Today, first of all we had to warm up these involved: Physical warm ups, Vocal warm ups and then finished off with some drama activities. The physical warm ups consisted of warming up the whole of your body. rolling of the spine, rotating our arms. It's good because in enables you to be more flexible and enable you to do more physical activities in your lesson, for example if you are a very physical body character, doing sports or moving around a lot. Another good example is if you were playing a character with animal features. Also we did tiny raisin face and massive pumpkin face, which enjoy because its funny, this warms up our facial muscles which is key in drama and for your character when you need to do facial expressions.
Next we started to do
vocal warm ups which is my favourite type of warm up. we had to make "z", "m" and "shh" sounds which warms ups your lips. After that we got into a circle and played body tennis, However its a mix of physical and vocal warm ups, because as well as creating and receiving the sound you also have to copy and create big body gestures and actions. Then after we gave our throat a heat massage where we had to rub our hands together until they got very hot and place it on our necks and start to massage it. It feels very nice, also its good because it gets ride of any knots in your neck which could stop you from doing anything physical in your drama lessons
After we did a drama activity and it was called the fisherman and the fish. We divided the class into two, then we had to face someone on the opposite side of the class (who was now your partner) . One of the sides where labelled A and the other side B. One side of the class was the fish and the other side was the fisherman. If you played the fish sir would call out a body part that the fisherman would drag you by. For example The fish was being dragged from your right foot. So the fisherman had to wheel you in from the right foot and the fish had to act like they where actually being dragged by your right foot. The activity may sound a bit random but it's not because it lets you focus on a certain part of your body which from there you could develop a character from. And I think that technique was called character centres.
Then after we finished that activity we moved on to another one. Only this time you had to be more independent and it was up to you how you portrayed your character centre. We started off as usual by walking around the space in neutral. Then sir called out a part of our body where we had to walk from, and the first part he called out was the knee. We had to act out as if our knee was the leader and was the thing which was making you walk (instead of the brain). Whilst doing this Sir was saying what character could we develop from walking like this. Or what person in real life would actually walk like this. For example maybe someone who is a youth and is in a gang. Another part of the body where we had to walk from was from our nose. so because of this I kept of sniffing and twitching my nose. The character I developed from this was someone who was a cocaine addict.
We kept on repeating this activity with the centres of our, nose, bum, knee and chest. For the bum I developed an old person with a massive bottom who was insecure because she was worrying about people staring at her bum. And for the chest I developed a character who was wealthy and posh, who was quite in your face. Whilst playing the different characters we had to think of a phrase or something that our character would say to someone while they where just walking on the street. One of my phrases for the character who was a cocaine addict was "Any Cocaine please!?"
Next we started to do some improvisation, which I really love to do. We got given a piece of text from the play that we will be studying which is the devil in drag. We had to create an improvised piece of drama which has the same sort of idea/feelings in the text we got given. The idea we got from the text was racism and standing up/confronting people. So the scenario we did was that we was in a classroom and a new teacher came in who couldn't control us. We was making racist jokes and remarks about other people which our characters thought was funny and acceptable and we was being racist and discriminating our teacher, until another student in the class stood up to our characters and how our behaviour is not acceptable. In the end our characters said sorry to the teacher.
What I really like about that activity was that we got to improvise and portray our character how we wanted to. How we had to convey the text we was given was good because we had to work together and gather ideas in our groups about what we thought the text could be about and then after create an improvised piece of what we gathered from the text.
