Unit 1 - Skills development in performing arts

Wednesday 11^th January

The focus of today’s lesson was to review all of the material that we had learnt before the Christmas holidays and had been practicing over the break.

We started the lesson with a short physical warmup. This consisted of shaking out the body, the intercostal diaphragmatic breathing exercise and diction exercises.

For the main part of the lesson we were focusing on our poems. This is because we will be performing these poems at Breacon Theatre in a few weeks. The first time that I ran through my poem I made one mistake towards the middle of the poem. However, when I did a second run through I did not make any mistakes. After my second run through, my lecturer Cara gave me some feedback. She was pleased with the fluidity of the poem and that I was able to recall it word for word. However she did give me a few pointers as to how I could improve it. The main skill that I need to improve on is projection. We will be performing these poems on a stage which will be behind a proscenium arch. This means that most of the sound is going to be swallowed up so we must have good projection to fill the whole theatre. Other comments that I was given was that I used good facial expressions and intonation throughout.

To finish off the lesson we ran through our duologue just to refresh it in our heads. We ran through this twice but we are still sight-reading parts of the text so we are unable to fully perform this yet.
The targets which I was set from this lesson were to work on my projection within my poem and to learn another 5 lines of the duologue.