My Shakespeare

My own experience with Shakespeare and the video My Shakespeare had many similarities. Everyone had a great time in the end in both cases. Two things from the film that I could to relate to from my experience are the actor's thoughts and experiences and the rehearsal process/activities we did to improve.

In the film, the actors were just ordinary people who had no experience with Shakespeare before. At first, the actors could not understand text and were just reading off the script. But later, most of the actors could comprehend the writing. During our residency, many people couldn't understand much of the text, but after working with it and doing various methods, we understood it. To understand Romeo and Juliet better, the actors of Harlesden were told to say the text in their own words. Before our residency, we were given the assignment to paraphrase all our lines. This task forced us to think about the text and understand it better. Sometimes, I thought to myself, "Why did I do this?" In my group, I had the least emotions and worked hard to fix that. In the play, most of the people were in my case also. But they didn't want to do this because they thought it was a waste of time. But after all the rehearsals and the performance, I was cheerful and happy that I had kept on going and trying my best. Last of all, before the performance in the film, all the actors were nervous and a great deal of them felt like they did not have enough practice. During our residency, I was probably the most nervous in my group. I wanted to practice putting more emotion into my words. But both performances went great. In the film, the actors surprised themselves because they put on a great show. In our group, we surprised ourselves but getting to go to the Shakespeare festival.

Many methods and procedures were taken in both cases to improve our skill and warm up. Paterson Joseph, the director, made the actors to display the emotion that he yelled out. It seemed quite silly to the actors and they laughed and had fun with it, but they had fun nonetheless and it did warm them up and allowed them to put more emphasis and emotions in their lines. During our Shakespeare Residency, the helpers would start off the day by shaking our hands and feet while counting to 10 very loudly. Then we would shout many sentences like, "What a to do to die today?" or "With a rat-ta-ta-rat-ta-ta-rat-ta-ta-tooo!" These activities were extremely amusing, especially because sometimes the classroom next door would be taking a math test. This warmed up our voices and our bodies, which is necessary because we use both during acting. During a rehearsal, our group was told to do something else to warm up. Ms. Stacy told us to run around the cafeteria twice. It was helpful in waking us up and making us act with more emotion. In both the film and our residency, various warm ups were done at the beginning of rehearsals to get us ready for

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