Deep Emotion

Nearer to the end of the play, my character, Thea, goes through a lot where deep emotion has to be shown.

I have been instructed to do some work on showing deep emotion through my stomach and my gut powerfully, instead of showing it through my head.

The first thing that I decided to do when thinking about this was to Google 'How to show deep emotion on stage'. This search showed to be unsuccessful as the results did not link with what I was intending to find.

I then decided to go onto YouTube and look for 'Deep emotion'. Again, this was unsucessful in the way that nothing came up to help me.

I then starting thinking about the scream I have to do at the end of the play when Hedda shoots herself, so I began to look at how to look at how to scream in a way that you don't damage your vocal chords.

Video On Screaming

I decided to look at singing websites to look at using your diaphragm and other parts of your stomach to scream from. I watched a video where he begins by talking about 50% being mental and 50% being physical; this confused me at first as I did not fully understand how I would 'mentally' scream. He then goes on to saying you have to imagine the sound that you want to make.

There is an overview on diaphram use and how it is important it is to use it when screaming. When you breath in, the diaphragm goes down, and when you breath out, it goes up. He then goes on to saying, you should breathe with your diaphragm while you scream/talk so that your scream/voice does not stop and start.

Deep Emotion

As I could not find anything useful on the internet about showing emotion on stage, I went back to thinking about our emotion memory exercises.

I started by thinking about a time when I felt like I have lost something I really cared about

From this, I then pretended I was back in that situation and I went to look in the mirror and, thinking about Jack's example of how it should sound like when I say 'No', I began to practice saying 'No' in the mirror.

I repeated this for about 15 minutes on a loop but then it began to sound repetitive so I changed my way of working. I decided to turn my back to the mirror and then face it and, in one move, say 'No'. After 10 minutes of this, I began to see a massive improvement.

My target I have set for myself this week is to continue this work and develop my skills ready for our performance.