Unit 6 - Performance workshop

Tuesday 15^th November

The aim of this lecture was to look at theatre for children.

To start off the lesson we started with the exercise that I introduced to the group last week which was ‘This is a tick’. To start with, the group were a bit slow but after a while we started to pick up the speed as everyone gradually understood it more. When everyone in the group seemed more confident about the game, we added in another object going around the opposite way. We found this very difficult especially when it got to the point when the objects crossed over each other. However, we eventually got the hang of this.

We then moved onto a warmup activity that Angel had prepared. The activity that she introduced us to is called ‘park bench’. For this exercise we set up a few chairs in the middle of the room which acted like a park bench. One person would sit on the bench and when another person enters and sits with them on the bench, the person who has most recently entered, has to try and get the other person to leave. We were not allowed to use the same excuse or situation twice within the game. 

We then moved onto one of the main tasks. We were given a piece of net that we had to create a scene from. We had lots of ideas as a group but then when we tried them out, they didn’t seem to work. With a bit of help from our lecturer Alys, we came up with an idea that worked well. The story was about a fisherman who lived in Cornwall and showed how he got prepared to go out fishing early in the morning. Callum played the role of the fisherman and me, Angel and Danielle played the roles of the story tellers. Because no one in the group was used to performing and creating material suitable for young children, we struggled with this task. However, in the end it turned out to be a good performance and we all stayed in character. 

For the next part of the lesson we were looking at a very well-known poem called ‘The Night Before Christmas’. The task that we were given was to act out the poem. We decided that we would have a storyteller throughout the poem as some of the lines were quite difficult to act out. For the first stanza of the poem, we stood in a semi-circle and spoke the first 2 lines of the poem together. Then, one by one, we spoke 2 lines each. For the second stanza, I played the role of Santa. We used a hula hoop to symbolise the sleigh (prop motif) and a tambourine for the bells on the sleigh (another prop motif). When we got to the second stanza, we swopped roles so I became the storyteller whilst the others acted out the poem. When we got to the third stanza, I swopped roles again to be the dad. Then, to finish off the poem, we used the hula hoop and tambourine again as the sleigh. The feedback that we were given was that it was well performed and certainly would be suitable for children. We worked quickly and effectively as a team to create quite a big amount of material in a short space of time.