Unit 6 - Performance workshop

Tuesday 14^th March

Today we were carrying on looking at characterisation and developing the characters that we started to develop last week. We also started to look at movement which we could include within our performance.

To start the session, we carried out a warmup. We started the warmup in a circle and someone had to walk across the circle to someone else and say “Hello, my name is …” and the other person would respond with the same. It would then go on to ask how the other person is and then finishing with “Nice to meet you …” and the other person responding with the same. We then had to say this in a different voice for every person that we spoke to. We could do this by changing the tone of voice, accent, volume, etc. After this activity we carried out the exercise ‘Bungalow’. The other 2 activities that we carried out which we were familiar with was ‘this is a pen’ and ‘zip, zap, boing’.

After these activities Callum suggested an activity. It consisted of slapping your hands on your knees for 3 counts and then clapping on the 4^th count. Once we had this rhythm, we were then able to think of other patterns such as slapping for 2 counts and then clapping on the 3^rd count. This meant that every so often, everyone will clap on the same count. This is something that we may be able to include into our performance.

After the warmup, we started to look at some movement. We all walked around the room slowly and once we came into contact with someone we would stop for a moment, and then carry on walking. We were then given a few scenarios and we had to think about what our character that we developed last week would do in this situation.

We then carried out an activity called ‘round, by, through’. This is when you have to create a movement for each of the 3 words. Working with a partner, we created a short sequence of movement each carrying out the ‘round, by, through’.

Next, we moved onto looking into how we could incorporate movement into one of the scenes that we had already created in one of the previous sessions. We chose the lift scene and we were given a piece of music to work to. As I have taken on the role of the choreographer within our theatre company, I choreographed the movement. We were given the first sequence which was to move the head. He looked left, right, up, down and then centre. These movements were quite fast so that they could fit with the beat of the music. We repeated this sequence 4 times then we made up 2 sequences of our own. After these, we then repeated the original sequence twice. After this, there is a change in the music so I felt like there needed to be a different type of movement. For this we all lent outwards in different directions to look like we were coming apart but then we come back in again. We then moved around so we all changed positions and repeated this 5 times.

After a short break we carried on with the hot seating activity which we carried out last week. This week we were asking Danielle questions about her character. At the moment, all of our characters are very similar age and quite similar backgrounds. After the hot seating activity, we had some discussion about what characters we need to have in our performance to make it interesting. Danielle said that she is going to rethink her character and try to think of a new character or change bits of her current character to make the performance more interesting.

To finish off the session we had some discussion about some ideas that we had for the performance. Because we are now starting to bring together some ideas as to what we actually want the performance to be about, we are able to bring some ideas to the group. One idea that we had was to include the slap and clap activity that Callum showed us in the warmup. Also, another idea which we had was to all be sat individually on a chair, the lights go off, something happens and when the lights come up, one of us is in a completely different position to when the lights went down. At the moment we are just listing down ideas because we are still in the early planning stages of the performance.