Tuesday 23rd September 2014 - Thursday 25th September 2014

Thursday 25th September 2014

In the afternoon, Sharron had instructed us to get into groups of 6 people and each group would be in charge, taking turns to be a teacher co-ordinating exercises to warm up a class.

Andreia's group went first.  They instructed us to get into one single line and the person in front would start off a movement which would then be copied by the person behind them. Ideally the group was aiming for a domino affect when copying the movement but when they was explaining, the class was hectic and not listening very well to instruction and was looking at the person at the beginning of the line instead of the person at the front.
As our class is quite big, people did get quite impatient because it wasn't over until everyone had, had a turn and wanted to move onto the next exercise. 

 I thought the exercise was quite interesting and fun but began to get tedious to continue. It would be better with a smaller group rather than a large group such as ours.
This game is useful to involve everyone's contribution and they have to say yes.  As it was the first game and we had come back from lunch, it was good to have started off with this game first as it helped us prepare for the games to come and made us want to get involve with everything.

The next group was Grace's.  Their exercise was 'Cat and Mouse'.  Grace explained that everyone is to be in pairs and link up and spread about the room.  Two people, one cat, the other mouse, had to chase each other around the room and people and to avoid getting caught had to link someone at random.  The person they had linked stays while the other person that was already adjoined becomes the mouse and has to avoid the cat.  If the cat however catches you, the cat becomes the mouse resulting in the mouse becoming the cat.
This game was very fun to play, and everyone seemed to have enjoyed it, however the disadvantage to this game was that not everyone got a chance to be the mouse and just remained a link.  If we did go out to a school and did this, there probably would be favouritism and avoidance within the group.

The next group was Jade's group.  Their game was 'Zip, Zap, Boing'.  We all had to stand in a circle, and hold our hands together in a prayer form, to pass the zip around you had to turn your body to face the person either side you and say 'Zip'.  To reject the 'Zip' which resulted in the person turning back around and giving the 'Zip to the other person at their side you said 'Boing'.  If you wanted to send the 'Zip' to someone else anywhere in the circle other than at your side, then you sent a 'Zap'.  You can 'Boing' a 'Zap' and a 'Zip' but not a 'Boing'.  The aim of the game is to keep the 'Zip' going, failure to do so by a person cause the person to sit out making the circle smaller till there is only one winner left.

Danielle's group was Duck, Duck, Goose.  This is a traditional game and we was all very happy to play this game.  The aim of the game is to all sit in a circle, tapping on each person's head while saying 'duck' until one person is chosen by saying 'goose'.  When the 'Goose' is chosen, the person is to chase and catch the picker before they get to the 'Goose's seat'.  If successful,the 'Goose' gets to sit back down, however failure to catch the picker results in the 'Goose' becoming the new picker, thus continuing the game.  We made sure everyone had been chosen to show equality and fairness.

Overall the class was very hectic and people weren't listening when they should've been.  I feel we need to improve on our listening skills and learning to respect one another when talking.  Despite this, we do come up with great ideas, and do get the work done, but would get more done if we all respected each other while someone is talking.

We then moved onto working on the Tomorrow Project (see Donmar Blog).

Tuesday 16th September 2014 - Thursday 18th September 2014

Tuesday 16th September

In today's lesson we started off with warming 

up, beginning with doing facial and vocal warm ups then moving onto physical warm ups.

For facial and vocal warm up we hummed and said tongue twisters and then began to walking around the space and getting into small groups and getting in a line and copying each others movements. 

The warm ups helped us to neutralise our energies and focus on the task ahead. 

We sat in a circle and discussed what would make us watch theatre, what we would want to see.

suggestions -
Sharney said understanding so the audience has clarity and isn't confused and get lost with what is going on in the performance, she wanted to be able to understand what's going on. Interesting, eye catching, relateable and natural.
 Francis said it has to have an air of professionalism and seriousness.  If the audience sees your serious they will be serious too.
Kurtis said that the play has to have climatic but have a comedic side so it's not heavily tense to keep the audiences attention. 

We thought of a stimulus of what we can show to students who are doing GCSE's in school so the age performance would be for 15-16 years.  Sharney suggested 'Still I Rise' by Maya Angelou because she felt that it was a poem that gives a message about social awareness and a right to stand up for yourself.

Afterwards we had to come up with topics to create a devised piece around to be able to appropriately show a GCSE class (ages 15-16). 

