Salim's Day

In Acting technique we explored living in the day of the character to help understand our roles better, this would help me to inhabit the space, understand the character and feel more comfortable with my character. This is what I thought Salims "average" day would consist of :

• Wake up
• Check on mum (implied she is quite ill in the text)
• Make myself and mum breakfast
• Get ready
• Leave My house
• go on the "block"
• meet friends
• go to the "trap"
• prepare drugs for sale
• go to camden 
• message "clients" about the drugs
• meet potential contacts and sell
• go back to the "trap"
• chill and smoke 
• go mosque (maybe) 
• chill more 
• maybe sell more
• go home

Inspiration

While working on on Frontline, I found working on my character wasn't  too difficult as I have encountered people that are similar to him in different ways, meaning the character wasn't too difficult to connect with and I was confident that I could work with this character. I established from very early that I did not want to make my character a caricature and use him simply for laugh ans I feel that is often the route that is chosen and that is the easy way of portraying the character.

These for me are examples of types of characters that I wanted to stay away from, as I felt that they were more stereotypes as opposed to honest representations of youth today. Although my character is a stereotypes of sorts, I wanted to help people to see that there is more to these people than just violence and drugs, even if that is the image only they help paint for themselves

Salim and Mahmoud

Towards the end of the play Salim has a scene with Mahmoud where he calls Salim over and discusses his history and Marmite with him. I found this scene intriguing at first as I read the scene a few times to try and figure out why the scene happened and the apparent relationship between the two. Due to the nature of the conversation I wondered if the two might of known each other. I came to the conclusion that the two knew each only by face and not by anything else. The thing that stuck with me after reading the scene a few times, is the trust/respect that Salim seems to have for Mahmoud, as throughout the play he is the only character that lowers his "defensive barrier" for. This is almost spelled out for the audience as in the same scene Erkenwald attempts to speak to him in the same manner, but when he mentions Salim's mum, Salim goes berserk and shuts down any attempt to speak on even ground with him. After doing the scene a couple times with Mahmoud, I began to be able to establish a character relationship that I could not get from the text alone. At first I found myself trying to concious of everything he said and react to everything to try and form a relationship, which worked to a degree with the scene , but I personally didn't feel that it was honest enough. After a while of trying different things I decided that in order for me to feel more in touch and honest with the scene, I would try to imagine how I would honestly react to the situation by honestly doing what Salim did and and try to take in only the stuff aimed at Salim. and zone out during the rest of his speech about Marmite and other things. This allowed me to honestly react and laugh at things he was saying in the speech as I realised that some of what he was saying actually had meaning, some of it was actually ridiculous and that I was allowed to laugh at the things that were said. This helped allow me to feel more "free" on stage and work with the scene a bit more. After making that change, it helped me to understand the "father figure" he represents to me within the scene, with somalia and Islam being our common factor.

Beatboxing

As part of our common ground rehearsal we did a beatboxing workshop with Grace Savage, a female beatboxer who came in to help us learn the basics of beatboxing to add a dimension to our play.

During the session we learned the roots of beat boxing, did a few basic exercises and all got into groups to perform a beat. I found this workshop to be very engaging and entertaining and I also think it adds a nice dynamic to the play and fits in well with the busy street vibe we are trying to portray. The scene was incorporated into the first scene when Beth sings the "Jesus gave me water song" which I think works well as it helps to add a dimention to Beths character before all is described within the play. I also it gives the Christians a different vibe, as opposed to the generic portrayal of Christians. I also think the beat boxing serves as a good mouth warm up for actors that are not doing it within a specifically within a scene on a basic level.

Laban Actions

Laban Effort Actions 

In lesson we explored Laban actions as an exercise to help with our individual character development. I decided that I wanted to go through every movement to help understand my character as opposed to picking out the movements that I thought would suit my character, as I felt that I could find something I did not expect to find with my characters movements. I started with just exploring exploring the movements at first, not as my character, just as myself,  so I could feel the different movements and just try and move around with them. This helped me personally understand the movements a bit better and the sorts of characters that they may represent, helping me get a better vision of the types of movements my character would inhabit. The next thing I did was try to move through all the actions but in the manner of my character. This gave me a better scope of the sort of physicality I wanted my character to portray. From this I managed to come to the conclusion that my character was more of a Slash/Punch type of person, This isn't a definite decision I have made regarding my character as this could change through the process, but it is what I have decided to go for at the moment . Next we had to try and apply the Laban Actions to our voices in the same way we applied them to our physicality, I found this hard as I couldn't quite get the slash in the voice action that I had decided to use for my character. I feel that that is the area I need to work on most as my character as that is the area I struggled with most when applying the Laban technique.

Ensemble Work

One of the most important factors that we have to work on as part of our piece is our ensemble work, many parts in the play, most particularly the beginning, include scenes where we have to listen very closely to the rhythm of the piece and work together as we interrupt each other at specific points within each others speech, that has to be very coordinated and cannot just be a messy argument on stage. We started working on our rhythm and coordination of our cast as an ensemble by doing a seemingly simple exercise. The task was for everyone to walk around the space and all stop at the exact same time without talking or communicating at all. I think this task is a very good team building exercise as it forces us to try and focus on rhythm and use our eyes to stay aware of the rest of the people around us, elements that are all very relevant within the play. Although I never expected us to all stop perfectly together as it was our first time as a cast that we performed this exercise, I found myself getting frustrated at the task due to the general lack of focus for the task and the lack of rhythm that was present within the room. I felt that the task could have been performed better if everybody had focused on trying to achieve the same rhythm with their footsteps. Had everybody found a rhythm of footsteps it would have been possible to stop moving easier as a unit as opposed to everybody moving in  their own direction and rhythm, meaning that nobody could hear if there was a pause in the walk of the other people in the room. I am almost happy that we did not get it right as it means that we have work to do as a cast and we are being appropriately challenged .

Salim character building

The lesson on the first day of October was our first character building exercise  which I found very helpful when focusing on my character Salim. In one of the exercises I created four square boxes and wrote the following headings in each box:

• Facts
• What I say about myself
• what others say about me
• what I say about others

After going through the scenes and writing down the various different bits of information that were required, I found little bits within the text that I did not notice from reading before. For example there is a scene where Salim has a conversation with Mahmoud about his heritage and also where Mahmoud comes from. Mahmoud says he has been to Somalia and makes a comment about his people who he calls the dhulbahante and describes them as "ferocious, relentless, disciplined and completely indomitable". I found this interesting as these are characteristics (minus disciplined) that I had picked up about my character from my first reading, so to do the exercise and pick up things that I had not noticed in the text before was helpful in finding out about my character. The most challenging thing I found about this task was realising my characters objectives through out the play. The reason I found this particularly difficult is because throughout the play my character does little to reveal anything about himself or his intentions in the play as hie is a very defensive character and is very quick to fly off the handle when he hears something he may not like. The only thing he seems to respond to seriously are things to do with somalia and his family (namely his mother). From these parts of the text I managed to come to the conclusion about his objectives :

• Super Objective- To have everybody respect him 
• Counter Objective - be the only dealer on his block
• The Through Line -  Sell his drugs