The Caucasian Chalk Circle Performance

           We had our performance on an extract from the play 'The Caucasian Chalk Circle' today! Everything went well, and I surprisingly memorized all my lines despite of their length, and so does Daniel (Simon) and Shari (Grusha). The audience like how we use them as the river separating Simon and Grusha, so they can feel the tension between them. They said it is interesting and although they can only see one person at a time, it is not frustrating as only one character speaks at a time and they only need to concentrate on the speaking character anyway.

          By doing this project I gained basic knowledge of how an act on stage is created or designed, also it let me realized the possibilities there are in a small extract. 

The Caucasian Chalk Circle Preparation 2

           In Today's lesson we decided on the form (how are we going to place the audience, how are we going to shape the stage etc.) of our play.

           At first we just want to show our play on the stage, then I came up with an idea of using the audience as the river. Although that may reduce the vision of the audience, and they can only focus on one of the two characters (Simon, Grusha), but that's not a big problem, in my opinion, as they will only talk one at a time, and because the audience is sitting between the two characters, they can feel the tension, I think that this method of arranging the audience is worth risking, luckily my group mates agreed on it.

           For the Singer, which I am going to play, as the singer only have two long paragraph in the extract, I will sit among the audience before I have to say my line, in order to create a surprise. As my two paragraphs are for Simon and Grusha respectively, I will stand on their side respectively, to show that I am expressing their inner thoughts. And to move smoothly between the two paragraphs, I will make use of the last line of Simon's thought "For bed I have stones in water", then I will lay down in the 'river' (among the audience), and stand back up again when I have to speak out Grusha's mind. Also, we decided that when the Singer is having his lines, all the other characters will freeze to show they can't here the Singer and it is kind of not in the real world.