We had:

• Individualism

• Mental health

• Bullying

• Peer pressure

Sharron then asked us who chose which subject and we split into groups.  As I didn't pick a subject, and saw that it was just Conor and Kurtis doing Mental Health, I decided to join them not only because of the lack of people but I could relate to that subject in multiple ways.  We came together and discussed an idea around the subject to develop our own piece which we would then present to the rest of the class to evaluate.

Conor had previously done this issue at GCSE level and as we was in a group used it as an advantage to elaborate on the subject. Discussing his idea, Kurtis and I agreed strongly on the idea as we felt that Mental Health has a wide spectrum to explore from normal everyday people living with depression or autism to mentally ill people and it creates not only an awareness of sympathy and understanding to an audience but to empathise with the audience if they can relate that people care and understand and if you need help there is someone who is willing to help.  As actors also presenting the piece it is very informative for us as we can explore the subject, go into depth and develop a further understanding of the subject to relay to an audience. 

Conor gave a suggestion how to set the stimulus, afterwards we acted out inputing how to set the scene, giving ideas to gradually mould it.

For our first scene Conor came up with the idea that a mental patient goes to see her doctor in a mental institution but has an episode that causes her to be restrained and calmed down.  I was the mental patient, Conor was the doctor and Kurtis was the security guard/carer. 

The scene began with me at a table organising the items on the table and getting myself a glass of water as it is a obvious routine that my character does muttering myself "order...everything has to be in order".  Max (Kurtis) comes to get me but I refuse to move and get frustrated at being interrupted and lose my place which causes me to self-harm by hitting myself.  To calm me down Max reassures me that the Doctor will have my rubber glove which comforts me which calms me down and I go with him.  I go to see the Doctor (Conor) who discusses an outburst I have that happens off stage so Conor creates the scene for the audience by explaining the situation which causes me to react and start hitting myself and shouting which causes me to be ushered off stage by Max.

I really enjoyed my character and my scene, I thought there would be difficulty in creating a character with an extreme case of mental health but I really connected with the character and was able to stay in character despite there being giggles while the audience watched.  

Our Feedback was that it was really good and we kept our focus and the intensity of the scene stayed on our hand and not the audiences when they giggled; we didn't play on it.  

Kurtis played his character really well, he wasn't seen for a long period and didn't speak much but he committed to his role really well and in the words of Stanislavsky, there are no small parts, only small actors.  All roles are important and be performed well which Kurtis did.

To improve on the scene, I feel we just need to extend the scene now and develop ideas on how to develop it even further, keeping in mind the age group. 

It was interesting to watch the other groups, in particular the peer pressure group stuck out for me as it was interesting how they developed their stimulus. They didn't focus on just one peer pressure, they did a wide specturm of it and the way they presented it was like an advert. However it was over comedic in the sense that while it was intersting to watch, it did at times forget that it was a serious matter

Watching the Individualism confused me because I was unsure of what was going on and I felt it was dragged out.

Thursday 18th September

In todays lesson we went straight into work and carried on with the work we did on Tuesday. 

We added an extra scene to what we had previously done, we decided to show little playlets of each character branching from the mental patient, showing the intimacy and care between the carer and the mental patient, freezing and transforming into the next scene which was the carer and his wife's marital problem stemming from her jealousy erupting from him bringing home the picture Max and the mental patient created to calm her down, the next scene showed the Doctors life showing that the Doctor had in fact a problem also stemming from the loss of his wife and his emotional attachment and incapability to the patients so would drink which affected his relationship with his kids. 

Feeback was that we had to watch our language and remember the age group we was performing so intead of saying "crazy is the best pussy", I could divert the conversation that the wife is feeling neglected. There were mixed reviews with who I was at the beginning of the scene with Connor. Some people could see that I was the daughter but a mature one, others thought I was the wife again.

So to make it better more thought has to go into the characters so there is a clarity of who is who so the audience doesn't get confused.

