The Caucasian Chalk Circle is a production that was written by Bertolt Brecht. My school adapted it and performed it as its yearly production. There were about 50 people part of this production, and that included me. We had to play more than one role sometimes as we were short of people, but even then, we had a wonderful time filled with learning and understanding.
The rehearsals took us four months and this was the first time I had ever done a play with a script. Particularly for me, it was a very important experience because it helped me explore a completely different form of theatre. I was very uncomfortable with learning lines and repeating them as I had always done improvisational theatre where I devised my work with a group of people. I pushed myself outside my comfort zone, and learnt to understand how to recognize when I need to start speaking and how to make it as real as possible while repeating lines I learnt a hundred times. I found it very difficult to match exact actions to the lines and make it believable. I found this to be completely different to improvisational theatre. In improvisational theatre, I would first imagine myself as the character and make lines and actions based on that. Here, I was given the lines, and I had to get into character to make it believable. It wasn't possible for me to divert from the lines given because my fellow actors took their cues from my lines.
I actually learnt that the delivery is never to the character next to you but to audience and this was a difficult concept for me to grasp because, surely, we need to be delivering to the character to make it look real? I realized that this obstructs the volume of our voice and alienates the audience to what is happening on stage.
There was a time in the performance where one of my fellow actors missed their cue and everyone in the scene had to improvise around this, and this, again, was a learning curve for me as this was my first time.
While this drama production helped me learn a lot, it also required huge amounts of time commitment which is when I learnt to let go next year and decided to focus on studies.
The rehearsals took us four months and this was the first time I had ever done a play with a script. Particularly for me, it was a very important experience because it helped me explore a completely different form of theatre. I was very uncomfortable with learning lines and repeating them as I had always done improvisational theatre where I devised my work with a group of people. I pushed myself outside my comfort zone, and learnt to understand how to recognize when I need to start speaking and how to make it as real as possible while repeating lines I learnt a hundred times. I found it very difficult to match exact actions to the lines and make it believable. I found this to be completely different to improvisational theatre. In improvisational theatre, I would first imagine myself as the character and make lines and actions based on that. Here, I was given the lines, and I had to get into character to make it believable. It wasn't possible for me to divert from the lines given because my fellow actors took their cues from my lines.
I actually learnt that the delivery is never to the character next to you but to audience and this was a difficult concept for me to grasp because, surely, we need to be delivering to the character to make it look real? I realized that this obstructs the volume of our voice and alienates the audience to what is happening on stage.
There was a time in the performance where one of my fellow actors missed their cue and everyone in the scene had to improvise around this, and this, again, was a learning curve for me as this was my first time.
While this drama production helped me learn a lot, it also required huge amounts of time commitment which is when I learnt to let go next year and decided to focus on studies.
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