Unit 8 (Monologues)
One of the 3 most important things about doing monologues are projection, taking your time and have good articulation. This helps the audience understand everything clearly. So before we start anything, every morning we would do exercises and warm ups that help us with articulation, projection and pace. We usually start off with a dance exercise. This helps us with our physicality and confidence. For the monologues, we were told that it would be much easier if we did a monologue that suits our age group. I picked a monologue from The Curious Incident Of A Dog In The Night-Time. The Curious Incident Of A Dog In The Night-Time is about a autistic 15 fifteen year old boy named Christopher Boone who is investigating the murder of his neighbours dog, Wellington. While investigating that, Christopher is also in his search of his mum. Although Christopher never mentions having autism, he says that he finds it hard to socialise and understand people emotionally. The monologue I am performing is a scene where Christopher is expressing why he would make a good astronaut. I actually had picked another monologue, but the reason why i didn't do it is because it was too short. The scene was about Christopher expressing why he adores space. The reason why I had picked this scene before is because I thought it would let me range around with emotions. But when I tried performing in front of the class, it didn't have the impact I thought it would have. So I went on to look for a longer scene that would allow me to play around with emotions when performing. Research And Planning
Since the character I was doing my monologue on had autism, I had to do some research on that. I had watched a lot of films on autism, this included films like Forrest Gump, My Name Is Khan, Rain Man, Whats Eating Gilbert Grape and many more. I also have friends that have autism, so I had a brief understanding about it. The characteristics of autism are repeated actions or body movement, having difficulties in socialising, having an interest in a various things. This helped me understand how Christopher Boone felt around people he didn't know and why has a certain way of doing things.
To help me further, I downloaded the whole play and had a read. In the process of reading the play, I would take out certain scenes break them down and analyse them individually. The reason for this is because it would help me understand each character in that specific moment. Even though my main focus was Christopher, I would analyse the characters he was close to. This includes Ed Boone (Father), Judy Boone (Mother), Siobhan (Christopher's Mentor) and of course Toby, Christopher's pet rat.
During class, we would do activities that would help us improve our improvisation and devising skills. this included activities such as creating small scenes that require a variety emotions. We also did an activity that included playing around with emotions with out monologues. The emotions included confused, angry, sad, joyful, excited. We also did a hot seating, but not everyone was able to to do it as it would take time for one person to do it. All these activities helped out a lot because it helped us to build our confidence and to improve on the things we would personally struggle with. For me, something i would struggle with was taking my time when delivering the lines, now slowly by slowly, I am able to take my time.
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