Unit 6 - Performance workshop

Tuesday 28^th March

Today we were focusing on bringing together the material that we have already had ideas for and started creating.

To start the lesson we carried out some warmup activities. For the first game we stood in a line in the middle of the room and if Alys said one word we would run to the right side of the room and if she said a different word then we would run to the left side of the room.  The game gradual became harder as Alys gave us sequences of the words which meant we had to remember them and run to the correct side of the room in the correct order. The other warmup game which we played was ‘zip, zap, boing’. We have played this game a lot in the past so we were all familiar as to how the game is played.

Because I was ill last week and unable to attend the session, the rest of the group discussed with me what they did last week. I am now the only one in the group who has not developed their character. To help me think about my character, the group sat on chairs at the back of the performance studio and gave a character description for their character. To make sure that this performance is interesting, we all need to have different characters so that there is no repetition of characteristics. Listening to the other characters helped me to gain an understanding of what sort of character I could create. Once I had listened to all the character descriptions, I was struggling to think of a new character or how to develop the one that I had before. However, the character that I had before had most of the characteristics that most of the other characters had. As the session went on, I kept thinking about what sort of character I wanted to play.

After we had discussed all of the characters, we had a discussion about what was going to come next and how the scenes were going to flow. We then came up with the idea that each character would have their own separate scene which featured someone else. This means that everyone in the show will have multiple roles to play. We came up a scene for each of the characters which represented them and informs the audience a bit about their background. The scene that I will be in is Danielle’s scene which takes place in a doctors surgery. I will play the doctor and Danielle plays the patient. I, as the doctor, see Danielle on a regular basis as she constantly thinks there is something wrong with her when she is perfectly fine.

It was after this scene when an idea was put forward as to what my character could be. The idea was that my character has split personality disorder and although this would be quite a challenging character to play, it would be really interesting within the performance.

For the rest of the lesson we came up with the rest of the scenes that each different character would have. The other scenes are Callum in the pet shop with Angel, Angel in the library with Emily, Emily in boutique with everyone and my scene is in a butterfly enclosure with Callum.