Vocal Awareness of Gregor

Today we prepared for the vocal awareness section of our coursework by looking at one of Gregor's monologues.

• Firstly, we thought about what Gregor is trying to convey through his monologue. We found many feelings underlying including frustration, desperation, resignation and defeat. This helps to understand how to say it as for instance if you are frustrated rather than angry you may say something slightly differently.
• Then we looked at dynamics, tone, pitch, pause and articulation to see how we could perform the monologue vocally rather than physically. We looked at each line and really specifically decided how to say it to make it as detailed as possible.
• We then looked at how to distort the lines to make them sound inhuman to emphasise Gregor is a bug. This was hard as the audience still needs to be able to clear understand what Gregor is saying. We went round the circle and all said a line to experiment with different ways of sounding like a bug. We also tried going from a really high sound to a really low sound to create him as the bug quite freaky to add that inhuman effect. We also looked at the sounds in between the speech to show how he is a bug so that the words can still be clear.
• Finally, we looked at how the family would hear his speech and what Greta would hear when he tries to talk to her. We all lay in the dark and turned ourselves into bugs and said our noises together for each. This helped as we can link this in to conveying this to the audience through what Gregor sounds like to him.