Lesson 6

Lesson 6
In this lesson we continued with our progression with the play "East End Tales". Ms Lee, our normal teacher for Thursday lessons, was absent so with had Mr Crowther as a cover. Nevertheless, we started the lesson with two warm ups: Splat, the reaction and focus based game and a new exercise called "Honey I love you". This game involves a main person who selects a target from the middle of a circle the rest of the group has created. He/She then walks over to their chosen target and says "Honey I love you". The aim of the game is to make the target laugh or giggle by actions or the words. However, if the other person doesn't laugh or giggle then they would have to say back to the approaching person, "Honey I love you too but I just can't laugh.". If they do laugh then they are simply out of the game and watch the duration of the warm up.

As we were told last lesson, the boys and girls from our class would be split up in two large groups. I was part of the boys which were performing tale 2 from the play and the girls tale 1. These tales both had a resemblance in that the main purpose of it was to describe another character, one a 18 year old boy and one a 21 year old women. The boys were chosen to perform the scene with the women, the girls the opposite. We used the physical theatre we had been practised in previous lessons as separate groups and combined our ideas and techniques as one. Some of these techniques were narration, timing and the wave. For example, during the beginning of the scene we set the background as a pub, we incorporated the wave through raising our glasses as though we were drinking in a consistent timing from right to left.

After this we split up into our individual tales, of which my group made great progress on. Though the performance was a little ruff we finally had a secure start for the rest of the tale as we worked though 3 entire paragraphs. We obtained helpful feedback from the rest as the finish of our scene most of which was to do with "polishing" the timing of our actions and other related things.

In conclusion, I feel that we have made huge progress this week through our individual tales and the start of the group tales and I'm positive that we will continue that same progress next term.         

Lesson 5 - Monologues

Lesson 5 - Monologues
In this lesson we performed our monologues to the whole class. As usual, we started with two warm ups which got us into the mood of theatre. Splat and the improvisation game were our two picks for today, of which the improvisation game helped me the most because our Monday lessons are based on the topic improvisation. It also helps actors react to any situation they come across. For example, I was in a situation where my character jumped off a building on a burning trampoline. This kind of scenario is extremely different from what we are studying in class. This shows that acting isn't always the same character types: sad, happy or angry. It shows that there are so many different personalities in the world and to be able to portray the effectively we first need to know how they act and what they sense.

After we moved onto the monologues and I especially liked Amiya's performance. She built her monologue up with her character, not her. She used what she learned in class to accurately perform, in my opinion, the best monologue. The emotion that ran through her body clearly showed her character that she was acted which is very important in performing a monologue.

On the other hand, what I feel that most people, including myself, did while performing was trying to show emotion by using big actions. Although this can be effective while showing emotions related to happiness, most were sad or angry. To make the scenes better we need to be more subtle in our actions when showing sadness especially anger. A lot of people were throwing down chairs when the scene they were doing didn't have enough emotion in it for them to do this action. In reality, the characters would be more still and silent during sadness and if they were angry they would build up their feelings in the scene leading up to the final climax to release the emotion and return to a calmer state.

In conclusion, looking at other people's scenes has really made me think that acting appears like animals, in all different shapes and sizes. You make acting what you want it to be, if you want happiness in your scene then act happy, vice versa if you want anger as the emotion.         

Lesson 4

Lesson 4
In this lesson we began to cover the scenes that we are going to focus on over the next weeks to come and the same scene we are going to perform to our friends and family. We started with two warm ups; the simple reaction game, "splat"; and an improvisation game that our group calls "the bench game". Although these games do not seem very significant to us, I believe they serve the purpose of getting the whole group ready for the time ahead.

As soon as we were finished with splat and the bench game, we set forth to our next event. Splitting into groups of 4 we were told to perform an event that had happened in the East End. Analysing the news we were given in the form of a report, we identified that 15 gang members, the gang name not mentioned, were captured by CCTV lighting rockets; firing them at nearby police cars. Straight away my first emotion of the event was surprised, and it seemed the rest of the group had agreed with me so we went forward with the idea to mould our re-enactment with the objective to capture the aspect of surprise and shock to the audience as the report had to us.

After performing to the rest of the group we heard both positive and negative reviews. Most positive comments noticed our efforts to create the surprise in the scene and praised us for it. On the other hand, the negatives were the result of us spending too much time on one aspect, this being surprise. I have learned from this activity that spending too much time on one emotion in a scene can actually reflect back on the ways to improve it. If we aim to make a distinction scene then we need to cover all emotions to the same level that we did for the emotion surprise.

Using the knowledge from our previous scene, we had the opportunity to create a higher level one. Tale 6 from the play was our chosen act to use our skills on and we had just about every emotion there was to have about this crossing our minds while planning. With little time we figured that it would be nearly impossible to cram every single emotion into one scene so we focused on majors instead. Giving the best performance we could possibly give we earned a round of a applause signalling the lesson coming to a close. Today I learned many things such as focusing on individual emotions and hope to use these skills in the future ahead.