Introduction
Beginning my acting course at Leeds conservatoire was massive for me, I finally got to do what I loved every day with people who also shared my passion for acting! When I found out the first two weeks of term were ensemble weeks, I was so delighted as I knew it meant everyone was able to get to know each other through being creative. I was apprehensive at first as I’ve never been the loudest person in the room and therefore, I find it hard to get my ideas out there but I knew starting off with The Festival of Dionysus would be a great challenge for me to jump right in the deep end!
Dionysus Scene Picture
Movement
Movement Dionysis-
Devising has always been something I’ve never been 100% confident in, specifically devised movement. Due to me growing up as a ballet dancer, I’ve been taught to be very precise and regimented in how I move so when I was faced with devising movement sequences for Dionysus, I was worried I wouldn’t be as free flowing and creative with my movements as everyone else in the class and I was worried I’d let my group down. I found that using choral movements really helped me get into the swing of things, especially with music, everyone moving together in some form of unison helped me discover how movements don’t have to be stiff and correct all the time to be able to tell a story. Although music was something that really developed my movement techniques, we had to create everything from scratch for our piece, which I initially thought would be difficult for me. Through this we ended up creating a really inventive choral piece where Dionysus walks across a table and we made music with our hands/feet plus the floor or tables and for the sounds we used our own voices. From here I discovered movement and devised movement pieces can come from anything you do with your body and it is always worth trying something out even if at first it sounds daunting. From these ensemble weeks I also took the exercise of free writing, this allows me to get all my thoughts down onto a page so that I have them even if all of them aren’t used, especially since at the start of the course voicing my ideas to everyone was something that I struggled with, I have since been using this device a lot when starting out with a project or piece and have found that coming back to it after finishing the work I was doing highlights where things came from and how if maybe I would have tried every idea out I could have refreshed what I was doing and maybe see it in a new perspective and so for the future I would like to use my free writing as a way of keeping my work fresh and to help pull me out of creative blockages.
Movement Classes
After Dionysus we went on to start our skills classes which I was really eager to get into. Particularly movement as I’d had so much fun discovering next ways to adapt my movement during the ensemble weeks. A massive part of movement for me has been viewpoints, which was something I wasn’t totally familiar with before. Using viewpoints has really helped explain to me the principles of movement of how you can start from scratch from things as simple as duration, tempo and gesture. Learning all the different viewpoints in devised movement has meant I have found devising in other classes much more approachable, for example during research for performance we are often given tasks which involve devising twenty-minute pieces with only a research topic to go off. Working in groups this time around compared to the first ensemble weeks, I felt much more confident in suggesting ways of starting off our rehearsal process. For our Agamemnon piece in Research for performance, my group used topography, repetition and kinaesthetic response to create scenes. One in particular being a scene where we had to represent the war at the time and how it affected people, for this we used the grid method of walking and the more curved ways to highlight different characters stress and franticness as a reaction to the terror they faced during Agamemnon’s ruling. We also used choral movements and chants to represent Greek chorus and how they would move together as one. I think without viewpoints I wouldn’t now know how to begin a devising process properly and I will definitely be using them for all future devising projects as a starting point to get the ball rolling. I also feel like a big part of movement for me was understanding that vulnerability is okay and not everything has to be perfect when starting out it’s all about being present and letting your body move and react to stimulus rather than forcing movements, as Anne Bogart said “The theater is an artform about the present moment, about sharing breath, space, time, and imagination with others.” (https://brooklynrail.org/contributor/Tara-Ahmadinejad , 2024) However, I also think that the more recent work we have done in our devised movement classes with “Flocking” would have been a really useful tool for this piece and if faced with a Greek or more choral based theatre I think this would definitely be something I would use at the start of a rehearsal process.
