Showcase feedback 19th Feb

Monologue:
Movement
1) Stand straighter! Shoulders pushed back.
2) Pacing too much and makes the character look uncertain
3) Touch the tomb more!
4) Vary hand actions more (not just open arms/one hand gestures/ touch self)

Voice
1) Angry= fast =loose enunciation. Dont do that! Keep the pace, enunciate better.
2) Play with volume- extreme soft, soft, medium, loud, extermely loud, scream...
3) Need to see more Despair!!!- perhaps even to the point where your voice seems to break
4) Try high and low, loud and soft for same emotions. (see which one is best)
5) Try using the argumentative lyric style for "pious...impious"
6) Pause after imp parts to let the message sink in.

Costume
1) Wedding dress + veil?

General
1) Be BIGGER!!!- railing against the God's
2) No matter what the emotion, tone, volume, it must be level 10! Intense!

Duologue
Movements
1) Try to remain standing (1st time i stand) when drinking.
2) Cigaratte, learn how to use one! Ash.
3) Create more character traits and ticks. Make the necklace thing more obvious.
4) Hands too 'flowy' both mother and daughter.
5) Mother-daughter touching awakward! Not right for the relationship

Voice
1) "I hope i've always done that"- said in a childish 'i feel hurt' tone.
General
1) Try out different levels and kinds of anger
- At myself for having raised such a daughter
- At Amy for making such a horrid choice and being so stubborn about it
- At Dom cause he's taking my daughter away from me, cause he's a playboy who has little potential and because he doesnt appreciate the theatre.
Get motivations ad subtext V CLEAR.
How are these anger's different from each other. How will i show these differences?
2) Where is the climax?
3) Could add more reflective/introspective moments to Esme.
4) Change intensity of response to Amy. From- 'I need a drink!' to "Why? Why?" sliently playing in her head.
5) End-make it more obvious that Amy is the adult, that she knows what she is doing. Sort of control shift.

Miss N's comments
1) Pace- Swallowing words
2) Smoking weird
3) Keeps standing up
4) Reaction- revelation
5) Sarcasm more than concern. Monotonous.

Consultation 28th Jan- Changes

My greatest fear was that my audience would not pity Antigone because she would seem to harsh, too strong and too defiant. So what I tried to do was to tone her down, make her plead with the chorus more and make her seem more 'human' by portraying her more as a woman who fears death and is trying to reason her way out of it.

But then at my 1st consult with Miss N after the assesment, i realized that i didnt have a climax! What a crime that was in Greek tragedy and in a monologue! My intensity kept varying, following a roller coaster of ups and downs; and that was not working to my advantage. She told me to play up the dispair to get sympathy, up till the point of the climax. I know it seems dumb but it never occured to me to do that because I always played this formulae in my head pleading for mercy=soft 'feel sorry for me' voice.

So now the new Antigone will be much more intese, staying true to Greek tradition; and there will be a climax! There is only one point which will lead to an increase in energy and from there it will only go higher. The line that goes "Never had i been a mother of children"

Another thing that i managed to get rid of is the unsightly awakward habit my character has of kneeling or sitting on the ground. Now at the new high intensity level i have no motivation to sit down. AND, a great suggestion was a imagine that my family members appear to me as ghosts instead of having to look at the ground and somehow imagine their skeleton's underground. That helps to make it more real as her emotions run so high that she imagines her family around her, their prescence has never left her since their death, thats how close she is to them and shows how she is unable to let go of them, much less their memory.

New thing! Is the emotion of JOY in my monologue. When I see my mum, dad and bro, there is a new sense of happiness and calm that Antigone feels. That gives her more layers and shows off the love she has for her family members.

V IMP change of staging. Now the tomb wil be behind me not to my left, which kind of makes it seem that its hauting me, looming behind me, ready to engulf me. Chorus will be split on my right and left; makes it seem as if everyone aroud her is against her, makes her seem more trapped. Creon remains on my right, downstage, a little furthur off than the chorus.

6th Jan

When approaching the role of Antigone, i thought that it would be an emotionally draining one; and indeed it was. However im not sure if i approached it the right way. I wanted the audience to feel the pain and injustice that had been caused to asntigone and so i portrayed her as a sad, angered victim; complete with the tears, emotional voice and actions that portrayed a distressed character. However i was reading a bit from Stan's book Building a character when something struck me. He said that it was an actors job to pour out all the emotions at home and then on stage use that energy to portray and convey those emotions to the audience so that they instead of him will feel those deep emotions. How in the world does one do that? Aren't we suppose to feel the character first and seeing what the character is feeling the audience being human wil respond. I do understand that he wants us to do this so that we dont choke during the [erformance; but how do we know how much to show, and how do we make the audience feel what we felt?

With ref to my monologue and Sophocles, he took the psychological approach, wanting to display characters in distress experienceing such overpowering emotion, his aim must have been for the audience to feel it. In some ways it is like Brecht's Epic theatre. He draws the audience to sympathize with his protagonists and then asks them to step back using the Chorus and analyze the scene from a 3rd person perspective so as to balance tyhe play out.

Sophocles aim was never to give the answer of right and wrong, in fact there seldom is any because there is nothing more to it than fate. What one God considers right may be wrong to another God since there are so many contradictory God's. What he does is to present the two sides and sort of ask the people to choose, although at times he leans towards one side more than the other. What Antigone did was wrong in the eyes of men's law and what Creon did was wrong to the God's. So both are kind of wrong in a way, so there is a sort of balance between the two.