"Family 2.0": Take One

Since British Arts has been a relatively independent project between my partner (Eric) and me, our teacher decided that we would perform our piece for the class today. Prior to today we had rehearsed our piece at four different times on our own time over the weekend. Without the guidance and the instruction that we were used to, it felt strange having to choose the piece and rehearse on our own. Despite this, we managed to work fairly well together in terms of coming up with ideas to enhance our piece and to further our characterization. In our performance today we pantomimed our props as we had not compiled our props yet.

After performing our classmates had numerous critiques which made me feel a bit discouraged because I felt that in their eyes, we hadn’t even done anything near an adequate job. For example, they said that we needed to utilize our environment and to better our physicality because all they saw was our profiles. We were also asked to cheat out more. They asked Eric to create a more defined setting so that the audience felt that he was more at home. In the script, my attitude towards my “husband” changes from being scared to coming to terms with the idea and I was asked to define this moment so that the audience could have a sense of character change. Because Eric and I were extremely nervous, we put out a one-note performance, and so we were told to exaggerate our emotions and to dramatize each word. Adding on to our nerves, our piece went by quickly and it felt more like reciting lines than it did a scene. At the end, I felt as if we had a tremendous amount of work ahead of us and left me feeling as if we wouldn’t be able to pull it all together in the end.