29/02/2016 - forth week of practicing
After practicing this week I have found that by changing the tongue twister to 'red lolly, yellow lolly' I have seen some improvements to my diction as I am able to pronounce the L's clearer then I used to. I do still find the tongue twister hard to repeat quickly but since I have only just started trying out the new exercise, I think that in the next few weeks this should improve as long as I keep practicing it.
07/03/2016 - fifth week of practicing
This week I continued the routine as usual however I did miss a couple of my exercises out as I wanted to experiment how effect the exercise of relaxation helped me in any way. So for the whole week I didn't use the incense sticks at all. I found out that it didn't necessarily change my voice however I didn't feel as calm as I usually do during the week. Even though the exercise doesn't improve my voice, I think I still want to use the incense sticks as they did keep me calm in the week which I feel is good to keep control over my well being.
14/03/2016 - six week of practicing
During this week I didn't stick to the routine for the programme as I only did it once this week. The main reason for my laziness with the routine was that I didn't feel that there was any changes to my voice for a few days. Plus I have been doing some college work which has made me want to occupy myself with more exciting things then my vocal development programme. Next week I will defiantly need to carry on with the routine.
21/03/2016 - seventh week of practicing
So far this week I have done a class speaking presentation which I defiantly had wished that I did more practicing last week as I was not perfect vocally. I was very rushed with my speaking during the presentation probably because I was not taking enough breath and I was very nervous. Therefore I needed to practice the breathing exercise and used some of the incense sticks as I defiantly felt I was not breathing well enough in the presentation.
Wednesday, 23 March 2016
Tuesday, 8 March 2016
Vocal practicing
03/02/2016
I first set up what exercises I wanted to do for my own vocal developement programme:
- stretching intercostal muscles and neck
- opening resonators by tapping head, nose and chest
- humming in lower voices
- relaxation e.g. Meditation and insence sticks
- holding and exhale line breath over long periods of time
- putting in pauses in my texts
- tounge twisters
08/02/2016 - first week of practice
I decided to practice my vocal developement programme three times a week so that I was constantly using my voice equally during the week. Personally I felt that I didn't notice much change to my voice as I had only being doing it for a few days so therefore no much would have changed. However I did find the excersise of inhaling, holding and exhaling breathe sometime quite challenging when I got to longer durations of time. To me this showed that this was an element. In my voice that defiantly needed to work on breathe more to make it stronger. I also found the tounge twister "red lorry, yellow lorry" quite easy so I have decided to change the tounge twister to "red lolly, yellow lolly" as I know I have struggled with it before. I hope that changing this will enable me to become better at articulating the L's more in my speech.
15/02/2016 - second week of practicing
On this week I was performing in a show so I felt that I needed to use my vocal programme every day of the week in order for my voice to be prepared for the show. I felt this defiantly helped my voice especially with opening lower resinators as I was playing a character who was meant to have quite a low voice. So I defiantly found the excersise of tapping my head, nose and chest resinators helpful as well as humming in lower tones as it got my voice to the lower register of my voice. I also felt that using the programme more frequently helped to see a bigger change in my voice so I think that I will increase to the times of practicing the vocal programme to five times a week.
22/02/2016 - third week of practicing
In this week we had a collage show however we didn't do much talking in the show so I was not as focused on the resinator excersise said or the humming excersise. Although I did do more of the stretching excersise as we used our body a lot more in this week. The stretches defiantly warmed up my body during the week so I defiantly feel that this excersise works for my body and vocal development programme. However when I was going through some of my monologue for my voice class I tried using the excersise of pausing at all punctuation marks and I found that this techniques wasn't helping me in any way. I felt it actually made it worse for me as I was then unable to rejoin the speech back together so that it would flow like natural dialogue. So I have decided to remove this excersise from the programme as it didn't work for my breathing and my other excersise of exhaling, holding and inhaling for long periods of time does work so there is no real reason for it to be in my vocal programme.