Dance-
Being a dancer my whole life I was delighted to find out one of our movement classes would be a more dance background approach to movement. However I’ve actually found this part of my training quite tough, I think our movement assessment was a big factor in me discovering this. For the assessment we did a speakeasy dance in which we, as an ensemble, had to perform a seven-minute piece in costume to music. I originally felt so ready to begin this work but as we got further into the process I found I was struggling with certain aspects of the dance, we were encouraged to illuminate different skills we had in the piece by creating duets and tricks. I felt almost shy about putting myself forward for parts of the dance even though I knew I was capable of them; I found myself almost fading into the background even though dancing was important to me. Thoughts came out of nowhere into my head of how I’d be “showing off” off if I demonstrated any of my skills, which I think did hold me back slightly. I did battle with this however, when I ended up doing a trick (backbend walkover) near the start of the dance, having this moment of actually it’s okay to showcase talents, was really helpful in allowing me to settle into the dance more and enjoy it rather than stressing I was doing too much. This then meant I felt freer to add more facial expressions and interact with other people in the dance specifically during the section where we split as a group and faced each other and danced almost in canon one after another. In spite of this, this section of the dance ended up changing very close to the week of the actual assessment, meaning I was more near the back and wasn’t able to interact with the main guy in the dance anymore, I feel like this slightly caused me to fall back into my negative thought process and I felt like I wasn’t as capable anymore. I worked really hard to still keep up my characteristics and energy no matter where I was in the dance so I didn’t blend in to the background again and I’m really proud of myself for prevailing but I feel as if maybe this wasn’t enough and to really show my tutors how hard I had worked to get to where I was for that assessment, in the future, I need to be braver in movement.
Acting
Acting classes were one of the things I was most excited about when coming to the conservatoire. I was so eager to start exploring complex emotions and begin to learn how my acting process would be changed or how I would learn new ways to approach characters. The character work we did with Tom was a key moment in me figuring out what it’s like to stay in character in the outside world. I think engaging with the public in character was really interesting as it meant I pushed my boundaries by going full out in public, which is something I’d never tried before. I think this exercise was helpful in me discovering my character’s personality, rather than writing them down, actually living with their characteristics meant that I was able to really believe the life of my character and therefore see them as a real-life human being, getting an insight into what their life would be like every day. I think for the future this will be beneficial in helping me figure out my character’s life outside the play and will help me with character reactions and mannerisms. Through these character development classes I figured out that making playlists always seems to help me with characters, this is something I’ve done even before my time at the conservatoire but I feel I felt the benefit of it even more this time because we did an exercise in class where we observed each other’s walks to demonstrate how walks are unique to every person and therefore giving your character a walk will humanise them. I took this exercise and merged it with listening to music I feel my character would listen to (Presented below) and found that the music almost influenced my walk and how my character would hold themselves, I now think I will encompass this into my acting process when approaching a character. Furthermore, another exercise we did during this process was a long form improvisation with a given scenario, this meant we could interact with characters of different personalities and be faced with moments of interacting with authority figures, although this also really helped with building my character I feel as if this could also be a useful rehearsal technique not just for me as an actor but going forward, if I was to direct a play, I would like to use long form improvisation as a way of characters seeing the world outside the play and to also help with improvising scenes that are referenced in the paly but aren’t actually written in so that actors are able to connect the dots and truly understand how their characters lived and connect.
Spotify Playlist For my Character
For our Acting assessment I wanted to make sure my awareness of character was prevalent. To do this, I knew that I needed to apply my practitioner work to create an embodied performance. One Stanislavski technique in particular was the “Magic If” as I found using this is actually really useful in generating ideas, a lot of the time I feel as if I panic and think I have to “get it right” rather than just genuinely do what the character would do, Stanislavski said he “did not believe it was beneficial (or even possible) for an actor to truly believe that staged events were reality. Instead, he taught actors to put themselves in the characters’ shoes and consider what they would do if they were in the character’s situation. The magic if makes the character’s motivations the same as the actor’s” (Ates,2023). The Magic If was the main factor in me coming up with my idea for my 5-minute scene. I brainstormed ideas of what I would do if I was in the character “Wilson’s” position, I decided that in order to impress someone (e.g. Joyce’s character) I would need to look presentable, causing me to come up with the idea of trying waistcoats on as part of Wilson trying his best to look presentable enough for Joyce to let him in. This idea formed the basis of my scene and from there I was able to adapt and develop, I have now also been using this technique elsewhere in my acting training as I have found it is a way to push through the block in my brain when I feel I don’t have any ideas for a character, specifically in my most recent acting work as the character Maggie from “Till the Stars Come Down” where I was