connorstoddart hnd logbook

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2nd - 6th March It’s Showtime!!!

It’s show week, it was quite stressful but I think that for me personally it was the most constructive time, I was concerned about my scenes and the concept between me and Sam about this ‘love story’, however with help from Carleigh about doing it in a completely different angle by scraping the whole love story and having me join Charley, Erol and Lewis’s cocaine idea and me being a hallucination for them put me at ease a lot and gave me new ideas when working with them throughout some of their scenes. Choreographing the end scene where I die was relatively ok because it was just about trying to find that middle ground of making it look convincing without being to over the top.

Throughout the week things were all going great I was on a roll, for awhile I had discussed an idea of having water on stage with Claire which she liked so one day I tried it, whilst doing something with Claire where she wanted me to clock something in the corner and go over to it, I went over there in character, unfortunately when I got near there, I fell down and smashed my head badly after falling down I felt a bit dizzy and sat out for awhile. It made me feel bad because of what happened, the following day I found out that the water idea, of singin in the rain and wearing the flippers was scraped, although I liked the idea which could have looked good for my not only my safety and everyone else’s the water could have been more of a hazard if it didn’t dry out, and the flippers would have made it hard to get on and off stage smoothly. 

When it came to the actual shows it was so much fun, it’s just a shame we only had two shows because when it was over I just wanted to carry on. Because of the reactions we were getting from the audience, I think that sort of feeling happens whenever you are on any process and you put so much time and effort into what you do that you just never want it to really end. During the actual shows it was great, the energy on stage was incredible but also we were just all having so much fun and that is what performing that sort of show is all about. I feel the scenes that I was a part of went really well and the audience really enjoyed it from what I could pick up from being on stage they were laughing along to everything that we were doing and they all seemed like they were having a lot of fun in the audience. As an actor when you are doing something on stage and you’re seeing the audience laughing along and cheering at you and just enjoying yourself that is such a great feeling.

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23rd -27th Feburary

This is the week before we go out so we spent most of our time working on our scenes that we had, coming up with new ideas, We also tried something completely different this week, this week the whole company were told that we were all going to be involved in this part of the show which was the Beyonce dance, not dancing, but as audience members, which was a bit of a shock as we thought that it was just going to be there dance. In my opinion I felt a bit strange in doing this as I felt that I didn’t fit in with what we were doing, I also thought that this dance was just going to be there own thing without us being a part of it.

We also spent a lot of time working on Uptown Funk which was going to be our finale, last week the girls had choreographed it, and this week we were all learning it and making sure that it was going to be show ready, with all dances they need to be well rehearsed because unlike acting, you can’t freestyle yourself out of it once you’ve messed up because everyone notices straight away that you’ve gone wrong. 

As it was getting closer to opening we were trying on our costumes this week and I was really pleased with what I had for my character, for once on a process my costume didn’t need to have adjustments made to it, everything fitted straight away, whilst looking incredibly wacky what with my flippers as well. As actors it is always very important to know what your costumes is going to be and to practice in it because you never know what restrictions the costume will offer until you are wearing it, so rehearsing in costume is crucial especially if you’re wearing flippers which make it hard to move around in. 

We did an interesting workshop this week, which was Laban, it is great how Laban created 8 different movements all with different purposes that can be used in acting, but also during the workshop we would get asked about how this relates back to our characters in the Variety Show, and you’d be really surprised how much it can actually relate back. Some people did this before in 1st year with Denise but this was my first time doing this sort of thing, and I really found it enjoyable and beneficial for me as an actor. It is really important as an actor to do loads of different workshops about loads of various things because this is what helps to make you a unique an different actor to everybody else.

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https://youtu.be/SWiWFU_Rcf4

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The history of circus

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Greek theatre

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Guy 6

Shared with Dropbox

Headshots

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Overall evaluation on The Box of the Unorthodox

This had been a very trying process I must say I look back on everything that’s occurred and once again it shows that whatever we go through we are in the end able to come out on top in the end. Constantly thinking about how I felt like I wouldn’t be able to get my parts within the show ready by the time we would go out was a thought that concerned me greatly. But with the help of some of my fellow colleagues those worries were put to rest. For me I think it was beneficial for me overall to work with same as it gave me the opportunity to work with someone on a process a lot that I haven’t worked with a lot before hand. His help in the material that we created was a big help the more we came up with together the more we found we were making bigger strides with what we was doing. The only downside I feel however is that when it came to my own things particularly the singin in the rain idea that’s where I struggled greatly, I’m not very good at coming up with my own choreography as teats not an area where I excel at. And it was shocking at just how quickly the weeks were going by until we would be going out with the show. One more difficulty to add to that was despite the fact that the flippers were a great addition to my costume they hindered my movements a lot which resulted in me having to pick my legs up very high so it made it hard for me to get on and off stage quickly, however the final nail in the coffin on the decision of not using the flippers was when I had the accident with my head when we tried the water idea for singin in the rain. It was at that point that I doubted myself a lot with what I was doing I didn’t know where I was and what I was doing with myself I really felt deflated in everything I had been doing because I wanted it to be of a good standard and I felt like this wasn’t the case. 

