Solo Project- Rehearsals Rehearsals Rehearsals

These last few days have been extremely chaotic with rehearsal after rehearsal for my solo performance. I have attempted the various suggestions that Nancy made such as actually recording the questions in a whispering tone and then playing them back. I will admit that I found recording the questions in a whispering tone difficult because I felt I lost the sense of what I am trying to say and what I am trying to reiterate to the audience. The whispering tone itself made the questions all sound the same and I felt I was delivering everything in a monotone style of delivery. My voice also did become  very croaky after whispering for several hours. I eventually abandoned whispering the questions after showing them to Nancy who saw them as being too husky and sexy. We agreed that I should record the questions again in a tone which is neither husky or too high pitched. I have recorded the questions again and have carefully selected the questions so that the subject of my grandmothers death and my own curiosity with her life are entwined together so I constantly flip between the two subjects .  A criticism I received from my tutors last week was that I placed the questions about my grandmothers death too near to the end. They suggested that I needed to jumble the questions around and talk about her death much earlier on. The questions I did select were far more detailed and looked at subjects like her death in depth.

Playing around with different ways to interact with the mirror.





In the rest of my rehearsals I have played around with the mirror and I have managed to develop a series of gestures that help me convey a relationship between me and mirror. The gestures I played around with was stroking the mirror and tracing my own reflections. I felt these gestures created a tender and loving moment where I am longing to connect with my grandmother . These moments where I touch the reflection of my own lips expresses my desire to be connected to my grandmother physically. I managed to create a two minute mirror routine where I try to be part of my grandmother's physical world. I have been practising lip syncing in the mirror the questions and I have been trying to get the exact timing although at the moment it is rather difficult at present. I am still trying to get the exact timing right.

Finding different ways of interacting with the mirror 

In my final rehearsals I have practised when the series of faster questions play piling letters into small piles and writing a key question on top on it. I played around with how I could place the letters and I have decided to put them in a circle around me as though I am trapped in my endless attempts to communicate with this absent world.
In rehearsal several times I have experimented with trying to get my grandmothers face projected onto my face but it has had a varied amount of success. When I initially practised with projecting her face onto mine the picture was positioned at the left hand side of the projection screen The picture I had initially used was reduced in size so that her actual face would meet with mine. Initially my first attempts of trying to project my grandmothers face on to mine were successful as it effectively created a moment where past and present came together as one and our two faces physically came together which was rather haunting !
In my later rehearsals I have found that once I began to project the enlarged images  the effect of trying to make our two faces meet became difficult to achieve. The physical height and scale of the projection screen made it difficult for me to realistically position my face at the same angle as hers because her face was too high above mine. The enlarged images of my grandmother's face that I attempted to project on to my face had been considerably enlarged so only one part of her face like her lips seemed to actually reach my face. This created an interesting image of my own face being physically obliterated and disfigured by hers but I felt it lost the meaning that I was striving for which is that our two faces our two worlds are connecting and becoming physically present to one another for the first time. I made the decision to remove the idea of her face being projected onto mine from the piece because I could not get it physically precise enough and the thought of this moment not being precise made me feel the actual meaning behind it would be lost.