My First Performance Log

Day One: Wednesday, October 26th

Today, Julia and I worked on developing our characters so we could understand them better and therefore play them more effectively. We asked ourselves what each character's motivation was for each action that they did. For example, when Juliet sees Romeo dead next to her, she kills herself with his dagger because there was no poison left over. Juliet wanted to kill herself because she could not imagine a world where she lived without Romeo. In her eyes, Romeo was her whole life, especially now that she was married to him. As an actor, I have to show that to the audience mainly through my body language and eye movements. Not taking my gaze off him during that scene is a potential way of showing this. Another possibility would be to look everywhere but at Romeo. This could show that she is overwhelmed by his death and is looking to outside sources for help on what to do. Juliet has not made many important choices by herself so it would seem likely that it would be difficult for her to make this decision. But to try this path, in the end, Juliet would have to be seen as ignoring all her other worries and killing herself because of her love for Romeo. That change is significant because the audience needs to know that she is conflicted, but being in love with Romeo will always win out.

Day Two: Thursday, October 27th

Today, the main focus was our lines. Julia and I worked to become more familiar with them, and even start to memorize them. We also watched various versions of the scenes being acted out on YouTube. I thought that this was especially helpful for a few reasons. Firstly, because many of the adaptations I watched had the same lines, it was good to hear the line being spoken by someone new. It helped to hear the pauses and also connect various facial expressions to different parts of the monologues. It was also very interesting to see the various ways that different directors chose to block the scene and with which set. Some versions had a very simple set with just a bed-like structure that served as the tomb, others had a more elaborate set-up, similar to something found on a movie set. Watching the actors interact with the space that they have was cool too. Also, the chemistry between the two actors was also very clear. The eyes of an actor are very telling of the true emotions of the character. I think that in the death scene, this is very important. Juliet cannot be looking all around the tomb when she sees that Romeo has died; it needs to be clear that Romeo is the only thing that she cared about. Another thing is that  because the majority of our adaptation has one character talking to an unresponsive character, the way that the actor, basically reacted to what she is saying is crucial. The actor has no one else to ‘feed’ off of so they need to be the one providing all the energy and emotion.