Week 17: Intense rehersal

Monday- Mr. Fearnehough gave us advice on how to improve our commedia piece and talked about annotated bibliography.  He told us to make sure to include lazzi and had each of us pick a type of lazzi to research. I picked illogical lazzi, because it sounded interesting. Then after discussing what some of the lazzi meant we went into the studio to work on the performance. We worked the first scene where Il Capitano and the zanni have their first entrances. Mr. Fearnehough said that the first entrance is very important and must be very big to show the audience the character. We did not get through very much of the performance but the part that we did work on got to be very good. This shows that we need to focus on details and think about exactly what each action and movement means. I also realized how difficult it is to watch hierarchy and react to the entrance of a new character.


Wednesday-We practiced the beginning of the play again. Mr. Fearnehough decided that we would use the masks during the rehearsal. This was because he thought that by using masks the actors would feel less sensitive about their performance and get into their character better because they were hidden. I was a lover so there was no mask for me, but I did wear a statue of liberty foam thing on my head, I didn't think that this helped much personally. He then had us start the rehearsal period off trying out our character walks. He told me and Mary (the lovers) that we would never stand still and were always bouncing, spinning, skipping, and moving around. We worked on the same part as the day before for most of the double lesson. This annoyed the half of the class that did all of the work, they felt like they were being picked on and Mr. Fearnehough was being really picky.  When it was me and Mary's turn to work on our part of the first scene we changed a lot of it from the way it had been in the rough draft. This kind of bothered me because I thought that some of the stuff from the first scene that we changed did not need to be changed. I need to work on being more flexible and spontaneous on stage. Then Mr. Fearnehough  had the zanni doing really strange things to me to get a reaction and I did not know how to react, this made the acting really difficult.

Thursday- Mr. Fearnehough was not in class that day so he told us to work on the guitar scene. I had been worried about this scene in  specific because I don't like speaking in front of people, let alone singing. But during this class period I was able to borrow a guitar from Mr. Palmer and using it helped me to overcome this "phobia". I surprised myself by being able to sing pretty loudly and make up sappy, cheesy love song lyrics quite well. One really strange thing that I noticed was that it was hard to sing and play extremely bad when I tried to. We did the scene with more audience interaction, and with more specified entrances and movements, we also decided not to use a recording of a song at all, which surprisingly helped. I just hope that I will be able to it a well or better on Monday and in the actual performances.