Everyman - Benji's Actor Log

In our show, we have a tsunami storm. It is slightly based off the 2004 Tsunami in Indonesia. The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, also called the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake, was a great underwater earthquake. The large movement of earth under the water caused a very large and powerful tsunami. The tsunami was called the Asian tsunami, or the Boxing Day tsunami in Australia, Canada, England, and South Africa because it happened on the 26th of December 2004 (Boxing Day). It spread all over the Indian Ocean. The tsunami caused heavy damage to countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. A total of 227,898 people died. Measured in lives lost, this is one of the ten worst earthquakes in recorded history, as well as the single worst tsunami in history. Indonesia was the worst affected area, with most death toll estimates at around 170,000. However, another report estimated the death total to be as high as 220,000 in Indonesia alone, giving a total of 280,000

This whole process has taught me a lot about characterisation, Brechtian theatre, vocal choices and a lot more. I have learnt a lot about being spontaneous and so much about myself, not just as an actor, but a person. I have learnt how important the ensemble was for my character and for the well being of a show. I wasn't sure before how much I relied on them before but during the tech run I realised how much I feed off how the ensemble act. The ensemble for our show was so strong, for example when there was a technical issue with the music in the party scene, the scene was saved because everyone had worked close enough to have the same instinct on how to resolve such an issue. I think I worked well with the ensemble. I have further explored certain practitioners that I am interested in such as Yoshi Oida. I have emotionally gone to places I haven't explored before and accepted and tried new methods regardless of whether it's worked for me. During the rehearsal process I

SHOW 1 The first show went okay. The preset did throw me off slightly as I wasn't really sure I was ready for the experience of greeting the audience, out of character, just before a show. Although it did make the show a lot more Brechtian. The first half, I did my parts without any mistakes however I think I was too self involved and again, wasn't thinking about the ensemble as much. I realised how much I rely on the ensemble because I heavily bounce off of the atmosphere created by the ensemble. I think I could have had a lot more energy and I need to work on my proxemics a bit. I don't think I was sharing to all 3 sides of the audience as much as I should have.  In the first half, there were a few lines dropped in pretty much every scene, but I don't think they were noticeable errors. In the interval, quite a few people were beating themselves up about it and that's why I think morale was quite low. This ended up with the rest of the show being fairly similar.

I've had a think about what Gig Theatre means to me, as Everyman has been described as such. Gig theatre is all about the audience and the experience. It is about music, dancing, acting and all forms of live creation all merged into one. Gig theatre shows must have the potential to go anywhere and be anything at any point. Whether that be live music, spontaneous dance battles or beautifully poetic monologues, all of which should have the potential to make you laugh, cry or want to join in with the escapade. Rules of Gig theatre to me, would be that there must be something new in every performance. Something brilliant, something spontaneous or even something terrible. As long as it's new and unexplored, I think that makes Gig theatre a fabulous concept. Another rule would be that there must be at least 3 forms of live creation: acting, music and dance/movement, regardless of the skill of the cast, music must be made live.

Mike Alfreds believes in the actors instinct, flair and trusting in their own ability more. I feel this is one of the key aspects to our show, aliveness and the ability to react in a natural, truthful way. For example, when I climb the ladder and pop my head up during my scene with Joanna, I didn't really think about it too much but it got a great reception. However, on the other nights when I did it and thought about it, the reaction wasn't too great. Things that are found in a moment can be redone to a good standard but it will never have the same effect as it does in the aliveness of the moment when it instinctually happens. I feel that Everyman really indulges in what its like to be alive in space. There is a freedom that can allow improvisation if needed within it, going with the flow and feeling what is happening on stage at the time. We were able to express all the most important things through our awareness, competition, desire, selfishness. This makes Everyman a play

Yoshi Oida was a Japanese Actor and teacher He paid attention to the nature of a situation, creating simple and not easily disrupted routes in a scene for your body and mind, for example: repeated actions or focusing on different centres of attention He believed in an energy balance between the outer expression of the body and the inner activity (emotions and thoughts) He thought about inner tempo and interior connection, through physical movements. Yoshi Oida found an emotional response to one of his most famous performances, where the repeated movement of just turning his head to a differing tempo evoked an inner emotional reaction that caused him to cry. We use the work of Yoshi Oida in our warm up processes where we do side stretch, a repeated sequence of movement that prepare us for the world of Everyman, stepping away from the outside world and stepping into the world of our characters. Yoshi once stated that when acting, it is difficult to create something new as most

DRESS RUN Today we did our dress run, the morning before our show. We were feeling optimistic about the run as all of the last week we had been running the play and it had been really fun and exciting. The first of the run went fine, nothing went wrong and if it did I didn't even notice. However, it wasn't as magic as the rehearsals we have been doing so quite a few of us were a bit confused. The rest of the run ran the same way. I did learn a lot from this run as I did some testing of coming on earlier into the last scene to see how that might affect the atmosphere. It certainly put people on edge so I might use that to my advantage, depending on how the show goes. It was also another opportunity for me to be able to interact/look at an audience. I found it really useful for some last minute characterisation while there was an audience there. This whole dress run really allowed me to stretch my character choices to the limits and create more exciting choices. Here ar

17.01.18 Today we got notes from our tech run from yesterday. The overall vibe of the room felt a bit weird today. People seemed pretty lethargic and unenthusiastic about the show. Here are some of the main group notes that Ben gave us: Don't drop the ball - When one thing goes wrong, it's like a chain reaction and people drop the ball. Presence - We need to make up for the empty space that there is in the theatre compared to the smaller spaces we've been rehearsing in. SING - The songs were poor and were definitely not loud enough. The general feeling about the tech was that we know we have a good show, we just weren't sure of ourselves in that unfamiliar space and we weren't sure what was going wrong. One of the main issues of the tech run was the costume changes were a bit rusty. So we did a run of the play with just costume changes. This helped to iron out any costume issues. 18.01.18 Today we did a run of the entire show so we could iron out

Today we did our tech run in the theatre. There were parts that took quite a long to get properly sorted out and it was a fairly long winded process that actually felt pretty rushed as we weren't in the theatre for very long. For me personally, it was a really useful and successful run. My first scene went pretty well. My first scene with Joanna went quite well and I really felt a lot more into my character than I have ever done before. I think it might be because of us being in the actual space with the set and a small audience, I felt more comfortable and felt like I had a lot more space to play around in. Some of the ensemble stuff did feel a tad weak but I think that because we were all worrying about ourselves and making sure we get our own things right. Which seemed to be the running thought with everyone once we discussed it afterwards. The songs all could have been much louder. I think it made us realise how much louder we need to be when singing the songs and how much th