Unit 6 - Performance workshop

Tuesday 8^th November

The aim of the lecture was to look at stimuli and creating pieces of drama from this. We were also looking at an idea and then thinking about its aspects. 

It was my turn to lead the group for the warmup this week. The first activity that I had thought of is called ‘hoedown, ye-ha’. This game is another version of the game that we have played in previous lessons called ‘zip, zap, boing’. Everyone in the group stands in a circle and one person starts off the ‘ye-ha’ which is then passed around the circle. Whilst saying “ye-ha” you have to slap your knee across your body. Another rule to this game is that you can say “hoedown, ye-ha” to change the direction. Another rule is that you can point to someone in the circle and say “get off of my land” followed by their name and then this person would start off the “ye-ha” in any direction. This exercise mainly focuses on building confidence and communication skills. The other exercise that I thought of was an exercise called ‘This is a tick’. Everyone in the group sits in a circle and then someone starts off by saying to the person next to them ”this is a tick”. In reply, the person would say “a what?” and back again to “a tick” and then the person passes it on whilst saying “ah a tick”. This then carries on around the circle but every time someone asks “a what?” this must come back to the original person who then passes the tick back. It is easier to carry out this exercise using an object such as a pen to make it a bit easier to understand. At first the group found this exercise quite difficult as it is quite hard to explain however, after some time they started to pick it up slowly.

As we were looking at stimuli today, our lecturer gave us a scenario of a play about cyber bullying. We were then asked to think about a play that we could create around this topic. However, we weren’t meant to think about the play in too much detail, just things that she had asked us to think about. These elements were things such as the target audience, intentions, style, performance space, performance strategies, cost, cast size, advertising, etc. She asked us to think about these because next term we will be starting to look at creating our performance and these are the sort of things that we will soon need to consider. 

For the next task, Alys gave us a few different scenarios and we had to pick out which one we thought was the best and interested us the most. The scenario that we picked was ‘siblings in war time’. We were then asked quietly to think of a character which we were going to play and what relation we had to everyone else in the group. My character had 3 siblings but I was the youngest at 13 years old. The scene that we came up with was that we were in an air raid shelter in our back garden. The 2 oldest siblings who were being played by Danielle and Callum, had woken up to see that our parents had not returned overnight. An idea that was put forward to the group from Callum was to start the scene off with a siren in the middle of the stage to create a tension for the audience. 

To finish off the lesson we had a group discussion about what we have achieved so far as a group. We all became great friends quickly which means that we all get on well and are able to work with everyone in the group. We would make a great theatre company as we all have good communication skills.