Tuesday 9th September 2014 - Thursday 11th September 2014

Tuesday 9th September 2014

Sharron began the session with a warm up of us walking around in the room, commanding us to constantly change direction, this caused us to keep focused on ourselves and become neutral.
As it was our first day back, Sharron then instructed us to get into pairs, and explain to our partners what we did over the summer holiday.  I paired up with Jade who summed up to me that her summer was boring which I then asked her to explain more in depth exactly what happened for it to be boring.
She then proceeded to tell me that for the first part of her summer holidays she was hanging out with friends, not really doing much until the last 2 weeks of the summer holidays where she went to Turkey with her Dad's side of the family which she thought was a big mistake as none of them wanted to explore or have fun, all they wanted to do is sit by the pool and sunbathe and there were a lot of German tourists who kept trying to converse to her in German and kept having to tell them she wasn't German.
After Sharron had checked each partner had recounted their summer to their partner, we was instructed to then join another pair where our partner would recount their partners story to the other pair and it would continue until the whole group had heard everyone's summers.  Once that was done, we then had to devise a piece based on our summers.  The short play could either be a recount of one person's summer or we had the option of combining everyone's summers to make a bigger piece.

As it was the first day my group, (Jade, Sharney, Andreia and myself) didn't seem to be as enthusiastic to try and devise a piece based on our summers.  After a lack of determination and deliberation on what we was going to create, I suggested after much indecision (on whose summer we would recreate if we chose to pick one person's summer) to just combine parts of our summers together.

For the first scene, we chose not doing anything interesting, just contemplating what to do which three out of four of us had in common when we heard one another's summers.  The second scene incorporated Jades' summer where she went to Turkey, we showed this by moving from lazing about to relaxing in a straight line as if we was sunbathing.  The third scene was Andreas summer of her mom opening up her cafe then the last scene was my summer where I had my birthday.
We thought it best to just let the scenes flow into one another as best as we could to keep our devising play going.

For our feedback we could've been more energetic which we knew it lacked already because of our thoughts on the task beforehand which affected our performance.  We needed to work on our transitioning into the next scene and use the space a bit more which is a con with combining a piece that incorporates different aspects rather than one persons story.

We then devised a short story with different characters.
Sharron described a scene of a town, afterwards she asked us to pick a character we thought would be in the town and to play a day in the life of our character.  I picked a dressmaker who owned a shop.  I brought my character to life by envisioning myself using a spinning wheel, a treadle wheel to be more specific which is powered by the spinners foot, making thread, putting it onto shelves to sell, using the thread I yarned to stitch clothes to sell eventually when completed.  Afterwards Sharron asked us to freeze and went around the room asking everyone what character they was.
Sharron picked a police office, lady of the night, fisherman and a preacher. 
She then asked us to stand in two lines facing a partner opposite you and both pairs had to act out the characters.  So one line would play the police officer while the other line played the lady of the night and we'd walk to the middle of the room and interact with our partner opposite as the character. 

We then related each character with personalities:
• Priest: Humble, Wise, Social
• Fisherman: Physically strong, Old, Determined
• Officer: Proud, Brave, Confident
• Lady Of The Night: Vulgar, seductive, Sensual

Afterwards we got into pairs of four and had to come up with a scene using the characters that was chosen and then we performed it to the 1st Years. 
Our groups scenario was that the lady of the night was the policemans wife who doesn't know she is the lady of the night.  She sleeps with the fisherman, while the policeman voices his concerns about his wife to the preacher.  Each character proceeds to confess their sins to the preacher thus building up a story to the preacher that pieces together when the conclusion of the story is when the Lady of the Night finally confesses that she enjoys sleeping with other men.

Thursday 11th September 2014

We began with physical warm ups and tongue twisters to warm up our bodies and voice. We then carried on with the stimulus that was created on Tuesday.  We all sat in a circle and looked at a poem by Dylan Thomas called "From Under Milk Wood" where after reading it I realised that's where Sharron got her characters from.
We all read the poem but with difficulty as people weren't listening to instructions so we had a few tries until we finally completed it and could move on with the next task.  When reading the poem, at each comma the person reading would stop and the next person would read until the next comma and so forth.  Once the whole was finally read, we split into groups and split the poem and had to act it out. 

My group was Kurtis, Sharney, Samuel and Elliott and we got the beginning paragraph of the poem. We developed our piece by picking parts we wanted to read out and adding physical elements to the piece to personify the poem thus creating a deeper atmosphere of the poem.
Afterwards we combined our movement with the poem with the other groups which created a bigger piece.  What our group lacked in, with our usage of space another group made up for it.  Overall the piece was very dynamic and creative and it was extraordinary to notice that regardless of separating and doing our own thing with our groups when it was all combined it flowed really well with one another.