Assignment/blog

"The Berlin Wall"


My performance was called "The Berlin Wall", and it was about the Berlin wall and how it affected family's live. Our performance zooms into a young woman's life, who lives in Berlin in 1977. Her brother gets sent away on National Service to go and guard the wall and she doesn't want him too, because she doesn't want to take responsibility for her ill mother.

In my performance, there were areas that I think worked well, and others I think needed improving.
For example, one of the ways we could have improved it is by doing a lot more research into how people lived, what they did, what were the people's lifestyles like, and so on.
If we did even more research, our piece would have been more historically correct. If it was more accurate, then we could have used our acting skills better to perform our characters, because we would have known more about the way the lived.

However, a thing that did work well in our performance was when Aundréa-(Harry), shouted at the top of his voice, telling Nancy-(Izzy) to "Get the f**k down" off the wall. I think this worked well, because he had a lot of emotion in his voice. The main emotion I could hear was fear, because he was scared of shooting a civilian. He also had anger in his voice, which shows he's getting annoyed because he doesn't want to shoot, but he's going to have too.

In the blackouts we made the stupid mistake of not turning the torch off, so the audience could still see what we were doing. We could have stopped this from happening if we used our common sense and turned the torch off.

When mine and Izzy's character's have their argument in the third scene, we kept it very naturalistic so it was believable to the audience. We worked on keeping naturalistic in rehearsals. Nearly every lesson we'd ask Harry for feedback and ask him how we could improve it. We wanted to keep the scene naturalistic because we didn't want to go overboard with the shouting and look like idiots on stage, so we tried keeping it civilized. Not only that, by doing this it allows the audience to actually think about what the argument is about instead of just watching two people shouting at one another on stage.  

I think we all used the projection in our voices well, because when we watched the videos back of our performances, my group and I could hear ourselves loud and clear.

We also used the space of the stage well, because we were never huddled all in one corner or all in the middle we were all spread out on stage and we were constantly moving.
We worked on this in rehearsals a lot, because at first we wasn't very sure on what to do with ourselves on stage, so we asked a teacher and after him asking us questions about our characters we then knew what to do, which made us move around the stage.

The two lifts we did should have looked more clean. Because when we lifted Nancy-(Izzy), I think it looked a bit messy and not very choreographed. So I think if we spent more time on the lift we could have thought of a better/easier way of lifting her so it looked a lot more smooth.

Overall I think my performance went well, but if we did more research and fixed the minor, silly mistakes we did it would have went better.