I first set up what exercises I wanted to do for my own vocal developement programme:
- stretching intercostal muscles and neck
- opening resonators by tapping head, nose and chest
- humming in lower voices
- relaxation e.g. Meditation and insence sticks
- holding and exhale line breath over long periods of time
- putting in pauses in my texts
- tounge twisters
08/02/2016 - first week of practice
I decided to practice my vocal developement programme three times a week so that I was constantly using my voice equally during the week. Personally I felt that I didn't notice much change to my voice as I had only being doing it for a few days so therefore no much would have changed. However I did find the excersise of inhaling, holding and exhaling breathe sometime quite challenging when I got to longer durations of time. To me this showed that this was an element. In my voice that defiantly needed to work on breathe more to make it stronger. I also found the tounge twister "red lorry, yellow lorry" quite easy so I have decided to change the tounge twister to "red lolly, yellow lolly" as I know I have struggled with it before. I hope that changing this will enable me to become better at articulating the L's more in my speech.
15/02/2016 - second week of practicing
On this week I was performing in a show so I felt that I needed to use my vocal programme every day of the week in order for my voice to be prepared for the show. I felt this defiantly helped my voice especially with opening lower resinators as I was playing a character who was meant to have quite a low voice. So I defiantly found the excersise of tapping my head, nose and chest resinators helpful as well as humming in lower tones as it got my voice to the lower register of my voice. I also felt that using the programme more frequently helped to see a bigger change in my voice so I think that I will increase to the times of practicing the vocal programme to five times a week.
22/02/2016 - third week of practicing
In this week we had a collage show however we didn't do much talking in the show so I was not as focused on the resinator excersise said or the humming excersise. Although I did do more of the stretching excersise as we used our body a lot more in this week. The stretches defiantly warmed up my body during the week so I defiantly feel that this excersise works for my body and vocal development programme. However when I was going through some of my monologue for my voice class I tried using the excersise of pausing at all punctuation marks and I found that this techniques wasn't helping me in any way. I felt it actually made it worse for me as I was then unable to rejoin the speech back together so that it would flow like natural dialogue. So I have decided to remove this excersise from the programme as it didn't work for my breathing and my other excersise of exhaling, holding and inhaling for long periods of time does work so there is no real reason for it to be in my vocal programme.
The Oresteia part 2
In order to perform extracts of Greek chorus, we are looking at a version of The Oresteia part 2 of 'the libation Bearers' and adapting the original Greek theatre to a modern interpretation. The Oresteia tells the story of Orestes quest to kill his mother out of revenge for his father's murder. In my groups section of the script, Orestes is being persuaded by the chorus to kill his mother because she murdered his father. When I originally looked at the section I thought that Orestes was the villain of the story as he plans to kill his mother however the chorus piece shows how they sort of pressuring Orestes to do it as they say things like "do it for the house of Atreus". This therefore made me feel that the chorus had the dominance in this scene over the hero and that they have a lot of influence in the play itself.
We as a group started to think about how we could modernise the performance in order to suit our target audience, a group of upper aged school kids. One idea we explored was a mother's meeting. Because the chorus had control over Orestes, we thought that the audience might relate to how they have been controlled by their mothers as well as Orestes. However when we started to develop this idea, found out that we weren't able to create an equal chorus role for all of our group and we were focusing more on our theme then the physical and vocal performance of the piece. Instead we started to pull out key words from our text that could link to physical actions for example our first line is "let all who have prayed for justice". The key word we found was prayed and so we decided to create a tableu of praying using levels and individual images that linked together. I personally felt that this was a better way to create our performance as it meant that we could connect more with the text and it later made it easier to add our context to the movements.
Our contextual style that we have decided to perform our piece in is school kids peer pressure. We felt that this was a good theme as it is relevant to our young teen audience and it would enable us to use chavy ascents to portray our characters. It was easy to add this voice to our piece for example James says "when she wails 'Orestes my child' ". He is able to add manipulative tones and slag to his voice to make this line comical for when he pretends to faint. I feel that this style also makes it more modern as the chavy ascents weren't even created in Ancient Greece and it has only really being used in the late 20th century.
Also adding physical theatre to these ancient texts makes it modern as we are using modern practioners styles of physical theatre. For example we use a lot of berkovian techniques in our piece as we over exsagerted mouth movements when we say the text and we use robotic like clockwork movements when we turn to get into our first tableu. I feel that berkoff was a good practioner to use as this style of theatre questions against complex theme just like in the Oresteia.
