2. How effectively are you personally exploring and developing your role(s)?

24/09/12

We have designated specific roles within the performance and have decided to develop the individual characters as much as possible in order to fit them well within the plot we create in the next week. Furthermore, we have made a strong decision to have a robbery at the center of our story line. 

We made the decision through our own acting ability as we wanted everyone’s character to “play on their strengths”, making their performance as believable and enjoyable to watch.  In order to secure the plot ideas we all completed research on past robberies and qualities certain archetypal characters would have. We found that the most common robbery to take place was revolved around a make or influenced by money in some way. Therefore, this lead us to come up with the reason behind the women wanting to commit the crime; the reason being they believe they have been “cheated” out of a bingo win, and feel they must take it upon themselves to claim their prize. When looking more closely as potential characters in our research, we discovered several “traits” that appear to come with a stereotypical personality of a certain individual. For example, “the strong leader” would be overly confident and self-absorbed (their perception of themselves often being less “superior” than they think). Characters such as “the chavy pregnant teenager” often appeared to be naive and oblivious to potentially serious situations, due to her young mentality. This would generally be reflected by constant, “dumb” immature comments and stereotypical teenage behavior.

27/09/12

We developed our understanding of our characters by watching everyday people similar to those we were playing on stage. I watched the film Juno in order to be able to see visually what my character may potentially look like. Juno herself is of a similar age to Kayleigh, her “chatty” naive personality reflecting the fact she is still young at heart despite about to become a mother. Due to her small frame the bump created an obvious restriction to her movement, as she waddled around, supporting her back as she tried to walk faster. Therefore, I decided that my motif must be highly exaggerated to constantly emphasise the physical pressure Kayleigh is under. In addition after analyzing Juno I felt it was important that even though being under strain, my characters “youthful” teenage personality must be constantly present. This will help to form the comedic stereotype of a “Teen Mum”.

26/11/12

In today's lesson we continued to devise our 'sketch' involving two best freinds at the bus stop on their way to school. We begn wih some hot seating to develop personal elements to our characters through creating a 'back story' to how they know one another and how they have ended up in their own current situations. During the questioning process we encountered a 'stubbling point' when exloring voice. As a group we made the decision to create characters that are eachothers opposites, on 'posh' and one 'chavvy'  to keep to the chosen performance style as we were creating a farcical peice based on exagerated archetyopes. To help Hazel develop her character we watched clips from the reality T.V show Made In Chelsea, studying characters like Millie Makintosh for ispiration as her character is a prime example of the 'posh tottie' archetype. To help 'combine' the two opposing personalities on stage as well as make their differences as obvious as possible we set up a mock interveiw, in which the girls answered qusetions about their friendship. This was beneficial as it allowed me to almost act as Hazel's reflection, however emphasising my 'ditsy' and stupid personality along with my 'chavy' manerism such as rolling my eyes and slouching in my chair. As our characters were both 15 and at school, it created a reason for the contrasting persoanlities to come into contact. Subsequently, we decided 'Tracey@