Last time I wrote we were coming to the end of our second trimester, which ended on our object manipulation autocours. I love object manipulation, it is so incredible how you can make theatre out of pieces of cardboard or rope or chairs. We only had two weeks work on object manipulation, which seemed a bit short as we normally do things in three week blocks. We used chairs in our autocours and created a filmic style piece, which centred around a young croatian couple in love that got separated during the Bosnian war. Yes, yes we did learn Croatian for our piece. Thank you google translate...we couldn't have done it without you. Oh yes and did I forget to mention the whole piece had to be within a 6ft by 6ft space. 5 people, 4 chairs, an immigration office, an apartment block, a war, a bus, all in that small space. They love to give us a challenge.
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So as I write to you now we have just finished week 3 of the third trimester. 
The last three weeks have been all about characters...what the whole of the first year ultimately leads up to. 
Week one was about passions and states. 

Week two we had to make the journey from home to school in character. Any character of our choice, it could be someone made up, or loosely based on someone you know. We were warned to avoid actors/people in the theatre industry, as it was too close to ourselves, they were interested in seeing us play people quite far away from ourselves. We were also warned to avoid cliches/characatures. So I would like you to meet Jean Mann (left) 40. A secretary at Derby University. I had fun playing Jean all week, although she got on my nerves a bit by they end, she was a bit of a wet lettuce. 

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Week three. I was Stacey Kenny (Right) 30. Nurse from Liverpool. Now Stacey had much more fire than Jean, I had a lot more fun playing her, but I am not going to lie, getting up an hour and a half earlier each morning to put on fake eyelashes, fake nails, curl my hair and just generally tart up, was not for me. I don't know how so many women do that each morning for work. 

Now this week is really where the fun starts. For monday we are to pick one of our characters from the last two weeks, so either Jean or Stacey and we then have to create a third character. So for instance if I pick Jean I then create someone else and have to be able to change from one character to the other quite quickly, I say quite quickly, it is actually ridiculously fast. We have to be able to be one character on stage, go off and be back on as the other character within 5 seconds. 5 SECONDS. 5 SECONDS?! Clark Kent can't even change into superman that fast and HE IS SUPERMAN!! I mean come on...really?? I told you they like to challenge us.
And so in autocours there are 5 of us but they want to see 10 characters! Our title is l'hotel du libre echange. So we are in a hotel basically but can choose anywhere, so could be in the kitchen, the lobby, the bedrooms etc or even a boat like a cruise (as that is also hospitality) When they explained our autocours to us the first thing I thought of was Dario Fo's Can't Pay Won't Pay. Where there are always people in and out of various doors, cupboards, wardrobes and where one actor plays a sergeant, an inspector and an undertaker. After thought was Faulty Towers. 
Where ever we are there are going to be a lot of doors, so people can go on and off, get changed rapid and get back on. It sounds very farcical and I know I am going to have a lot of fun this week! Very excited to get started and see what happens.