Blog post #2

Ivan Kapkov

IB Lit & Performance

Mrs. Guarino

Blog post #2 Monolog experience.

This week my class and I took a big step in our academic career and in terms of our personal experience.  For the past two weeks we were preparing our monologues for an act that we did this tuesday. It was a long process because firstly we choose the monologues that we want to act, then we cut some details from the monologue that we didn’t like or if the monologue was too long. For me the toughest part was to become this character and to express all the feeling that he provides in his role. The character that I was playing is Troy. He is the most highlighted character in this play who truly believes in anthropomorphized death, and talks to the death throughout the play. I created his emotions in myself by  reading this monologue many times and watching the part of the movie where he talks to death and the emotions that he expressed talking to death. I improved my skills with showing different emotions by repeating this monologue in my head all the time when I was in the bed and the thing that helped me the most was practicing this monologue on my roommate. The other monologue that I wrote was from my own experience. It is a story from my childhood. This monologue was a new thing for me because I expressed myself, my own feelings and memories. The most difficult thing about writing it was remembering the details of my story. It was less fun to write and present this monologue because of remembering how hard it was to live knowing that I was the shortest kid in class and getting bullied because of that. From this project I learned how to be more confident in front of the audience, and I learned how to express different feelings using one paragraph. The hard part in this project for me was to act in front of my classmates and show Troy’s emotions. It was hard to express his emotions because he is a hard character and the way he expresses his emotions is like he actually feels them in real life. When I first read Troy’s monologue I thought that it was the hardest monologue of all of them, but when I heard the monologues that my peers presented I was impressed by how they presented their monologues and how they conquered the emotions of the characters who had those monologues in the story. Every time when a person presents his monolog or the monologue from any other story he must express the emotions and that's the hardest part and the part where many people struggle. Me and my peers struggled with presenting our monologues in front of each other. This project showed me what is it to present a monologue from a story in front of audience and how it feels.