Belgrade Youth create their own monologues for their Zoom-based lockdown project
Last week, Senior Youth Theatre member Cameron explained how his group were developing their characters and experimenting with camera angles in their Zoom-based Telling Stories on (the Small) Screen project. This week, the group have been considering a setting for their work, and further fleshing out their characters by creating their own individual monologues.
Our last session focused mainly on working with monologues that we’d created in advance. To prepare for the session, we recorded ourselves performing them and sent the audio files to our group leaders.
When we met up via Zoom, we used the time to rehearse our monologues and, building on our work in previous weeks, started to explore ways of intertwining them and bringing them together.
This is my first experience of working with monologues, but since we started, I’ve been able to see the potential of the structure they provide, and how useful they have been for developing character.
Before this, I had been mainly improvising my character’s dialogue, focusing on expressing how I felt about them at that time. I do tend to be an “in the moment” kind of person generally.
However, I have found that preparing a monologue has helped me to understand my character more fully and rehearse my role more effectively. It’s also been useful for collaborating with the rest of the group, because it has enabled us to find shared themes and make sure we are complementing each other with our work.
So far, a lot of our project has been set on a busy tube train, imagining members of the public responding in different ways to the Covid-19 situation. This setting allows us to introduce a range of characters and develop them very quickly. We are continuing to explore ways of working in unison, to create a believable and relatable experience for the viewer.
After working on our monologues, we also went into our different breakout rooms and did some work on costumes and props.
The sessions seem to be producing great results now. Each week, we build more on the structure, adding to it in fun and manageable layers. It will be really interesting to see what the end result will be.
At the Belgrade Theatre, our team have been working hard to continue engaging with youth and community groups during lockdown, even as we face the greatest crisis our industry has seen in a lifetime. With over 70% of our income having vanished overnight, we are relying on diminishing reserves and the generosity of donors and supporters to continue with this vital work. To help secure a future for our theatre and for groups like Cameron’s, please consider making a donation to us online.
