New Reflections Presents...CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

Hello my Lovely Readers,

Today in this blog post I will be exploring the uses of character development through a piece of educational theatre to create a relevant and believable character that the audience will be able to connect with.

As I mentioned in my earlier blog post I am currently working with my new theatre company called 'New Reflections' on a piece of educational theatre as part of a unit for Drama School called 'Student Led Project' at RCCSD. The performance that we will be presenting is called 'Like Me? Follow Me..' and has been hugely influenced by Brecht. The performance focuses on body image in teenagers and the impact that social media and celebrities has on them.

The story follows the journey of two teenagers Perpetua (Pep) and Hudson (Hud) as they struggle to deal with the harsh ideas surrounding the Perfect body. 

As a group we were adamant that we wanted to incorporate many of Brecht's techniques as we believed that they would compliment the style of educational theatre. We also thought that many school students that will be taking drama for GCSE will be familiar with his methods and connect with the message that we are presenting them with.

Although I do believe Brecht's technique work well with educational theatre, I was faced with the issue of staying true to the character of Pep.  Using abstract and 'un-naturalistic' methods of representing, made it difficult to really grasp the personality and essence of the character I was playing.

The first thing that we did in order to gain a greater understanding of our character's was by developing a time line and diagram to represent the history of our character. This allowed us to discover ideas such as 'who the character was' The history and family life of the character and their background. Although this did give us an insight, we felt it wasn't enough to allow us to grasp the realness of our roles. 

I along with my fellow cast member Phoebe Seddon, who was playing the other lead role 'Hud' decided to write a monologue from the perspectives of our character. In order to really get into the head of my character our director Katherine Wyatt felt this would be really important part of the our character development. 

After knowing all the relevant details about Pep's life and relationships I decided write down all Pep's deepest feelings, things that only she would know. I wrote down even the tiniest and most specific details that came into my head at that moment, whilst I was in character. I felt as if I was sitting in Pep's head and for the first time I really understood what she was going through. The words felt so natural, I didn't have to think too hard about what I was writing, it just came to me as I was so sure it was actually true. I felt how she felt, I understood and respected what she was going through. I felt like I was actually thinking like her for the first time since creating her. 

The next day in rehearsals we had a chance to perform our monologues to the rest of the cast before deciding to merge both Hud and Pep's monologues together. The reason we chose to do this was to put emphasis on the similarities that both characters are effect by.

Originally we did try to adapt the speeches to make it genderless, meaning it could refer to either male or female. However after trying this out, we came to the conclusion that it didn't work to our advantage. It had a much greater effect when the speeches were read as their original characters back to back. 

As the duologue scene was very stylised (a Brechtian technique) I found it quite difficult to really grasp the emotion of my character. During this scene the chapters speak their thoughts to the audience, before returning back into neutral. 

I found it difficult to go into character and then withdraw back to a neutral exterior  within seconds. This meant I ended up withdrawing from the character all together and speaking my lines as myself rather than Pep. We had come so far with the development of our characters that it would be a disaster if we couldn't connect to them throughout the whole performance.

To try and gain back the understanding of our characters our director decided to 'hot seat' us, asking a variety of questions about our monologues that only our character could answer. I was completely surprised at what was coming out my mouth, I had thought I knew everything about her life, but after this, I realised that I hadn't. I found out things about her that I had never knew existed.

After the short interview with Pep, we went through our lines one by one, putting an intention in front of everyone of them. This gave me a better understanding on how to utilise the words. Every line in the speech matters, every word had been put there for a specific reason. For my character's sake it was vital that as an actor i understood the reason that she has chosen these specific words. 

Sneak Peak through the life of Pep & Hud (rehearsals) 

Good Day for now and remember to subscribe to my blog for more posts :) Bye Y'all