Unit 1&2 Introductory units.
The teaching tasks for these units were split up - Becca was production based tasks, Rob's lessons involved sitting in a circle getting to know one and other and preparing us for the Identity unit.
"Identity"
Rehearsals
In this lesson we played a game where we could only use doing words and then connectives to create a story about the activities we did. Later, we proceeded to do a piece where we had to create a scene using improv and a stimulus about outer space to show the audience that we can use the space around us to convince them that we were in outer space.
We were working on vocal projection and confidence using range to enhance our performance. The range we used was a mix between comedy and seriousness to create a split screen to make sure we had variation to make it more interesting and show the use of our skills.
In the beginning, I was apprehensive about performing arts because I had done GCSE Drama and had not had much luck with it. I wasn’t the “greatest actor” but I took pleasure in watching my peers perform.
At the beginning, my director was also apprehensive. Using devising to compose this piece we were put to the test to see if we could work together as a group for the first time. The first few weeks were rusty as we learned to gel together but then as we began to get to know and understand each other we had a better understanding of how the concept worked.
Throughout the duration of the performance we had a first feeling of true nervousness as we were being looked at by our peers, but we got through it and pulled off a great one!
Production
For our first performance we started off in a neutral position sitting along the back of the stage on chairs' We were wearing performance blacks.
We used a range of techniques such as blackout, to help give build up at the start of the performance. The play had a sense of structure even though it was not chronological.
Throughout we used a lot of things to highlight identity by using different peoples cultural background. We did this by getting them to speak in different languages.
We used this to our advantage by creating a whole scene at the end about how people are bullied for being different.
I utilised eye contact with the audience to improve my voice projection and confidence to demonstrate my point. We focused on various different things such as cultural and social identity, we heavily focused on the cultural by using different aspects during the play such as during scene switching. We had different actors (George and Shabir) introduce the scenes in different languages.
I believe that this helped to show the cultural diversity of the group, coming together to perform this piece and help it to flow better. The way we showed cultural diversity was also including speeches covering topics such as racial inequality and stereotyping which portrayed a touching message.
During the performance we used enunciation, so the audience could understand what we were saying as our voices projected through the theatre.
Our director helped us to devise a good play. There was a fair bit of ad-libbing which worked extremely well as our choice of words had a great effect and caused positive reactions.
We were very organised in the way we did the performance, no covering because everyone's timing was very good and also we gave a lot of effort. The context we used for our play was very related to our own stories which included bullying. We "cheated" a lot, always having our bodies facing the audience making our body language very open so they understood what we were doing.
Context
Our plan for identity was for us to express our different stories about bullying and immigration in such a gripping way that it would make it easy to transition between all the different stories as we intertwined them. We covered our countries of origin to help us define what we could include, but we hit multiple barriers because of the number of people and transitioning between different scenes. We had trouble coming up with ideas but towards the end we scrapped some of the immigration stories and moved onto bullying which was easier to execute and it gave us free reign to apply our acting skills to the production.
This week during Rob's lesson we endured many helpful and challenging tasks, such as working on our identity pieces, bringing in new ideas. having more fixed ideas of the speech my group was going to use. During our piece we are doing a short play involving 2 scenes on the matter of bullying. We begin by standing in a circle and 4/5 of us are having a conversation after the 5th actress walks in playing the role of a lost student. She asks how she can find her class and we have to be very rude to her with the scene ending by us barging her as we walk off stage.
We then proceed to the next scene where we come into class and find out that she is in the same class as us, and we have to show disgust towards her through the use of paper ball props that we throw at her to show that bullying can be done in different ways.
Furthermore, we stand up at centre stage and we put our arms up and say stop bullying one by one and that's how the show ends.
We also did an articulation exercise using tongue twisters to help us articulate our words. An especially hard one was red leather yellow leather which helps us to articulate our th's and our d's. This is an important skill we require for the theatre because the acoustics are not forgiving to our voices which means we have to accentuate our voices to be heard in the back rows.
Articulation is important because it prevents us from mumbling and using colloquialisms. It makes us sound completely different which helps us get more into character.
Mandy's lesson
In Mandy's first lesson we worked on learning how to follow instructions by using this game where the actions were numbered 1-9 and she used the numbers to conduct how we moved around the studio using things like (walk, run, jump,turn,freeze and change direction).
We then moved onto a clapping exercise where she clapped a rhythm and we had to repeat it and the sequence got longer and longer to help our memory which we then converted into a footwork routine.
The footwork routine had was 5 steps forward then 5 steps left, then 10 steps back. This was to help us to use the whole space that we were stood in because an actor has to use to the entire stage to create a convincing scene because everything has to have a purpose.
The performance went well the different scenes worked very well together especially the scene where we were bullying Mya. All the different actions we put together all ran smoothly such as the scene where we had to throw paper at Mya's head which had been a hard scene to do because if somebody missed her head a few of the actors would begin to "corpse". "Corpsing" is laughing during a scene this means that you break character which can affect the play massively. This meant our director had to teach us different methods about how to stay in character on stage.
The variation in themes and cultural stereotypes we used helped us to have a clear idea of what the performance was going to look like. This was pushed by different tasks that my director had set for the class to do as a research project to get this devised piece of work onto it's feet. This helped a lot because this was the first unit so that means we needed to be taught the ropes and get an understanding of how the year was going to go.
We used a range of different methods at the beginning such as black out which taught us about chronological structure - having a blackout indicated a new scene and this helped with our planning on a basic level. It set the stepping stones for harder planning in the future. This production was a devised piece that was meant to send a message to the audience about the issues that go on today and I believe it was performed very well using everybody's co operation we pulled it off.