The Seagull: Lesson 2

Warm up: Exercises 3, 4 & 6

Today was our first chance to rehearse our scenes in individual groups. The way our scene is structured means that the majority of the scene is a duologue, so we split into our partners and spent the first part of our rehearsal analysing and discussing our scripts. Doing this as a pair meant we were more aware of our partner's intentions throughout the scene, giving us a better playing field in which to explore and challenge each other. We broke our scene into 'units' or 'bits' in which the mood of the scene changes, then set about deciding our characters' psychological objectives. We then split the bits into breaths or thoughts using a forward slash, and gave each of these thoughts a physical objective. These allow us a basis on which we can base our movement and purpose in the scene, allowing our characters to become grounded. These first impressions were entirely based on having read the script, not having played with the text yet, so could be inaccurate, but they were a starting point. We then started to play with blocking and physically rehearsing the scene while carrying out these objectives. From this, I learnt some basic first impressions of my character, including those that contradict my original impression from analysis e.g Medvedenko is not as passive as he first appears, he is open to letting his discontent with Masha show, as opposed my original impression that he put pleasing Masha over everything else. I learnt from using this method that having an original analysis of objectives lays a foundation in which it is is possible to build up truthful interpretations, even if this means knocking down the original analysis.

We then responded to our peer's scenes, watching their versions of truthful acting using physical objectives and proceeding to evaluate them, using both tutor and our own analysis. Watching other's scenes allowed me to clearly witness what it was we were trying to achieve as the groups that were showing were guided by the tutor to entice the physical truth from their performance. They were encouraged to change their entrance and initial actions repeatedly in order to breathe new life into the scene, and were asked to repeat the lines using different emphasis until the words flow naturally off the tongue. This was repeated until the text was no longer important as the focus was on playing physical and psychological objectives, the words only coming when the actions prompt it. This is referred to by our tutor as 'Ergonomic Flow'.