Semester of New Beginnings

                In the beginning of this semester I said that I wanted to work on portraying serious emotions such as depression, sadness and neglect. While most of my work this semester has been on comedy my final project was serious and helped me to learn to portray those emotions. Overall, I did learn more about portraying those types of emotions by adding pauses, stopping my movement, and using my tone of voice.

          Since my first monologue about seeing a ghost I have come a very long way. During my first project I had a hard time memorizing my lines which in turn affected the way that I delivered the monologue, because I was constantly worried about what I was going to say next. Throughout my performance of the first monologue I didn’t pause as much as I needed to which made it hard to understand what I was saying. In my last monologue I paused more which made it easier to understand and I also had the whole monologue memorized confidently. I have most definitely stretched myself this year as an actress. Throughout this semester I mostly did comedic performances, such as the ghost monologue and the candy shop scene because I was most comfortable with comedy. However towards the end of the semester I decided to challenge myself by doing a serious monologue and the rejection letter devising piece. Throughout the semester things that were easy for me were projecting and blocking. In all of my performances I never had a problem with being heard and I never had a lack of movement. Some things that were hard for me were talking slow so the audience could understand what I was saying, changing the tone of my voice to make the performance interesting and memorization. During the course of this class I have improved upon these things and hope to do so more during the musical next winter.
       
           My favorite project was the candy shop scene. This was my favorite because I had a person to play off of and react to, which also helped me to remember my lines. I also liked this because it had a lot of blocking when I walked to and from the back room of the shop. This scene gave me the opportunity to practice comedic timing and delivery. I also liked this scene because it had a lot of props which enhanced our performance. Examples of these were the gun Elena used to shoot me and the money that I counted in the beginning of the scene.

          I learned from this course that as long as you don’t let the audience know that something is wrong they won't know. Sometimes in my performances I would forget my lines and over time I learned to just keep going no matter what happened. Some things that I still want to work on are pausing more when I talk, because even in my final monologue I could have talked slower. I could also work on keeping my feet in the same place when I am speaking instead of wandering.