However despite these difficulties that I have faced I believe the show itself was a success for both nights as we achieved what we wanted to do in having the Box of the Unorthodox being a popular entertainment variety show which appealed to our audiences. Looking on the actual process itself I feel its had its ups and downs, things that I’d say were the ups were some of the workshops that we did which I enjoyed such as the bouffon and clowning workshops with these it was the freedom we had in what we was doing in them that made them so enjoyable not just for me but for everyone. However big downers was the energy and commitment through things throughout the process examples like lates which drained our energy and motivation to what we was doing as long days made us less likely to want to do what we was doing especially if we were just drilling two or three things in the day. Also regarding being put into the groups of things outside our comfort zones I believe that some people felt like they shouldn’t be in those groups because they felt that’s not something they would like and wouldn’t be able to commit 100%.

I believe that within the time of like two weeks the amount of chopping and changing that was occurring was nearly too much. As we’d believe that something was set in stone so to speak, but would be changed the next day so it was hard for us to become familiarized with what we were doing. If I look back on this process and think that I fulfilled the requirements of being a popular entertainer to an audience I would say that I’ve met those requirements things someone would need would be charisma, likeability (depending on the character), energy, commitment. Although with some of these I may have been in doubt of them in the weeks leading up to the show on both nights I felt like I entertained the audience with wackyness of my character, I even received some feedback from people that despite my character supposed to be a frog they saw me as more of a leprechaun. 

One of the biggest problems that I found was that the quicker the time approached to show week the less that this love story between me and Sam wasn’t working, so after a talk with Carleigh we scrapped the love story and decided to have my entire character as being a hallucination for some of the other guys who do cocaine as they see me when they are basically high. The only time we ever kept a love moment of some sort was when Sam would do the cocaine with the gangsters and end up seeing me as well which led to our comedy tape measure and banana routine.

Regarding the first show we did I was nervous yet excited at the same time to me throughout the reactions and responses we were getting from the audience was fantastic whether it was genuine or it was because a lot of them were from college and were laughing at what we was doing because they saw it as just us or the characters we were playing I will never know. For me in my experience of the show everything that I was involved in was running smoothly after the accident beforehand I think getting rid of the singing in the rain dance routine as well as the flippers was a good move because one it wouldn’t have looked as good as I had envisioned it, and two it now made it easier for me to move around the space as well as going on and off quicker compared to if I still had them on. The ending seemed a bit abrupt though with the tea-bagging of my face by Sam it just didn’t really do what was happening to me any justice and didn’t help my character end on any happy note, the fact that I was being beaten up then would just randomly proceed in getting up and dancing with people who had just beaten me up was something that to me didn’t make sense. 

Luckily for me that issue was addressed the following day when we polished up the fighting scene and I ended up getting knocked out and everyone thinking I’m dead. Luckily for me Sam comes along and helps me up and asks if I’m ok which now helped my character end of a better note and made it look more sense for when everyone else came on for Uptown Funk. It was just a shame that there was a slight sound problem near the beginning of the show which we didn’t know how to react to but luckily Sam as the host so to speak due to his character was able to save the moment which allowed time for the sound to be sorted out. Another problem was the fact that my tape measure had gone missing before the routine I did with Sam but luckily I was able to improvise well around what had occurred but yet still make the routine look good.

If I was to come back to this process and change some things I’d definitely change the material and try something different especially I’d like to try something in a trio, as well as something that can create a spectacle to the audience. 

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My group’s devised piece of STOMP!

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Mine and Erol’s warm-up which we led.

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Bouffon Workshop

A bouffon workshop that we did, I thoroughly enjoyed the fact that there was no limit in what we could do, and we were able to make our bouffons look as strange an d grotesque as possible.

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Puppetry Workshop

A clip of me and Amber with two puppets showing a scene which we had created.

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zombie script

Here is the zombie script for what our company came up with and showed the 2nd years 

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Box of the Unorthodox variety show 16th - 20th February

Monday 

- The decision was made today that Claire thought I should scrap the idea of my stand up comedy as she felt that it wouldn’t work for sending the message that I wanted to get across. So instead she wanted me to try the idea of a frog in a love story instead and falling in love with someone but in the end it doesn’t work out and he ends up exploding and dying.  For me personally I felt kinda bad that it got scraped as I was hoping that it would work but as an actor you have to realize when something might not work out for you, you have to just keep on carrying on and come up with more new material. 

