Unit 6 - Performance workshop

Tuesday 18^th October

As Alys, our lecturer for this unit, mentioned to us last week, one of us in the class would be leading a few warmup activities to start off the session. This week Danielle was leading the warmup. The first activity that she introduced us to was called character bus. We set the space out like a bus by using a few chairs. To start off, I was the driver of the bus and the rest of the class where stood at the bus stop waiting to enter the bus. The rule of the game was that the person who enters the bus plays a certain character, then everyone on the bus would have to be the same character. We started the scene with me on the bus and everyone else entering one at a time. Once everyone was on the bus, we started the game again but this time we swapped the driver so Danielle was now the driver. I used my existing skills and characters that I had played in the past within this exercise. This exercise aims to build up our confidence and to gently get our brains ready for the lesson. Once we had done this exercise a few times and swapped the driver a few times, we moved onto the next activity which was called ‘model, artist, clay’. For this exercise there are 3 people, a model, a artist and someone acting as clay. The activity started off by the model picking a pose and standing still in that pose. The artist would then have to copy the pose that the model was in by moving the person who was acting as the clay. We did this exercise through a few times so we all got the opportunity to play each part. After we had finished the warmup, Alys selected me to run a few warmup activities next week. This then gave me a week to prepare and think of the activities that I would run with the class.

For the next part of the lesson, we started talking about physical contact within performances and productions. We all stood at the back of the performance studio and Alys asked us if we could find a way to move collectively without giving any instructions. We firstly tried walking in a group but this did not work as we could not move at the same time. We tried linking arms in a circle but this didn’t work either. Alys asked us to think about being able to move together without holding onto each other. As we were stuck for ideas, she asked us to get into partners. We then walked around the room arm by arm. This way we were touching but not holding onto each other. Using this method we were able to sense if the person next to us was slowing down, speeding up, stopping, etc. We then tried this method as a group. We stood in a line at the back of the performance studio and moved as one group down stage. This worked well as we were now able to sense if anyone wanted to stop, go faster, etc.

Last week we were set a research task to find out about a theatre company. This could be any type of theatre. For this task I chose to research the “Royal Shakespeare Company”. During my research I found out lots of information about the company such as that they are based in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s hometown, however their work is shared all over the world and they work with over 530000 children and young people every year as part of their education project. I first heard about RSC when I went to see Matilda the musical and this is why I chose to find out some more information about it. 

The last task of the session was to think about characterisation. We sat down and were asked to think about a character. We named the character, gave them an age and an occupation. The, we carried out a hot seating activity which helped us to develop our characters more. From this, we were then set an independent study task which was to write a short monolog that the character would say. This was due for the session after half term.