Week 5 - Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing

Wedding and Shaming of Hero Choreography

To start off, we were given the challenge by Sally to devise a short physical theatre piece, we were told what we needed to create it round and what we were trying to portray. We were told that we needed to show that there is a swap between the characters of Hero and Margret and how Borachio sleeps with Margret thinking it is Hero and shouts her name while Claudio hears him. Claudio then shames Hero at the wedding. 

In this scene we tried implementing a box step where the two girls could get mixed up there. The box step is simple choreography which I learned from my Youth Theatre group, the way in which I wanted it to be done was that there were two lines where one line would step backwards and the other forwards so they would cross over each other, the line going backwards would step backwards with their left foot, step to the left with their left foot, step forward with the left foot and step right with their right foot and the other line would do the opposite. The second line would step forwards with the right foot, to the right with the right foot, back with the right foot and to the left with the left foot. This would of allowed the two to swap and for the audience to see this swap with it being realistic, this took quite a long time to figure out as I think as a class we find devising difficult as we are not open to other peoples ideas and this is a shame as a lot more could have come out of this rehearsal. After Sally came back, she liked our ideas of having quite a claustrophobic setting while the swap happens, she envisioned the idea that three guys would carry Hero and three guys would carry Margret on their shoulders. We still haven't figured out how the swap will happen, I have an idea with a blackout that could work and I said it to Sally but she didn't want a black out, I said that a black out could happen and then the girls could change sides and people who's shoulders were carried on. After this scene it will go into Matt and Phoebe's scene which is a perfect transition because this scene is about Hero being disowned by Claudio and Beatrice asking Benedick to kill his best friend.

Emphasis

I was told today about how emphasis is so important and I knew this to be true. I looked at my scenes and noticed how I was putting the emphasis on the wrong words. I started to look at the script and looked at the words I should be putting emphasis on, most words that are meant to have emphasis are verbs, so ' I ....', walk or the words for Bendick I think more personal pronouns are used as he is very arrogant and believes everything is about him, for most contemporary pieces its a rule of thumb that not many personal pronouns are used as it starts to sound un-naturalistic but for this script I think this is the right words to emphasis.

Overall I think this week went well as we got a lot done and we got closer as a grou thrugh a devising exercise.