Shoreham Monologues Evaluation

The main strength of my performance in the Shoreham Shakespeare Festival was my projection, because we had to start our pieces randomly imbedded in the public it was important to catch their attention well and quickly. I didn't think it would work well initially, but especially after my first try, I had a huge audience and received a large applause after, this gave me a lot of confidence to do it again and again. As previously mentioned in my blog I wanted to try out too tones of voice for my first line, on this first try I chose the more confident one, as I was nervous and thought this was most logical. Once I had grasped the idea of how to attract attention without volume, I took a longer pause before starting, this shaky start drew just as many people in, which I didn't expect. I also strived finding new and interesting performance spaces. At one point Luke and myself sat on a bench at the roadside and began our monologues together, reciting them to each other. This had a dramatic effect as it was loud, and competitive. Delivering my monologue in this way, with anger gave me a new perspective on the emotional developments during the speech and I realised I can make some parts a lot more aggressive if I want to. 

One weakness of my performance was my nervousness, specifically in my earlier performances of the day I struggled to have a punchy starting line, which made me lack on confidence. I found that without this good start, you don't attract much of an audience, for example I began on a bridge at one point, and I chose a bad time to start as there weren't many people around, and therefore didn't attract much of an audience. This scared a lot as it made me quite anxious about my next performance but I made sure I was persistent and finished the dialogue. 

Overall I am happy with my performance at Shoreham, I was confident and got the opportunity to try out and learn about different ways to deliver the lines. I have benefitted from this as an actor as I now have a better idea about audience reaction, most of them were genuinely interested in what I was doing and stopped to listen and appreciate my efforts. I would like to try this on a day that isn't known for Shakespeare, or a non Shakespearean  monologue to see if they have the same effect on passers-by. I found that performing outside like this gave me an insight to what my Antigone performance at the Brighton Open Air Theatre will be like, as they are both outside. I now know I will really have to push my projection and movements to make sure I keep the audience entertained with all of the distractions around, without ruining the effect of my smaller gestures of characterisation.