Unit 6 - Performance workshop

Tuesday 4^th October

The aim of the lecture today was to continue looking at different materials that we could base our devised performance around. 

As it was very cold outside and all of us in the session were cold, our lecturer Alys decided to carry out a warmup with lots of physical elements. To make the warmup a bit more fun, she put on some music which we all recognised from our childhood. This made the warmup more fun and exciting. The sorts of movements that we carried out to warmup were star jumps and small dance movements. We went around the circle, all picking a dance move to do and the rest of the class had to also do the movement. However, instead of just physically doing the movement, we had to describe in a lot of detail what we were doing. This helps us develop our communication skills. 

Once we had completed the warm up and everyone in the class was warm, we moved onto the main lesson. The first activity that we carried out was called the “one word story” game. We have played this game in previous sessions. Each member of the group would say one word at a time which then would create a story. Once we had completed this using one word, we moved onto saying a sentence each. This made it harder as you had to be quite imaginative. You also were not allowed to say very long or very short sentences. The extension to this activity was to then perform it to a live audience. As we were focusing on and looking at different theatre companies, we were introduced to this type of performance which is performed by only a few companies around the world. This type of performance is when there are one or several actors at the side of the stage who are narrating the story whilst the other actors, are acting out the story. However, the actors are miming and can only use sound effects. We all took it in turns to play the different roles in this type of production. At first I was an audience member, then I was the actor and then the narrator. I found it hard playing the role of the narrator because we had to say one sentence at a time which fitted in with the context of the story so far and I sometimes struggled to think of a new sentence which would fit with the story line but was also exciting at the same time.

To finish off the lesson, our lecturer showed us a poem which she thought would be suitable for us to use within our performance. From this we created a list of facts that we had been told from the poem. We thought about how we could make a performance from this by thinking of the meaning of the poem and what it represents. We also thought about other aspects to the poem for if this was to made into a stage performance such as target audience, style and genre. We lastly listened to a podcast which we could also base our performance on.

I found this lecture very useful as I learnt about a new type of theatre and gathered some more ideas of which we may be able to use in our production towards the end of the academic year.