Teenage Culture mood board

1950's Salem

In todays rehearsal one of the exercise was to walk around in character and visualise the town, your bedroom and the house that your character lives in. For me this was one of the hardest parts of the improvisation as i couldn't picture it in my mind. I knew i had to do more research into 1950's Salem in order to know what the houses would look like, the church, the streets and the interior.

Looking at images has allowed me to see what kind of setting I am living in. I can now refer back to these images in my mind when on stage to give me a better understanding of my surroundings. 

Acting Technique - Notes and thoughts

Physical gestures help create an atmosphere. Physical gestures inform and support your phycological decisions. Physicalising the inner. 

The phycological gestures creates an objective in the scene. Taking physical action and making it phycological can create a shift in your body helping you make new connections and realisations about your character in the scene, relationships with others, thought patterns and so on. Allowing your physical body to take lead instead of always allowing your mind to create opens up new possibilities for your character as you are feeding more of your gut and natural instinct. 

Checkov believes that the head restricts you from creating work. He believes that what you create doesn't have to make "logical sense" its about being imaginative and creative. Being free to explore rather than be restricted to what your mind tells you is right or wrong or what your mind tells you is socially acceptable.


One exercises we did was taking a movement and blending it with an objective to see what that creates. One movement was raising out right hand in the air and putting it back down. We then added an objective to that movement like, to accuse, to help, to ask etc and that changed the quality of movement. In fact when i was to raising my hand with the objective to accuse i felt a character emerging from just that movement. I began to picture what this person looks like and the reasons they were accusing someone else. I found that incredibly interesting that i didn't need to use my head and think about a character, their appearance, their attitude i just needed a movement and an objective to create something new and unplanned.

Differences between me and Abigail

During Acting technique lessons we discussed how we often look at the similarities between ourselves and our characters in order to make emotional connections, when actually you can also find interesting links when looking at the differences. Something i always do is look to myself and my life in order to emotional connect with my character; "what things have i experienced that feels the same as what my character is experiencing." However looking at Chekov has questioned my way of thinking and forced me to look from the outside in. I will continue with this on new blog post.

Differences

Abi is desperately in love                      She is interested and exited by witchcraft 

      She seeks revenge on others     She lives in Salem              Abi lives in the 50's

Abigail is power hungry              She had an affair                           She is jealous

               Abi has just lost her job               She wants to have sex with a married man

She wants another women to be sentenced to death                    She worked as a maid

    She leads a group of friends into                           She lies to her family and friends

    trouble 

                                           Abi finds her acknowledgement or strength 

                                            in a mans love 

Looking at the differences between me and abigail has helped me see what parts of her life i can work on and look at as they are the furthest away from me. i think its important for me to see how in many ways this character isn't connected to me and how the conditions she is under differ from mine as they helps me separate the two worlds allowing me to enter a different world when playing her.

Relationship with John Proctor

Key words to think about:

EXCITEMENT       LONGING     AUTHORITY   POWER  ATTENTION   SEX    LOVING 

TOUCH          LOVE       THRILL       REBEL 

Themes

Initial thoughts on Abigail

Here i have a created a visually mind map discussing some of the main things that stood out to me about Abigail's character. I also drew a picture of her, this allows me to visualise what she looks like like. This will continue to change and develop over time as the conditions of the play will change. For example if the era is changed or say the location that has a huge impact on what i first imagined Abigail might look like.

Some key words for me that i would like to play with whilst developing her as a character are:

UNLOVED 
IN LOVE
POWERLESS
CRUEL