struggling with the start of the scene because I am sitting outside of a party and therefore needed a reason to be outside the party rather than in there, I used the same method and ended up deciding to use a handbag in my scene to reapply makeup/lipstick after feeling stressed out due to constantly being asked questions inside the party, giving my character a motive to go outside and to give them something to do when out there as we as humans would do before we start speaking, instead of just going straight into the scene, looking static as if I was waiting for another character to talk to me rather than my own character being alive in their own world. Other Techniques I have found very beneficial in my training are Uta Hagen’s techniques, zooming in specifically on “the fourth side”, “Endowment” and “moment to moment”. I actually also embedded moment to moment into my Acting assessment on top of the Stanislavski Techniques. I discovered that adding moment to moment to emotion memory, for me, helped higher the stakes in my scene and rather than just having an object that provokes an emotion in my character, actively having to look for it encourages the stress levels of the character to rise and therefore emotions are heightened. The fourth side has hugely impacted my acting, before using this I found it difficult to be occupied in a scene and make my character busy when they don’t have lines but with this technique, I have been able to stay active in scene. Another example from “Till the Stars Come Down” is during Act 1 when everyone is getting ready for Sylvia’s wedding but Sylvia herself doesn’t actually have many lines, I decided to use the fourth side as a mirror for Sylvia to touch up her makeup and do her hair, therefore endowing too, once again highlighting that the stacking techniques on top of each other definitely seems to now be a part of my acting process and is becoming my go to, I think partly because a fear of mine is over acting and so trying different Uta Hagen techniques within my rehearsal process has coached my understanding of how much I need to actually go as bold as possible at first so that no opportunity is left untried and after reading some of Uta Hagen’s book “Respect for Actor’s” there are quotes that have influenced my journey in over and underacting such as “No moment is too big or too small if it has validity for the moment in the play.”(Hagen,1973) I would however like to continue adding more than one practitioners techniques on top of each other in my Acting as I think more recently I have become more Uta Hagen based and slightly neglected some of the original Stanislavski techniques, which I recognise is okay as my Acting process is something that will always be developing and changing, I just don’t want to totally get rid of anything I’ve used in the past that I also found helped me.
Screen Acting-
Another side of Acting I’ve really grown to love is the screen Acting we do; I did some screen Acting on my foundation last year but always felt as if I wasn’t as strong in this department. This, alongside with improvisation, has allowed me to feel more comfortable in the silences. Beforehand I was scared to sit in the silence of a scene and felt like I had to fill it with a line of dialogue or a sound or movement but now I’m beginning to understand that silence is actually a really useful tool in illuminating the subtext on a scene and can show the emotion behind a character’s eyes, instead of overcompensating with words. Using the basis of scenes and then doing improvisations based on what happens in the scene helped so much in connecting with another person naturally because before trying this exercise I was focused on getting the lines right and you can see that on screen through someone’s eyes that they are not fully listening and that their mind is somewhere else, being able to watch this back it presented to me how listening first is more important than thinking about my next line, my lines will come to me when I simply just react to the other person or people in the scene with me, I need to have more confidence in myself that I have learnt my lines and am able to instead focus on my scene partner and get out of my own head, I have now noticed the difference this makes when I took this feedback on into scenes I have done after and how much more believable the scenes becomes and how more real it will feel to an audience, an example of this improvisation is in figure . Also, I noticed that I tend to start most scenes in quite a melancholy or negative manor and therefore have been pre-empting the endings of scenes instead of slowly or abruptly revealing it to the audience. The method of keeping it light at the start of a scene has helped me pick out moments in my own acting when I felt I was making things to obvious and wasn’t as natural as I would have liked to be. This meant that in my recent screen assessment I was able to pick out moments in my own self tapes that I would change the next time I do a take, making the self-tape process much less daunting and much easier to differentiate takes rather than everything being one note and having not much of an emotional journey in scenes. I think being able to watch back takes we have done in class has really been helpful in me seeing my journey as I am now much better at listening in scenes, being on camera makes it a lot more obvious when one person or both people aren’t actually listening to each other, I’ve realised how important listening is instead of just reeling off lines to each other, I’ve even begun to notice this in film or TV that I’ve been watching and have really made sure I know my lines well enough so that I am able to immerse myself in the scene and not be in my own head, whilst also realising that if I drop a line due to fully listening that it’s okay, it’s not the end of the world and it just means that the acting was full of truth because I know that I used to think that dropping a line meant I wasn’t performing the scene well enough, when actually I understand now that a take with a dropped line just means we’ve found a new way of doing the scene and on the next take I can now use this to switch up the way I was originally performing the scene to stop it from being static and break me out of the pattern I’ve learnt lines in and therefore I will be able to do further scenes in a more free and flexible way whilst then still getting the lines.
