Drama: Week One

The first week of our course was focused mainly on getting to know one another and learning to work together. We did a lot of drama games and improvisation to build our confidence and have fun as we got to know the course, tutors and other students.

Here is a brief rundown of each day:

Monday 8^th September 2014:

On the first day we did a lot of improvisation.

In blog and tutorial we set up our blogs and users on the college system.  

Tuesday 9^th September 2014:

We started the day by doing a basic warm up, and then focused on articulation and projection.

We practiced sounding out different vowels and consonants and worked on projecting our voices loudly without a glottal being audible.

To practice throwing our voices we did an exercise in which you imagine yourself throwing a bucket of water over a hill, at the same time as doing the corresponding action.

We also did some tongue twisters to develop our articulation.

After warming up our voices and bodies, we were each given a copy of a poem named Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe.

We took turns and read out a line of the poem each, trying to put into practice the vocal skills we had been working on. We also tried to portray emotion in our reading out of the poem, and it came together quite nicely.

We were also put into teams of about six and given a short quiz to do. This was enjoyable because it got people working together and showing their competitive sides a bit!

We did some improvisation as well.

We would go up into the performance space in pairs and improvise short pieces of drama. We were taught the importance of not blocking, and had to get used to the idea of going along with whatever the other person suggested in the improvisation. 

To add a little more interest to the improvisations, everybody wrote down an opening line and an emotion.

When you went up to do an improvisation, you picked out an emotion and opening line at random from the ones that everyone had written, and had to use them in the improvisation. We were also given an environment which our characters had to be in, and that made it more fun to play around with.

We also played an improvisation game called Goalie.

In the game, one actor stands on stage and takes on the role of the “goalie”.

People can volunteer to go up and start an improvisation, and the goalie has to go along with whatever that person’s idea is.

On this day, we also had the opportunity to watch some of the second years’ short pieces.

It was interesting and helpful to watch them perform.

Wednesday 10^th September 2014:

This was the first day of lessons that we had with Sharon.

We started the day by warming up, and then we walked around the space in the room and had to freeze when we were instructed to by Sharon. This exercise made us more aware of and familiar with the space we were working in, and kept us on our toes, making us listen carefully in order to be able to freeze on time.

After we had warmed up, we split into pairs, and played a game where we had to mirror one another. We stood opposite one another and took turns to lead.

Whoever was leading had to do slow movements and gestures and their partner had to mirror them exactly and try to keep in time with them. The objective was to be so in sync with one another that if you looked at the pair you wouldn’t be able to tell who was leading.

We then worked on this further by going into groups of four, and doing a similar exercise, only this time, we had to stand in a line side by side, all facing the same direction. Again we took it in turns to take the lead, but it was trickier to keep in sync with more people, using only your peripheral vision to see what the others were doing.

This exercise built trust, teamwork and concentration.

After this, we split into pairs again. Now we had to tell our partner the story of our holiday. Once we had exchanged stories, we teamed up with another pair, and had to tell them one another’s stories.

We then had four different stories to work with, and we had to come up with a short piece of drama based on one or more of our holiday stories.

We had some time to prepare and rehearse our piece, and then we took it in turns to perform. We all gave each group feedback on their performance.

Our next task was to split into groups and make a spider diagram of everything we knew about physical theatre.

Once we had done this, we went back into our groups of four which we performed in. It was now our task to perform our piece again, only this time we couldn’t talk, we just had to use physical theatre to tell the story.

Again, we rehearsed for a while before performing for one another and giving and receiving feedback on the performances and the use of physical theatre in them.

The homework we were given for next week was to prepare a short story, true or false, based around an object. We would have to bring in the object next Wednesday and tell the story to the rest of the class.

Thursday 11^th September 2014

We started the day by warming up and doing some voice exercises.

Then we learnt about subtext and objectives.

We did some improvisation then, keeping in mind what we had learnt about the objective and the subtext.

We worked in groups of four, and had to prepare and perform a four line long improvisation. We each had to choose one line and one line only from a selection we had been given, and then we built a scene surrounding those four lines.

Then we split up into pairs.

We were given three short scripts to choose from. We had to learn the lines from our chosen script and then improvise the rest of the scene ourselves.

Once we had prepared and rehearsed, we took it in turns to perform.