Today in lesson we were taught about a person's natural pace in life- tempo-rhythm.
Thinking about someone's natural tempo-rhythm helped me out a lot with my character, Doll, because it made me think of how she'd move around the stage and if she'd be really quick and direct. After a while of playing around with her tempo-rhythm, I ended up deciding she was quite slow, indirect, with quite a fast rhythm.

Describe the difference between the two shoe shop scenes;
 - How did the change in tempo - rhythm affect this?
One of the first exercises we did was walk around the room in different tempos, first one was slow, the second was just a natural medium pace and the last one was basically us power-walking. When we did these three paces, we then had to write on the board how it made us feel. We had to think about our characters while doing this, and we would have to hold our postures how we think our characters would, and think about where they hold their weight.

When we had done that, we then got went off into pairs and one three, we labelled ourselves (A), (B) and in the three's case (C),  and we had to do a little improvisation where (A) was a shop assistance and (B) and (C) were two shoppers. We were in a shoe shop.
With these characters, it gave us a lot to play around with, we could have the shop assistant really slow and laid back and the shopper really quick and in a hurry or we could have it the other way around. So this exercise gave us a lot to play with. After 5 minutes we then swapped roles.

I was working with Harry for this exercise, I was the shop assistance first and Harry was the shopper. I was moving around relatively fast, because I thought my was character student at a University and she wanted to work super hard so she earned more money to live off. I would say my character was vavace, so she was fast and enthusiastic but didn't seem like she was in a rush to leave the shop.
Harry's character on the other hand was quite slow and awkward which was tricky for my character to look like she was doing a great job. I would say Harry's character was comodo, so slow but not deathly slow.


At the end of the tasks we had learned about different tempo's which were;

• Grave (Very slow)
• Comodo (Bit faster)
• Animato (Medium)
• Vivace (Lively)
• Pretissimo (Very fast)

What do you think is your characters natural tempo - rhythm?

I personally think that Doll Common is mentally vivace but physically grave/comodo. The reason why I say that is because in her mind Doll is still a lively person and knows what she wants to do, but where she is ageless in the play; Playhouse Creatures, she quite slow when she moves around.