On last Thursday, we spent three hours, staying in the black box, to perform and watch others' performances. Our group is the third one, and we made through once, which is excellent. David and David put all the efforts in it, and they gave their best performance I believe. They spoke loudly and clearly; the facial expression and body movement are into the characters. I love the nagging that David Dai had and the peacemaker David Wang created. I am proud of them.
My performance is not bad. All of us showed the characters' emotions, and my emotion is good as well. I decided to create Caroline to be naive and a little bit soft at the beginning of the performance, so I had petty actions, such as jogging, many facial expressions when saying the lines, and unsteady tone when saying the lines. I wanted to show that she is not confident enough to speak her voice out loud in the first monologue, and I did pretty well on it. In the scene that the biggest conflict happened between mom and Caroline, I shouted to David (mom) and intentionally broke my voice. The breaking voice can bring the scene more dramatic and can highlight Caroline's anger even more. I like this decision. At the end of the scene, the moment before the wedding, I dressed up and said my monologue in a stable tone and a bit heavier voice. I spoke the end monologue more slowly compared to my last monologue. The first monologue is like a diary that I only speak to myself due to lack of confidence, but the last monologue is more like a speech that I project my voice so that everyone can hear me and understand me. I did this comparison clearly, and I like it a lot. In addition, if you noticed that I improvised in the last monologue. I added some lines because firstly, I found out the duration of the performance might be shorter than expected, and secondly, I think it might be better if Caroline shows the understanding to her mother. When people get nervous, they usually speed up their speech, so I hoped I could stretch the performance longer.
I made mistakes, two big mistakes. One is that I said the line wrong, and the other is that I kind of forgot the line. I messed up one line's sequence so that it did not sound right. Then, I had to change the words a little bit, and it brought extremely awkward pauses. It is really bad, and I felt sorry for it.
There is an accident that David cannot get used to the dark environment, so he passed the teddy bear to be late, and it caused the last scene started late. I came up to stage late, so the monologue did not match the background music perfectly. However, I do not think that is a big deal. I would have more tech practices if I have the performance in the future. In addition, the camera is kind of closer to the floor. Then, the performance is moved to the top instead of setting in the center of the camera. Besides it, everything is good.
