Monday 27th March
Last Wednesday, the children from Lord Scudamore Academy came up to college to record all of the dialogue for the performance after Easter. Therefore, we did not have to practice any dialogue with the children individually this week because it has all now been recorded. However, the songs are yet to be recorded so this gave us something to work on today.
Today we were working with a much bigger group than we have been working with recently. We were working with all of the children who were in the drama club and were involved in the leech’s song. We started the session by carrying out a warmup with the children. We firstly started with a full body shake out. However, one of the children suggested that we could do ‘Rubber chicken’. This exercise gets the body ready for voice production because it loosens up all the muscles within the body. It starts with the right hand in the air and you have to shake that 16 times. You then repeat this with you left hand and then move on to the right foot and then the left. We then repeat this all over again but we shake it 8 times, then 4 and so on halving the number each time. After 1 shake, you take your arms low to high and shout ‘Rubber chicken!’ After this exercise, we did some simple tongue twisters with the children. We started with ‘red leather, yellow leather’. We then had some suggestions from the children of tongue twisters that we could carry out such as ‘She sells sea shells on the sea shore’ and ‘red lorry, yellow lorry’.
For the rest of the session, we were working on the leech’s song with the children. Here is the link to the song:
Some children have solo parts within the song. We decided that we should stand these children in a line at the front so that they could say their lines and lead the other children for when everyone was speaking or singing. This worked well as it was easy to identify who was singing and we could hear them all clearly. The rest of the children who were singing the ensemble bits were in another line behind the leech’s which had solo lines. Once we had practiced through the song once, we spoke to several children and gave them some advice as to how they could improve. However, the rest of the children lost concentration very quickly. We then practiced through the song a few more times just to make sure that everyone could be heard and that it was the best that it could be. After the song, there is a small section of dialogue which is said over the music. We ran through this dialogue firstly without the music so that the children could get used to saying it loud and clear without the music. All of the children that had lines within the section were loud and clear so we only had to run over this section a few times just to make sure everyone was reading the right lines. However, we did have to work on tone of voice in some places. A piece of feedback that I gave to Richa when she said the line ‘Final bubbles floating up’ was that she could change the tone in her voice so that it goes higher at the end. This would add more of an effect to the line and would create an image of the bubbles floating up in the river. Another example of when expression was used in this dialogue was the last line of the piece ‘Down, down, down’ was said by Daniel. He used expression in his voice to create the effect of the stone sinking in the river. He also slowly bent his knees and went down at the same time as saying his line. The last time that we practiced the dialogue without the music was very loud and clear and I could hear each child as they spoke their line, However when this dialogue was put to music, this wasn’t the same. The children suddenly went very quiet when they had to speak over the music. The main issue with this was that if the person before wasn’t quick enough or loud enough with their line then the next person would miss their line, and this would keep happening. However, as time went on, we practiced it over and over again and by the end of the session, the children were a lot clearer with the dialogue. To finish the session, we ran through the whole song and the dialogue to make sure that there was a good flow between the 2 things that we had worked on today. This material is then going to be recording in the recording studio this Wednesday.
No comments:
Post a Comment