpse of the fake blood behind us on the left side of the picture. |
No comments:
Post a Comment