Tuesday 

- Time to get my arty side on as we had a puppetry workshop today in how to create simple puppets and move them along more convincingly then your other basic puppets of the typical popping up and down. Starting off first by doing a workshop in pairs where we used each others  bodies like puppets, it was good to know where I held points of tension in my body because I needed to get rid of it from those areas in order for my body to move like a puppets does. What also made it interesting whilst having made the our puppets was that we were able to give them personalities of their own which in essence sort of brought them more to life, Through the personalities of our puppets it was interesting to see the sort of relationships that we were able to create with each others

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Wednesday

- Today was very busy as I now needed to start coming up with material for this Frog idea that Claire had given me. It’s now made me think how I’m ever gonna be able to get this out for the show as I’ve realised just how hard it is. Working with Sam as the one that I fall in love with has really helped me as I’ve been able to work off of him a lot. The idea is that I see him for the first time but yo don’t hear me speak you just see me in the back staring at him, the next scene we are is when I first start talking to him about how much I adore him despite the fact that he wants nothing to do with me, which leads onto my song singin in the rain which I’m using an umbrella for, ideally we’d like to have some water involved in this to create more of a spectacle. This then follows on to our third scene which involves bananas and love like music. What we have yet to work on though is the final scene where I actually get blown up in the end as I get given a potion that I am led to believe is a love potion but it’s chemicals that cause me to die in the end.

Thursday

- After hearing about the samba band STOMP we had a workshop in how to use anything as a instrument, after gathering various items such as metal bins, a drum, sticks and even a rubber chicken we just randomly started to come up with beats and counts involving all of the items that we had. For me I’m not a very musical like person so hearing what we was coming up with to me sounded a bit bad. The way I look at it is that with samba bands and especially with what STOMP do is that you have to have a certain level of skill to make it look good and be able to wow an audience, whereas there are only 11 of us who have never really had any training in this sort of thing. 

Here is the new layout that we were given for the show, as you can see the material is now starting to get there. Opening Sequence: STOMP(Ensemble)Drag Queen: (Sam)Opening Speech/ Scene 1 with Frog (Music)Beyoncé Dance (Music)(Amber, Levi, Alex, Julia)Trapeze Piece(Alex)Frog Love Story/ Scene 2(Connor)(Singin’ in the Rain- Music)/ Water Scene Song: (Money Makes The World Go Round- Cabaret- Music)(Daniella, Harriet)Magic Act/ Mystic Meg(Sam, Amber, Harriet)Clowning/ Slapstick Song: I Will Survive(Lewis, Erol, Charley)Closing Stand-up Speech(Sam)Lounge Piano INTERVAL: Card Tricks, etc(Charley, Sam)Comedy/ Stand-Up/ Scene 3 Banana(Sam and Connor)Circus/ Food Piece(Levi, Erol, Harriet)Solo Song(Daniella)If They Could See Me Now Puppetry Piece(Sam, Connor, Lewis, Daniella)Trapeze(Levi)Object/ Food Piece(Charley, Amber, Alex)Frog Blown Up/ Scene 4(Sam, Connor)Finale Piece(Ensemble)

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Box of the Unorthodox variety show 9th - 13th February

Monday 

- Today was really enjoyable and insightful as we did a clowning workshop and was able to discover the various types of clowns there are. There’s the tramp/hobo clown who is positive and just happy to be there in the moment. Then there’s the Auguste clown who is the sad/grumpy clown who likes to lead but always fails in the end. And finally there’s the white face clown who is positive/happy who like to drive and lead the work. From the different exercises that we did it really showed me how different a clown can be depending on which of the three you can be, at the end of the workshop I realized that out of the three the clown that I was the most like was the tramp/hobo clown as I was positive and just happy to be there, I didn’t feel like I needed to lead or drive the work like the white face clown.

Tuesday

- Continuation of work on variety show adding final touches to my written stand up 

Thursday

- Another workshop that I’ve enjoyed through this process so far is the bouffon workshop, in this we looked and heightening areas of the body to look grotesque it’s main focus is the art of mockery to mock things from within society. With what we were doing there was no limit to how far we could go in regards to things that were happening in society, the point of a bouffon is to go so far they it makes the audience cringe at what is going on and then go some more. I focused the feature of a belly being over exaggerated in looking very large and round, not only this but I altered the way I moved around the room as well the only problem was that looking back on some of the footage of the workshop it was a shame that I didn’t continue to do so as I was still discovering my bouffon. When given the topic of the war going on in Syria and I was in a pair with Erol whose bouffon was very scary looking and we improvised a story of him being a bomb maker and me supplying him with the goods to do so. There was no limit to how far we could go so when we were asked what we liked the most about bombs and the war we said that we loved to watch families get blown up into pieces, we went further by actually showing an example of how we would like to see a family get blown up in front of everyone, after the example we did I commented on how much it was fun to see the children get blown up as they are smaller and tend to fly further the adults. This just goes to show that this is how far a bouffon goes by making people cringe at what they go on about.

Friday

- After being put in different groups of pieces that Claire believed would put us out of our comfort zone there were three things puppetry, clowning and object pieces. For me personally the one in my mind that I knew I’d struggle at the most was the puppetry and funnily enough that’s what I was put into. Me, Daniella, Sam and Lewis discussed ideas of things we could do for a puppetry piece. And researched the various types of puppets that people make, from the simplistic sock and hand puppets to the more extravagant puppets from silk and other fancy materials. Looking back on this week I believe I’ve taken a lot away from the clowning and bouffon workshops that we did because not only are they beneficial to all of us as actors but it’s opened up windows of opportunity for us to implement what we’ve learnt from these workshops to add potential pieces into our variety show.  

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Laban Workshop

A Laban workshop we did on different movements and the way in which you moved your body differently according to the given word