Wed 9 May 2007
Do you know that feeling you get when you wake up in the morning and it’s hard? No… not that feeling. That anxious nervous feeling at the top of your chest when your heart starts beating faster and your face gets red and hot. When you can feel like you can no longer hold it together and you can just slowly feel yourself losing control over your body and emotions until it just slips away.
The other day I was talking to a friend who was upset but at that moment contained and she said she was fine until people spoke to her. She was able to block out the thought until someone would speak to her and push her to think about it.Â
This what happens to Sophie. She has become so praticed at blocking out her trauma that there is almost nothing that could push her to show how she really feels. That is until her experience in the void. The questions from her fellow ‘voidans’, “what was your goal?”, “so what went wrong?”, are all little scratches at the surface which make her uneasy. It isn’t until her argument with the guide that we really see her start to lose control.
The guides interogation techniques push Sophie to focus her mind on the one thing she is avoiding. The two characters work together, Sophie slowly running out of excuses becomes nervous and fidgety (the feeling descibed in p.1+2) and the guide sees and feels her the energy and from it is encouraged to continue pushing. The two build the scene in intensity with movement, volume and emotional tones to a breaking point (highlighted by lighting) where everything the audience has become accustomed to dissappears.
Sophie’s feelings at this point are all that we see. Shee turns inside out. All of the mannerisms adopted by her persona to hide the person she really is dissappear. Her movements, her dialogue is all competely natural and powered only by what she is feeling. There are no stereotypical or sociological elements, it is completely bare.
From this point on Sophie’s physicality and reserved speach is completely changed and we see a completely different person.
Well there is nothing else to write about this week so I thought I would just ramble about stuff. We have a lesson tomorow (Friday) but I think we will be sleeping. If anything interesting does happen I will add to this blog.
Pilot.
May 19th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
Great blog Gem, good to see you combining both your stage crafts to make a scene work to its full potential and thinking about the underlying stuff of your character and not just whats going on at the surface and in the script. You’re doing a fantastic job of Sophie, I don’t think anyone else could play her quite like you do, she’s very complicated and you bring out the many layers of Sophie. Congrats.
May 20th, 2007 at 3:03 am
oh and btw could you please read the direction section (ooo that rhymes) of my blog for this week? spanks muchly. catch you tomorrow.