Berkoff No. 2

Looking again at Berkoff (as I guess we will for the next couple of months) we began with an exercise in partners creating slow-motion, defined and exaggerated fight moves. We developed this gradually first through just coming up with the moves as a sequence of four with exaggerated mask-like faces, then adding words to the action, a little sequence at the beginning to give the moves context, the splitting apart and each facing the audience respectively. During the process, I began to realise how hard it was to maintain multiple disciplines at once: the face mask, the definition of the movement, remembering choreography and moves etc. during the practice, I realised my moves weren’t defined enough e.g. no definitive beginnings and ends to make as once I’d do a move, I might still move slightly, so I began working on making it more staccato and thinking of it in that way meant I did that more easily, though still not perfectly. However, in the performance, my downfall became clear: choreography. As always. Choreography is my failing in everything, my mind just pulls blanks for moves, and it did in this case as you can see in the video below:

Following this exercise we split into different pairs and began to look more into creating an actual scene. The theme of the scene we created was surrounding the idea of two waiters/ servants laying a table. Me and Hannah decided to have two contrasting characters, one who was a bit of a quiet perfectionist and the other (me) was arrogant, jealous and over the top. I think that the contrasting characteristics worked well for the performance, creating a great basis for an undercurrent of friction and argument between the two characters, and opportunities arose in which we could have little moments such as glares, and deliberate twitches of table setting to rile the other.

The physical movement was harder to create and subsequently pull off (especially with my lack of skill in choreography, memory and grace) especially considering the style of Berkoff. It was a massive struggle trying to remember the moves, (let alone the order of movements) the facial expressions, character etc. (thank god there weren't any lines). The first problem was creating appropriate movements, to also work with the music, some fantastically weird and groovy Tom Waits. We eventually came up with around thirty seconds of movement, deciding to do some synchronised movements, some responsive similar movements and alternate. Although I think the piece was quite fun, firstly, our timing went a bit off in the middle section when we're putting down plates (think it was my fault, I'm a terrible counter) but the main problem is that it wasn't extremely Berkoff-like. The movements were too fluid without beginnings and ends plus not precise enough.

Our next task was looking at the beginning of East. The setting was interesting, well, interestingly bare - just five chairs sat at the back for the chorus to sit on. The stage directions tell the cast to enter and sing a song off beat, different keys and descant, ( I think we spent a little too long trying to find the song on youtube to get the tune, you can't tell what the tune is anyway it's that bad) the first port of call was to create each character, I played the Dad which was decided was a bit of an in the pub guy, with a tuneless voice and overconfidence.

Again, my problem for the physical side of the piece was the beginning and end of moves, e.g. they're too fluid, need to be more "defined and mimetic". However, I repaired this issue before we performed it though the movements look a little awkward and unrealistic (in an unrealistic Berkoff way) but I feel we performed an almost-Berkoff like piece.

The next part of the lesson was spent on looking at the following section of East between Les and Mike which is a dialogue about the moment they became best friends. In the read-through I was given the role of stage-direction reader - there was one direction to read and the other readers skipped through it, my talent was wasted! But then half-way through we swapped roles and I got to show-off my perfect cockney accent (if it's anything other than middle-class Radio 4 accent or even posher, then I can't do it). Then in pairs we began working on a one-minute section of the first scene.

I went with Charlotte, Charlotte playing Mike, and Les: yours truly. The forty minutes before break were quite fruitless, finding it very difficult to come up with appropriate movements, or even good ones, we were feeling pretty hopeless. But after break, a spurt of creativity came and we were coming up with movements quick and slick. This came partly through adapting the section we were going to perform, starting a bit later, so that we started with my line "A crowd of yobs formed a ring of yellow face in the lamplight" rather than talking about going "round back" and something about "dragon's breath" cutting out a small section in the middle about police men and finishing after a small slow-motion fight. The editing of the script took a long time, with lots of different edits and failed choreography till we decided on which bits we were doing, but I feel that in the end, it was an appropriate script with a good number of suitable lines for each character. We decided to have a lot of synchronised movement to centralise the narrative (and make it easy for us and the audience to follow) as well as some parts with alternate, or even opposing movements.

Although not quite perfect yet (especially the atrocious Cockney accents), I think our scene is looking pretty promising for the performance next week.