Unit 1 - Skills development in performing arts

Monday 7^th November

For the first part of the session, we carried out a warmup. For this, we carried out different walking speeds around the room. For example 1 was very slow and 10 was very fast. Simultaneously to this, we moved our arms in circular motions out to the side of us. We then carried out our intercostal diaphragmatic breathing and abdominal press exercises. Lastly, we did some diction and travelling exercises. We ran through ‘pah, tah, kah’ and we are both now able to get this up to a decent speed but we are still working on this to get it even faster. When it becomes faster, this is when the exercise will start to improve our diction. Another exercise that we carried out was the consonant exercise. For this exercise we would say the 5 vowels followed by a consonant for example “ab, eb, ib, ob, ub.” Then when we repeated it again we would say the vowel twice after the consonant and then finally 3 times. After this, we moved onto the next consonant. We worked our way through the alphabet using a different consonant every time.

For the rest of the session we were focusing on our poems. My target from last week’s session, Monday 31^st October, was to make sure the middle section of my poem was secure. I had reached this target as I had been practicing the poem throughout the week. This week it meant that I was then able to work on looking at internation and the expression for the first part of the poem. Within my poem there are certain words that need to be emphasised so that it sounds more interesting and it makes an impact on the audience. For the first 4 lines of my poem, I tried to think about where the emphasis was going to be placed. When I had ran through the poem once, putting emphasis on the words that I thought were appropriate, my lecturer Cara gave me some pointers from my rendition. The first pointer that she gave me was to watch carefully where the punctuation is placed within the poem. This will help me to know when to take breaths and when there is an end of a sentence for a slight pause. Also, I need to look into the internation of the poem. This links in with looking at the punctuation as I need to know where the sentences end and what tone of voice to use for these. However, this will be hard for me as I have selected a poem where the punctuation is not always clear meaning that it could be difficult for me to know where to pause or take a breath during the rendition.