The Third Week of Rehearsal Log/#17

As we went through the rehearsal on our scene of Romeo and Juliet and finished the memorization quiz as well as the in-class performance, I've got pieces of feedback from class, and they are really helpful because they pointed out what we still need to work on directly. It is a week that we did not do many things in class, but basically focused on memorization and on-stage performance without scripts.

I did well in the memorization quiz, but I still found something confusing. I could write the lines down without many mistakes. However, I would forget some of the lines immediately when practicing with my partners after class. What I had in my head was blank, and I need my partner's help to continue. I tried to do what Sanford Meisner said that I need to "get out of my head", but I found it kind of difficult for me since I was not able to really get into the scene, acting as a real character and reacting to my changing environment. Also, when Betty and me were trying to work on our body languages when Juliet and Lady Capulet are having a conversation, I might either forget my lines if I focused on my body languages and movements or forget to react to Juliet as I was paying attention on my lines. This is common for not only me but also my parter. There are lots of reactions and monologues between Juliet and Lady Capulet that are truly important during the whole scene. For me, I think Lady Capulet's personalities could mostly be shown in this part. But if I fail to combine my lines and body languages, it would be awful. Since then, I was trying to find a way to get myself into the scene as a real Lady Capulet.

I think what I need to do is to go back and look at my previous analysis of Lady Capulet, such as her personalities, behaviors in the scene, and emotion changes. And then I can find a way to unite these and add them into my performance.

In the following days, according to other groups' performances, I feel like we really need to slow down when we are speaking our lines and put more spaces within words and phrases. Again, body languages are pretty essential to the whole play. If there is not any movings on the stage, it will look weird, for it isn't look like performing a scene, or a story. but is two characters speaking their monologues individually. When my group was performing, we did slow down and add our body languages into the lines while we were speaking. However, we ignored a point about our blocking. We set two doors on both left and right stages, which seemed confused to the audience. At first, we were thinking about highlighting Lord and Lady Capulets' different personalities by setting different doors and letting them entrance and exit from these two doors. But it seemed that it did not make sense. As a result, we deleted one door and let Lord and Lady Capulet appear and leave from the same door, and then focused on enhancing our performance to highlight characters' features. Also, based on the feedback from my classmates, I knew that I need to show more facial expressions to cooperate with my emotions and gestures. To achieve the goal of "get out of my head", I need to practice more with my partners, such as discussing what emotion we should express in a specific line or monologue, and how we can perform it as real as possible.

Acting is a new thing for me. It is interesting, relaxing and useful. There is still a long way for me to walk along. And acting as a role in Romeo and Juliet is also a challenge, which I should conquer myself to achieve the goal of acting.