Unit 1 - Skills development in performing arts

Monday 17^th October

To start the lecture, we carried out a warmup to get the blood flowing faster to parts of the body that we would be using during today’s session. We did some simple head rolls and some shaking of the arms and legs to gently warm up. Next we carried out our intercostal diaphragmatic breathing. Once we had gone through this once, Cara decided that it would be a good idea if we were to monitor each other’s breathing. To do this, we had one hand on the other persons shoulder and the other hand on the bottom of their ribcage. This was to see if their shoulders and ribs were moving. I monitored Angel first and then she monitored me. When I was monitoring Angel, I felt her shoulders rising slightly however in this exercise the shoulders are not meant to move. I also felt a slight bit of movement within the rib cage so this means that she is doing the exercise correctly. Angel then monitored me doing the exercise. The feedback that she gave me was although I had no movement in the shoulders; I needed to have more movement in the ribs as these were only moving a little bit. Once we had monitored each other’s breathing, Cara let us monitor her breathing. This then meant that we would gain a clearer understanding of what the body has to do during this exercise. Whilst we were monitoring Cara carrying out the exercise, we felt no movement in the shoulders but a lot of movement in the ribs. This meant that she was carrying out the exercise to its fullest. When we are able to carry out the exercise better, we will gain more from it as our lung capacity will start to increase and we will soon be noticing the difference.

For the rest of the lesson we concentrated on learning our poems. The target that I was set a few weeks ago was to learn the first 4 lines of my poem. In today’s lecture, I had reached this target because I was able to remember the first 4 lines of the poem without a prompt from my lecturer. She then set me a new target to learn the next 4 lines of the poem and this was set for Wednesday 19^th October.