Custard creams.

    I think I'm addicted to them. I honestly do! This always happens. We get ANY new type of biscuit in the house and I form a brand new addiction. This time it's custard creams! This is not actually going to be the predominant feature in my blog today; I just thought it'd look like a cool title. I was actually going to talk about the first day back to school.
   I started the day oh so well. I went to bed late last night and so naturally couldn't be bothered to transport various essays from laptop to home computer in order to print them off. This meant I had to that this morning and pack my school stuff whilst making myself look half decent. In this area, I failed but luckily, I didn't miss the bus which was nice and even more luckily there was no-one there who I had to talk to so my iPod and I shared a long journey wrapped up in each other. School was nice; I really do like it! In English we did a nice Tennyson poem; ooo it were pretty and very though provoking. Then I had Drama in which we did a few Stanislavsky exercises. I really wish I wasn't so tired and hadn't just exhausted my brain power sorting out Year Seven production stuff (more about that in a sec). Anyway, for those of you who don't know, Stanislavsky is a Russian practioner who believes in basically, real life acting. As in acting that doesn't look like acting. If you get me. This really is only brief!!! Today, we did an exercise in which we all had to envisage ourselved walking through a door. We pictured the situation in our heads, developing it and creating a character and a reason for them wanting to go through aforementioned door. We then all had to, when we felt the time was right, get up and act this out in our various spaces in the room. It was very, very surreal! Stanislavsky believes in an impulse which basically means that when the actor feels the time is right and doesn't even have to think about doing something but it is just utterly compelled to do it, they have mastered the art of impulse acting. Anyway yeah, we didn't know this until after the exercise! It was so strange because as I was sitting in my chair, I began to feel myself feeling like my character and taking on all her characteristics. My face began to creep into a smile and my heart started beating so hard at the thought of what was on the other side of the door! My stomach almost lurched with the adrenaline my character was experiencing and before I knew it, I was up and acting out (but not really because I was my character) walking through the door with the character and situation I'd imagined. What was even more surreal was that some of the others had felt EXACTLY the same way. SPOOKY!
    At the end of the day I had French which was much nicer than I expected. Both teachers were in jolly moods and I have decided to try RIDICULOUSLY hard in French from now on so I even offered to read. Woo!
    Lastly, I got home and decided to start planning this year's Year Seven production. We decided to do Alice In Wonderland because it's got lots of fun characters and is hopefully something eleven and twelve year olds will enjoy! I've been in it twice; once when I was eleven as Alice's sister and then again when I was fourteen as the Mad Hatter and loved it both times! However, I've just cut all the songs because there is no way I'm teaching them the harmonies and what ever, haha. So yeah, I found myself a cheeky little script; spell checked it, edited it, cut bits to make it shorter and generally just sorted it out. I was having a bit of a creative burst at this point so I went through the script and wrote out a character list in order of appearance so the girls can see which characters are available for them to play. Then, I wrote out a letter explaining how the audition process for the girls would go that can be put in each of the Year Seven forms' registers and finally, I scoured the script for three audition pieces; one for one person, one for a pair and one for three people. Each of appropriate length with a bit of background information of the story up to that point to avoid confusion! Now all that's left to do is decide with the others when to hold the auditions, book the drama room for the auditions, create audition sign up sheets (someone else can do that, I'm fine with typing but when it comes to logical tables...oh god no!), pin all the information up on the noticeboard outside the drama room, photocopy about a thousand audition pieces (I'll ask my drama teacher, haha!) and then actually hold the auditions! Then simply casting, direction, costumes, make up, set design, music and deciding a performance date to go. OH MY GOD! I much prefer being an actor but I suppose this is exciting too.
Sally x