Unit 6 - Performance workshop

Tuesday 21^st February

Today’s session was being led by Dinos. The aim of the session was to look at characterisation,.

To start off the lesson we carried out a warmup which consisted of many different exercises. The first exercise that we carried out was going through the different types of beans and making a shape with our bodies to symbolise the beans. We included broad, string, kidney, etc. After this we moved onto an exercise which focused on controlled movements. We stood at one side of the room and we had to walk to the other side of the room but had to imagine that we had a bucket of water in each hand, a string pulling us forward, eggs under each arm, a book balanced on the top of our head and our feet had to always be touching the ground. The aim of this was to look at isolated and controlled body movements. The next exercise which we carried out was an exercise which focused on moving as a unit, being conscious of others’ movement and working as a chorus. One of us was chosen to be the leader and we had to lead the group around the room. We all had a go at leading the triangle.

The next exercise was another about moving around the space as one unit. We started by mapping out the area that we were using and then connected with each other by putting one of our hands on the person in fronts shoulder. Music was played and we had to walk in time with it. After a few minutes we started to add new rules such as that you could walk straight across the space but then had to wait for the rest of the group to catch you up.

For the next part of the lesson we were focusing on characterisation. We led on the floor and Dinos counted from 1 to 10 and when he got to 10 we had to be stood up acting as that character. For each character that we were given, we were given a main element to focus on. The character and aspects that we were given were:

·      A middle aged person – posture

·      An elderly person in a park – movement

·      A child witnessing a car accident – face

·      A parent putting their child to bed – voice.

Once we had got ourselves into these characters, we were tapped on the shoulder and had to say a line that we thought the character would say. I found this quite difficult because we had just thought of the character and we didn’t have any background of their life.

After a short break, we started again with a quick game of fortunately, unfortunately and then we carried on with looking at characterisation.

The next task that we carried out which looked at characterisation was passing around a suitcase and we had to improvise a short monologue speaking as if we were the suitcase. The second time around we had to speak as if we were the owner of the suitcase and the third time we had to take someone else story and adapt it.

The last activity which we carried out was we chose a button which we would then use as a symbol of our character. From this, we then had to think of 2 secrets that the character had and had to form a freeze-frame for each of these secrets by using the others in the group.