Ben's Marvellous Memories Made Through Acting

Candidate Declaration - I confirm that the attached portfolio is all my own work and does not include any work completed by anyone other than myself.  Task 1 Check Blog. Task 2 Check Blog post titled One Flew Over Audition and Preparation. Task 2.1 For our performance I researched and looked into many of the aspects of the psych ward the characters inhibited and the tools Nurse Ratched used to keep them under her command.  This helped me understand the actions of the characters in the performance.  Furthermore, I looked into who the characters I played were, by watching the film, reading the script and also filling in the blanks of the Williams and Warrens such as how long they had worked there, and how they felt about the patients: Aide Warren: Aide Warren is an aggressive Aide who works in the ward.  He has worked in the ward for 5 years and even when he first began working at the ward, he harboured a strong hatred for Miss Ratched.  Even though he doesn't int...

Tuesday 8th of May Today we worked on the beginning of Act Two, mainly focussing on the basketball scene.  While rehearsing this scene, this helped improve our teamwork as we had to work together to plan out who was passing the ball to who, so to the audience it looked random and chaotic, but we always knew who the ball would be in the hands of and passed to.  After this was the scene between McMurphy and Chief Bromden, when he finally speaks.  Since I wasn't needed in this scene, I went into the LRC to work on my production role and do more research on the play of One Flew Over and mental institutes. Wednesday 9th of May Today we finally performed the scene where Nurse Ratched confronts all the patients for their behaviour, trying to pressure Chief into talking, before McMurphy got into a fight with Aide Warren.  Since this scene is very physical, we made sure to be as safe as possible, by going through each part of it separately to make sure it was safe, before pie...

  Monday 29th of April Today we were given a set of questions to answer about our course for tutorial, and once we had done that we went through the scene where McMurphy runs into the Aides whilst trying to find toothpaste.  Me and Delroy both got off our script so we could use proper physicality during this scene, as we were meant to be cleaning up the mess made by the patients.  During this, both the Aides are complaining to each other about how horrible Nurse Ratched is, even imagining killing her.  Before we practised this scene, we first worked on our American accents, so we had better diction and volume. Tuesday 30th of  April  Today we did more of One Flew Over, getting up to the end of Act One.  This involved the Aides introducing Candy Starr into the ward, before going back to their duties of cleaning.  Once Candy leaves we join Nurse Ratched on stage when McMurphy demands a re-vote to watch The World Series, in which I made the decision ...

  Monday 22nd of April Today in the morning we did a few warm ups to get ready for practicing our performance of Shout, one of them being Wah do we were more awake.  Once we did a run through of Shout, Kelly released the cast list for both One Flew Over and Radium Girls. Whilst I didn’t get the role I auditioned for (Billy) I am more than please with the roles I was given, Aide Williams for cast one and Aide Warren for cast two.  These roles will be a challenge for me as I will have to juggle learning two sets of lines which will more than likely be similar to each other as the characters mainly share scenes with each other.  Furthermore, I will be engaging in stage combat with these roles, stretching myself and my abilities even more. Tuesday 23rd of April Today we did the first scene of One Flew Over as the full cast one.  This helped me work on my chemistry with Delroy as the two Aides work together so would obviously be friendly and know each other quite wel...

  Monday 15th of April Today we did auditions, read blog titled One Flew Over Audition and Preparation. Tuesday 16th of April Today we all sat in a circle and did readthroughs of the first 30 pages of both Radium Girls and One Flew Over so we could form opinions on both scripts in case we hadn't read it before.  People who wanted certain roles could walk into the circle and read in for that character so Kelly could see who fits certain characters the best.  After reading both of the start of each scripts I definitely preferred One Flew Over as I found the story more compelling. Wednesday 17th of April Since we were going to perform Shout next week, today we only did run throughs of Shout so we could keep it fresh in our heads, as well as improve certain scenes using the notes the lady from Connections gave us.  During this we took into consideration how we would use the backstage space since it would be a lot smaller compared to the space we had during the home perfo...