Feedback on Our Piece So Far and What Needs to Be Done to Improve It?

I feel like our piece has got a lot of potential and we managed to pull together a lot of material in this lesson. I think that it is really important to make sure that we make it look good and we don't fidgit or move or break our focus because that could cause the whole piece to look fake and forced. Everyone needs to put 100% into it to make it look good and effective and to make sure it reaches the audience and makes them think.

We need to all be really mature when performing this, because it needs to be taken seriously to work and be believable. We need to be able to do what Will is asking and not over-act it - people tend to make acting too complicated, we need to keep it simple, to make it believable. As soon as we start to act or put on an acting face, you are losing your believability and anchoring back to your residual self and not becoming a believable character which you can feel emotions through and convey and believable performance to the audience, which is what you are looking for.

We need to make sure that the transitions between our scenes are smooth and flowing to make our piece fit together. To make this possible, we all need to know what we are doing and really focus ourselves in rehearsals to get it to look very accurate and smooth.

As actors, we really need to learn to get over stuff as performers and realise that the spitting and biting might feel weird, but if it is done with conviction, it will look really good. We also need to realise that the spitting is not aggressive, nor is the biting, it is just a sensual way to meet a parnter. We need to put a longer piece in about trangressing morals and have a monologue that sets up the audience's pre-conceptions of what morals are and what they're about. We could also add a lot more to do with the theme of love, we could have some other poems, some songs about love, some more things on the projector to do with the more romantic side, now we have explored the sensual side.

I think the piece is very good at the moment - it obviously needs a lot more work and rehearsal time, but at the moment, I think we have a good rough version of our finished play. It is very obscure and dramatic and definitely breaks our comfort boundaries and challenges us to see how far we are willing to go. I found that the biting and spitting not only questions the morals of the audience, but also questions our morals. I found that when I had to bite Alex, I was breaking my own moral code of "Not to bite someone or hurt anyone" and found myself asking myself if it was ok that I was biting him and was it ok that the reason I was biting him was that I was blaming it on "acting" but it still hurt us both, so you need to see if you can push past your boundaries and find it ok to hurt other people for the sake of acting, your job, your own protection or even protecting someone else.

As an actor if you are asked to do weird things, you just have to go with it and follow your instincts, you can't act through things you are uncomfortable with, you have to let the action flow naturally.

Some ideas, for our piece, are a little weird, but you need to trust your partner to go with it. For example, Sarah and Tom are challenged to create a real piece of drama that conveys people really being in love. This is challenging for them, because obviously they aren't really in love with each other, yet they have to make it believable to the audience, by not acting, but relaying their emotion into how they would actually be feeling. It is also challenging not to have a text. You have to use your instinct and if you have a feeling you need to go with it. It is also challenging because you have nothing to fall back on. However, you do have an advantage, so that if something isn't working, you can change it to make it fit what you want to do.

As an actor you are really challenged to break your boundaries of what would be acceptable behaviour in society and push past it and hope the audience understand what you're trying to convey. If you have an idea, you just have to go with it and explore it in more detail to see the potential.