Figure 1
Voice
This year I have learnt how holding tension in your body can actually affect your voice, I noticed how the way I hold my neck and jaw is quite stiff. As Kristian Linklater states in her book relaxing physically and getting your body ready are vital for your voice and by doing activities to benefit this will help you see results throughout the day, “stretch your spine every morning for the next two or three days. Be aware of the preceding details and become aware of your skeletal behaviour and the contrasting tension and relaxation you feel throughout the day.” (Linklater,1976). Through developing my own voice warmup, I have been able to incorporate jaw exercises/massages and start the warmup by moving my body with rib exercises and side stretches to make sure my posture and body are ready to work in order for my voice quality to improve. Having to go through the process of generating our own warmup has been so helpful for me as I’ve actually been able to hone in on what my body and voice needs specifically, before coming to the Conservatoire, in preparation for auditions I was always unsure how to get my voice to the standard it needs to be so I am able to step in the room and feel my voice is as clear as possible but now I would be able to do my own ten minute warm up catered to my voice outside of and audition room or even in the wings or backstage before a performance, my final written out voice warmup is on figure 2.
I actively saw development in my voice from the first modern poems and sonnets we did to the most recent Shakespeare Sonnets and Narrative pieces. For the first poem section we did in December, I performed, “That Music Always Round Me” by Walt Whitman (shown in Figure 3) which was a detailed poem about music, my feedback for this was that my imagery was very good but at times I could be breathy. I continued to work on my imagery in Voice to help maintain it by using some Cicely Berry exercises like the one where the speaker stands in the middle of a circle and their job is to make the people around them feel and react to the poem they are speaking. I also think using actioning words for poems much like we do in Acting when uniting and actioning a scene was a device I hadn’t thought of using for voice before and it helped transform my poem from just speaking it to actually telling it and performing it to an audience, I used my Actor’s Thesaurus for this and found that not only the words used in there but also the descriptions are what took my voicing of poems to the next level, a quote that particularly stuck with me was “the tonal variety and textural depth provided by these actions conveys acting which is truthful and specific, rather than phony and generalised” (Caldrone and Lloyd-Williams, 2004) which I think really helped me specifically with poetry as I feel sometimes it can sound as if it is just being recited rather than felt. For Breath I worked on actually regulating my breathing so my breath doesn’t all get stuck in my throat and then come out when I am speaking, I have practised in class and my own time letting go and breathing, thinking of a balloon and splatting my belly. Another way of working on breath has been in my 1 to 1 singing classes- I found that working on breath through song has also helped me with breath in my acting, doing the singing exercises every week I have really seen a development in my speaking voice too and therefore also took this into my classes when doing poems and other pieces. On the other hand, I know my singing is one thing I definitely need to grow my confidence in, I have had trouble finding a song in my 1 to 1s that fits my voice an I am still unsure where I sit, whether I am a Soprano or an Alto or maybe even somewhere in between, which has been making it difficult for me to connect with songs as I’m constantly second guessing myself. One day I feel as if I have the confidence to get up sing a song and be happy with the outcome and then the next I’m feeling like my voice doesn’t even fit any songs, which it does. I felt so much more comfortable when I finally got up and sang a song I had chosen, being vulnerable meant I have now realised I really enjoy singing again, I just need to keep on doing it so I don’t forget how much I love it and so my worries don’t keep taking over. I think I’ve just been too hard on myself singing wise this year as I used to sing a lot when I was younger but in more recent years I haven’t been singing as much and during this time my voice has naturally changed with growing older and so I feel as if maybe me not being as used to singing in my older voice has put a slight block on how I’ve progressed with my singing so for second year I know that we have a block where we do Acting through song and so I would like to push myself to get up and perform in that class as much as possible so that I have more time to try out many different types of songs and I am able to strengthen my experience in singing and eventually feel confident in choosing my owns songs and getting up to perform them, even if they aren’t perfect so that when I’m faced with having to find a song for auditions in the future it will be second nature to me by that point and I’ll know exactly how to approach that type of work.
