Unit 6 - Performance workshop

Tuesday 28^th February

To start the session we carried out a warmup. This consisted of a few different activities. The first one was thinking of different types of beans and performing an action to go with them. We carried out this activity last week when the session was run by Dinos. We included beans such as broad, string, jelly, French, runner, jumping, chilli, kidney, baked and black eyed. The other warmup activity that we carried out was ‘fortunately, unfortunately’. This is when you alternate around the circle starting the sentence with ‘fortunately’ and ‘unfortunately’ which then forms a story.

After the warmup we had a recap of what we covered in last week’s session with Dinos. To recap, we carried out one of the activities again. This activity was the one where we had to talk from the perspective of the object. Instead of using a suitcase, we used a teddy bear. We started by talking from the perspective of the teddy bear, then from the perspective of the owner and then developing someone else’s story. This activity will help us when we come to developing our characters.

For the next part of the lesson we were looking at the idea that we have come up with for the performance. This is the idea of confinement. We made a list of things that we think of when we hear/see the word confinement. We came up with:

Hospital

Prison

Mental health unit

School

Care home

Slavery/human trafficking

House arrest

Depression

Anxiety

Friendships

Relationships

Death

Birth

Long term illness

Witness protection

Thoughts

Lift

Mental health

Agrophobia

OCD

Once we had created this list of words, we were asked to create a lift scene which included at least 2 of these words. I played a character with OCD and Danielle played a character with claustrophobia. Callum played a character who was going to a job interview and Emily played a character who was heavily pregnant. At first we found this scene hard to do and I was unsure of how to play a character with OCD. However, after some time to think about what characteristics come with OCD, I was able to play the character better.

After a short break we looked at singing some simple chords. Callum played a major chord on the piano and gave me, Emily and Danielle a note each to sing. This then meant that when we sang the 3 notes together it created a harmony. We tried this a few times just to gather some ideas as to what we can include in our performance.

To finish off the session, we did some short improvisation. Our lecturer, Alys mapped out a small space within the performance studio using the 3 blocks and some chairs. For the improvisation we had to think about why we were in the confined space. Alys didn’t specifically tell us what the space was so we just interrupt it ourselves. I interrupted it as a cell in a prison but I was unsure why I was there. When I got into the cell I was mumbling to myself and didn’t let the audience hear what I was saying. I moved around the space slowly and cautiously.