Unit 3 - Community arts project

Monday 20^th March

Today we went back to Lord Scudamore to help the children rehearse for the project that will be performed after the Easter break.

Firstly, we were working with Lexie (who we worked with last week) and Izzie. We carried out a warm up with the children so that they were ready to rehearse their lines to the best of their ability. I ran the warmup with Emily. Because the children are around 7 to 10 years old, all of the activities that we carry out have to be quite simple as they wouldn’t have had much experience, if any, at these exercises. For the warmup we started with circling the ankle, working that up to the knee and then working that up to the hip. We then repeated this with the other leg. Then, Lexie suggested that we could carry this out with the arms. Starting circling the wrist, then up to the elbow and then up to the shoulder. This shows that Lexie has good initiative and confidence to express her ideas. To finish off we just did a few simple tongue twisters that the children were able to participate in such as ‘red leather, yellow leather’ and ‘unique, New York’.

After the warmup, we moved onto running through both of the children’s lines. Because we had worked with Lexie last week, she was more confident and was able to project so that her lines were loud and clear. However, Izzie was quite shy because she had not worked with us yet and therefore spoke her lines very quietly. After she had spoken her lines, we gave her some feedback and this was that she needed to be louder so that when she comes to record her lines, it doesn’t appear quiet on the recording. Even after the feedback, Izzie still spoke her lines very quietly. We then came up with a way of trying to get Izzie to speak louder. We played a game where you had to increase or decrease your level of volume according to the number that you were given. For example, if you were given number 10, you would have to speak very loudly and clearly but if you were given number 1, you would have to speak very quietly. We gave Izzie different numbers but gradually increasing them so she became louder and louder. When we rehearsed the lines again after this exercise, Izzie’s lines were a lot clearer than before.

Next, Harley and Evie joined the group. We worked with both of these children last week so they had an idea of what we were looking for. We ran through the script again with the other 2 children as well. All of the children were no speaking very clearly and loudly because we had worked with them to improve the delivery of the lines either in today’s session or last week’s session. I have noticed that the children work better vocally when they are in a group with other children. This is due to the other children boosting their confidence so that they are able to project more. There is a big difference from when we work with the children individually and when we work with them within a group.

To finish today’s session; we went down to the library to work with a much bigger group of children. All of the children that we had worked with so far were in this group. We ran through the lines for one of the scenes within the script. There were certain points within the dialogue which I stopped the children to ask them to repeat a certain line because it wasn’t loud enough, the wrong intonation was being used or any other improvements could be made to the line of speech. Working with the larger group of children gave us more of an idea as to what the performance is going to sound like. It is difficult when we are working with a child individually because we just have to jump places in the script so that we can just hear the lines that the child have been allocated.