When it came around to performing our Shakespeare sonnets, I felt I had much better knowledge of how to keep my breath going for long enough, to make sure I was able to put emphasis on specific words to create imagery, especially for Shakespeare as the Iambic Pentameter needs to be kept without taking away the imagery of the poem. I also think my breath needed to be sustained a lot for my Narrative piece due to me having to story tell whilst simultaneously creating and using multiple different voices for characters, without getting out of breath and damaging my voice as the voices I did were one squeaky high pitched and one deep and rough. Overall, I was really happy with how my voice assessment went and I really felt I saw the development from December to now. More recently once again, our scenes from “Till the stars Come Down” were helpful in putting together all the fundamentals of acting we had been learning but also for bringing together all the skills classes, under voicing due to the scene we did being intimate was something I quickly realised I needed to fix, through Jo’s recent lessons of using intonement with lines in the scene and also exercises where I was physically pushed back by people in the class and had to push through them physically whilst staying on voice has meant I’ve seen a massive difference in lessons these past few weeks and the note of stop under voicing has become less and less and I was really quite happy with the scene I did during my last acting lesson where I felt I had really projected and protected my voice due to me having to shout a lot in the scene. I know that I still hold my voice in the back of my throat sometimes, which I think is partly to do with my accent, so I would like to carry on using these exercises to make sure that my voice keeps being pushed to the front of my mouth and therefore eventually having it there anyway will hopefully become second nature to me and I would like to develop connecting my voice to text more as I go into second year to do a lot more full plays and scenes for projects also for the ensemble weeks we have coming up where we will be performing in public areas.
Figure 2
Figure 3
Artistic Development
Artistic Development has been the class where I have been able to figure out how I connect personally with art. I go to see plays as often as I can and often like to discuss afterwards how they made me feel or what I enjoyed or what I felt didn’t work or maybe could have been different and artistic development has shown me how to do this but then also apply this to my own work, by reflecting on the art I go to see I have been able to use things I have liked and apply it to work I would like to do but also to see what didn’t work and therefore find new ways to things. For example I went to see “Feel Me” a play produced by the Paper Birds theatre company, now usually after watching this play I’d discuss my thoughts and opinions but then wouldn’t take that any further, whereas now I went and researched this company and was able to use it in my Political Theatre project for my Research for Performance class in which I had to create my own political Theatre company but have inspirations from 21st century companies, for the actual performance section my group even incorporated some Paper Birds techniques such as asking the audience questions and we said we would go on to use even more if we were to develop our company further. I think for me artistic Development has made me realise my own creativity, during the classes I’ve wrote poems and monologues that I’d like to take further in the future. Examples of this work that exercises I have done in class have inspired are in figure 4.
Figure 4
Conclusion
In conclusion, this year I have been open to exploring ideas and exercises I have never done before and have found that a lot of them are now things I will take forward into my further years of actor training and even into future work. I would like to work on “backing myself” and going for things even if I think they might not work, just trying ideas out instead of thinking I have to get everything right all the time so that I am always able to play and create. Being a perfectionist is something I’ve always struggled with but this year has shown me how mistakes are valuable and can in fact be the key to new ideas, which is the mindset I would like to take forward into my next years of training.
Bibliography
Ates, A. (2023). The Definitive Guide to the Stanislavsky Acting Technique. [online] Backstage. Available at: https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/the-definitive-guide-to-the-stanislavsky-acting-technique-65716/. Date Accessed; 26/5/2025
https://brooklynrail.org/contributor/Tara-Ahmadinejad (2024). ANNE BOGART with Tara Ahmadinejad | The Brooklyn Rail. [online] Brooklynrail.org. Available at: https://brooklynrail.org/2020/07/theater/ANNE-BOGART-with-Tara-Ahmadinejad/ Accessed 26/5/2025
Caldarone, M. and Lloyd-Williams, M. (2004). Actions : the actors’ thesaurus. London: Nick Hern Books. Accessed: 26/5/2025
Linklater, K. (1976). Freeing the Natural Voice. New York : Drama Book Specialists. Date Accessed: 26/5/2025
Hagen, U. and Frankel, H. (1973). Respect for Acting. New York : Macmillan ; London : Collier Macmillan. Date Accessed: 26/5/2025