We as a group started to think about how we could modernise the performance in order to suit our target audience, a group of upper aged school kids. One idea we explored was a mother's meeting. Because the chorus had control over Orestes, we thought that the audience might relate to how they have been controlled by their mothers as well as Orestes. However when we started to develop this idea, found out that we weren't able to create an equal chorus role for all of our group and we were focusing more on our theme then the physical and vocal performance of the piece. Instead we started to pull out key words from our text that could link to physical actions for example our first line is "let all who have prayed for justice". The key word we found was prayed and so we decided to create a tableu of praying using levels and individual images that linked together. I personally felt that this was a better way to create our performance as it meant that we could connect more with the text and it later made it easier to add our context to the movements.
Our contextual style that we have decided to perform our piece in is school kids peer pressure. We felt that this was a good theme as it is relevant to our young teen audience and it would enable us to use chavy ascents to portray our characters. It was easy to add this voice to our piece for example James says "when she wails 'Orestes my child' ". He is able to add manipulative tones and slag to his voice to make this line comical for when he pretends to faint. I feel that this style also makes it more modern as the chavy ascents weren't even created in Ancient Greece and it has only really being used in the late 20th century.
Also adding physical theatre to these ancient texts makes it modern as we are using modern practioners styles of physical theatre. For example we use a lot of berkovian techniques in our piece as we over exsagerted mouth movements when we say the text and we use robotic like clockwork movements when we turn to get into our first tableu. I feel that berkoff was a good practioner to use as this style of theatre questions against complex theme just like in the Oresteia.
Thursday, 3 March 2016
Greek Chorus - Origins
Greek Theatre Origins
There is three types of Greek Theatre:
There is three types of Greek Theatre:
- tragedy
- comedy
- satyr
Originally these types of plays would have been performed in the festival of Dionysus in front of all of Greece. The festival of Dionysus is a religious festival which celebrates the god Dionysus so it was very common for these Greek plays to have masks worn by all of the players. They were used to teach Greece life lessons by showing them the worst consequences to peoples actions. These plays were performed in open air theatres that were built into the side of a hill.
Tragedy
In Greek Tragedies, they mainly focus on looking suffering and human misery in the face. It confronts themes like living in a fraud world which has been caused by our own actions and these themes often relate to our modern world today. In tragedies, someone usually dies from some cause and before they die they usually talk about the sun as it links to the religious beliefs of the Greek gods. At the end of Greek tragedies there is also a catharsis. Catharsis is when there is a cleansing or purifying which can inflict to the audience an emotional draining at the end of the play. When relating these Greek tragedies to today's world, they are most similar to modern day soap operas as they have confront many extreme themes through acting.
Chorus
There are two key uses of a Greek Chorus. One of them being that they added fun and energy to the plays by using 12 or so strong singing/dancing men who were very athletic and engaging in the plays. The second being that they provide the prospective of the community in the plays. They often will show the hero and the villains story but the chorus will comment on the actions and decisions of the main characters. The chorus don't necessarily have to all think the same things but they must show different responses and opinions to the main characters. In the National Theatre videos on Greek Theatre, they described the chorus as "not a body that thinks together but a body that speaks together". The chorus's identity are usually based on stereotypes of common people in order to show that they are the community compared to the main characters. However in modern interpretations some play writes have adapted the chorus members to have there own individual character trait and statues in order to show that there are different people with the same opinions.
Tragedy
In Greek Tragedies, they mainly focus on looking suffering and human misery in the face. It confronts themes like living in a fraud world which has been caused by our own actions and these themes often relate to our modern world today. In tragedies, someone usually dies from some cause and before they die they usually talk about the sun as it links to the religious beliefs of the Greek gods. At the end of Greek tragedies there is also a catharsis. Catharsis is when there is a cleansing or purifying which can inflict to the audience an emotional draining at the end of the play. When relating these Greek tragedies to today's world, they are most similar to modern day soap operas as they have confront many extreme themes through acting.
Chorus
There are two key uses of a Greek Chorus. One of them being that they added fun and energy to the plays by using 12 or so strong singing/dancing men who were very athletic and engaging in the plays. The second being that they provide the prospective of the community in the plays. They often will show the hero and the villains story but the chorus will comment on the actions and decisions of the main characters. The chorus don't necessarily have to all think the same things but they must show different responses and opinions to the main characters. In the National Theatre videos on Greek Theatre, they described the chorus as "not a body that thinks together but a body that speaks together". The chorus's identity are usually based on stereotypes of common people in order to show that they are the community compared to the main characters. However in modern interpretations some play writes have adapted the chorus members to have there own individual character trait and statues in order to show that there are different people with the same opinions.
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