Unit 6 - Performance workshop

Tuesday 13th September 2016

Every Tuesday afternoon we have a performance workshop which is led by a practitioner from outside of the college. Her name is Alys and she works for an organisation known as UCAN productions. UCAN is an organisation that helps to engage blind and visually impaired young people in performing arts. The organisation if based in Cardiff, Wales but they work all over the UK.

The aim of the performance workshop is to create a performance as a company. These performance workshops will not only help us create a performance and work as a company, but will also help us to develop certain skills which we can then apply to our unit for developing skills in performing arts.

We started the lesson by giving an introduction of ourselves to the rest of the group. In pairs we discussed several facts about ourselves such as our name, where we were from, what makes us happy and our pet hates. However, we had to make sure that we were listening carefully as we then had to feed this information about our partner back to the group. Following on from the introductions, Alys (our lecturer) gave us an overview of what we were going to be doing in these sessions over the next year such as focusing on our teamwork, communication and then the creation and production of a performance as a company.

Next we started the warmup activities. Firstly we started off with simple exercises such as head rolls and a bit of movement to get the blood flowing faster around the body ready for the lesson ahead. Once we had finished these warm up exercises, we then moved onto some fun activities. The first warmup activity that we started was called “bungalow”. For this activity we started by singing as a chorus “bong-a-low, bung bung-a-low”. Once we had sung this through twice, we were chosen one by one and the rest of the group would sing to us. For example they would sing “hey Charlotte, hey Charlotte let me see you bungalow, let me see you bungalow” in which the person would reply with “my hands are high, my feet are low and this is how I bungalow”. At the point whilst singing “my hands are high” we rose our arms up above our head, “my feet are low” we pointed to our feet and “this is how I bungalow” we did a dance move of our choice. We then repeated this moving round the circle till everyone had had a go. The next activity was to pass objects around a circle. This exercise made us use our communications skills because as we passed the object, we had to say what the object was. As the game went on, the speed increased meaning our communication skills had to be grater. The last warmup activity that we took part in was story telling. This exercise encouraged us to use our imagination. We firstly did this exercise by telling the story with each person saying one word which made up the story. However, the second time round, we made it more complicated by making each person say a sentence each.

The majority of the session was then taken up by an activity which was to tell a story of a famous fairy-tale or play in 5 freeze-frames. As a group we chose to act out “Goldilocks and the 3 Bears”. Using our communication skills we discussed our ideas for the 5 images that we needed to create. Once we had decided and practiced the piece, we thought of titles for each freeze-frame and thought about our transitions from one frame to the next. I found this exercise quite difficult because I was working with new people and I haven’t had much experience with freeze-frames in the past.