Rehearsal Exercises

We done various rehearsal exercises to help us become familiar with the new Shakespeare monologues. Initially i was worried about performing my first Shakespearean style monologue as i felt like i wouldn't be able to understand the language and the meaning behind the monologue and how the characters was emotionally attached.

As a group we done exercises to help encourage our learning of Shakespeare this included:

Tension and Relaxation:

This exercise we experienced in the previous assignment and there i felt it was beneficial so we decided to apply it to introducing our Shakespeare monologues.

In this exercise we read throughout the monologues to refresh our memories on theme firstly. Next we walked around the room at a neutral pace. As we begun to read the monologues out loud when we came to any punctuation we turned a whole 90 degrees turn. This physicals the tension in our monologues. Therefor where there is more punctuation the more tension and rising action is apparent in this specific part of the monologue.

When doing this exercise i notices that my monologue features a build up to the highest point of tension which is apparent in the middle of the monologue then then end decreases towards the falling action of emotions in the monologue. In my monologue Ophelia is verging on madness as she has just experienced a unplanned meeting with Hamlet who she had in the previous act agreed to her father she would stop seeing Hamlet! This meeting with Hamlet has allowed Ophelia to see that he is not that man she thought he was and he is not capable of taking on the position of being the role model in her life. Women in this era relied of men to guide them in life. Ophelia's has always been her father but her meeting with Hamlet had in forced her of her fathers opinion of Hamlet of being useless and cynical.

Neutral, Melodramatic, Non Verbal:

Another exercise we we done to develop the ideas around the emotions was the perform the monologues out loud and perform them using extreme form of styles. This included firstly performing the monologues as we currently had them, for example in an appropriate way. Next we were to perform the monologue the an over exaggerated melodramatic way. This included overemotional and over dramatic form. The allowed us to experience the heights of emotion in our monologues. Finally we would perform the monologues in a non verbal way using no speech but only using actions relating to the the words. I feel this helped us become aware of the physical space of what will use when performing our monologues.  Also it helped us physically embody the characters we were playing.

Overall i feel the outcome of this specific exercise was very effect and had a beneficial effect on influencing our final performance. I feel that playing our characters to the extremes can help us work towards the final performance as we can apply subtle hints of the different styles to our final classical performance.