8 - Blackout PDF

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Blackout performance...

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Blackout Overvie     

Title: Blackout Date: December 2013 Role: James’ friend/ James’ bully Venue: The Drama Studio, Thomas Rotherham College, Rotherham Audience size (approx.): 40 people

Plot The brief: Use a section of the script from ‘Blackout’ by Davey Anderson create a piece that incorporates the style of Brecht much as possible. The play opens with James, a teenager who is very close to falling off the rails. He becomes increasingly violent in his retaliation to his bullies and joins a bad crowd adopting neo-Nazi beliefs and becoming emotionally unstable. ‘Blackout’ shows how these and subsequent events affect his life family and future Responsibiliti es During the creation of this piece I was responsible for ensuring that the group were all well synchronised and that all of our timings, including the physical movements, speech and scene transitions, were as precise smooth as we could get them. Additionally, we ended up using a lot of physical theatre to have a minimalistic set which meant that I sometimes found myself having to physically portray fixed, stationary objects such as a staircase. This meant that I had to make sure that my muscle strength and balance were at a good standard so that I could hold the positions firmly and remain stable for as long as needed.

Skills and During the development and performance of this piece I learnt a variety of skills and techniques: 

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Accent – Davey Anderson’s ‘Blackout’ is set in Scotland so the characters all have quite thick, strong accents. This meant I had to develop my own Scottish accent and keep it up throughout the performance so that my characters would seem realistic and portrayal would be more professional. Physical expression – The characters I played seemed to always be in one of two moods, very laid back or extremely aggressive. To physically show the audience when I was portraying each character I had to adapt my body language. To show the bully I created a hostile and confident image, crossing my arms, standing tall but not straight so that it appeared that the character felt superior to James and was in no way threatened by his presence.

Professionali sm Within this piece I think I showed a good deal of professionalism. I decided at the beginning of the creative process that I wanted to really improve my overall characterisation by extensively researching how to create a believable Scottish accent for the characters and how to make it sound thick and regional enough to sound Glaswegian. To further improve my portrayal I looked into body language and how just by changing the way you hold yourself a character can seem very different. I also made a point to look into anything which could be helpful and used to improving my performance and the production itself....