Characterization - 27/11/14

In today's Theatre session, we completed our usual warm ups and took part in an improvisation activity where two people were put into the middle of the room and given a situation to extend on. Using many acting skills, you had to develop the scene by improvising. This was a difficult activity but helped us to think on our feet.
One activity I enjoyed doing in the session was creating the sounds of a storm with our hands. We closed our eyes and it felt like we were outside where there was a lot of bad weather. A few of the movements were rubbing our hands together, clicking and patting our knees and the floor. We had to create these sounds by listening and passing them on to each other so that the sounds became increasingly louder. This helped us to develop our use of sound in performances and our listening and concentration skills. After this, we got put into groups and had to create sounds to portray one part of tale 8. This tale included a lot of weather sounds for us to devise. A few things our group added in were noises to portray thunder (stamping our feet) and whistling to show wind. Our group received positive feedback from the class. However, we thought that we could have developed our performance a lot more if we had some extra time.
Finally, we had to draw the outline of a person again and write about their exterior and interior views. From this, we had to create a small piece of theatre including one of the characters from the scene. We chose the Landlord as we felt that he had different sides and emotions too him. Maybe he was hiding something but putting on a brave and happy face, or possibly he was covering something up by being in control. There are many different possibilities to who the Landlord actually is, so we thought he would be an interesting character to explore. It took a long time to decide how we wanted to portray the Landlord and this gave us less time to rehearse for the performance. Therefore, our performance was not as polished as I hoped it would be.
Overall, I enjoyed the lesson and felt that I used my acting skills to devise and develop many pieces of theatre.