"feels like fragments of a mosaic" - The Guardian 2019 is a beautiful way of describing this play.
When me and Mae were first told we would be doing a duologue together we were really pleased. We know we are reliable and can work well together and we knew due to our existing friendship that we would have good chemistry. Once we found out our piece was a snippet from "blank" we knew that chemistry was really important to have. Because this play is such an intense scene following themes of drinking, abusive parents and running from home, we tried to represent the strong sister like bond these characters have through our voice.
Upon first reading through it we noticed a segment in the text where the tone totally shifts, its at the line "she wont wake up" about half way through we thought this was weird but didnt think too much of it, until we started to read the whole play and research about it. We then found out it was actually two sets of different characters. In one way this knowledge was nice to have as it made the play make more sense to us as we now had some form of context, on the other hand however now we knew the exact reason for the change in tone it made it harder to try and merge these two sets of characters into the same story. Towards the end of the first scene we tried to lighten the tone a bit as the first is overall serious and the second starts of with back and forth banter so in order to merge these two characters a bit more seamlessly we played around with doing that. I think overall it worked well and the merging of the two characters was something I felt confident with after our later rehearsals.
In each rehearsal session we had we played around with our voices changing the tone or the relationship of the characters but in the end we chose to stick with a super close sisterly bond and just make some specific lines more comedic, like the lines about cabbage, penicils and tuna. We thought it was good to be serious to spread more awareness of the dark themes through this scene and play.
When we got to the recording studio i found it really cool, I liked asking questions about the sound broad and what each thing on it does. I found myself being really curious and looking at everything, partly because this was my first time doing voice acting and also because it felt so professional I wanted my knowledge to be expanded instantly. When we done voice acting in class I found it fun but I never considered actually doing it. I think this was because recording an audio book is very different to playing a character and I love playing characters so getting behind the mic and still acting was a really interesting and new way of doing what I already love.
I found myself still gesturing and making eye contact with my scene partner as if we were on stage, however I was really conscious of any movement of soft sound like a swallow and itch being picked up so I really held back, in future when I am more confident in my voice acting ability's I will move more as I think it really does help put your mind into the character. Being behind the mic is more relaxed then stage acting as when your on a stage everyone is looking at you all the time however behind the mic you can do as many takes as it takes to get it perfect. In another way it is still nerve-wracking as your voice is such an intimate part of you as a person and so really being vulnerable and relying on just that to put a message across is quite a big task that people in day to day life would not have to really think about. Overall it was a really fun experience that has defiantly put voice acting on my radar, I hope in the future to do more radio drama type things and get stronger in my abilities in this
Refrences:
[Blank] review – Alice Birch's build-your-own-play experiment | Theatre | The Guardian
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