Devising Theatre - 04/12/14

In today's lesson, we began with some warm ups. The whole class was involved in playing an activity called "Splat" which helps you to get focused and to concentrate. It also speeds up your reaction time. After this, we did an improvisation activity, where two people are put into the middle of the room and given a scenario that they need to act out on the spot. This helps us to be imaginative and also improves our improvisational skills. I was chosen to improvise with Gloria, where we created a scene where a school's headteacher finds a student truanting. By working together, we were able to create a good piece of comedy as we always accepted whatever the other person did, so that there were no large halts during the performance.
After the warm up activities, we were put into groups where we had to devise a piece of theatre based on a news story, in the style of the play "Tales Of The East End". This was difficult as there were many decisions to make.  Our news story was about a black man who was beaten up and hurt because he asked two white men to be a bit quieter. They started throwing racist comments at him and continuously kicked and punched him until a woman came and stopped them. The first decision we made was to have the victim in the middle with the two suspects facing the audience. They would punch and kick the air in front of them, to show the actions they used. We chose to do this as if you staged someone being attacked, it often looks very messy. As a group we also had to decide on the comments used as we did not want to offend anyone or use foul language. The narrator stood at the back describing what was happening and then ran into the middle as the woman who found the man being attacked. Our performance linked into "Tales Of The East End", as the narrator was telling the audience about the event and we were acting it out, just like when the characters in the play are talking about the events to a taxi driver. I portrayed the man that was being attacked. I did this by using very dramatic sounds and movements to show that I was being hurt. We used both vocal and physical skills to create this scene.
When we had all performed our scenes to the class, we stayed in the same groups to work on our allocated tale, which is East End Tale 7. Again, we had to devise a piece of theatre, including sound, movement and a few lines from the tale. In this scene, it is late at night in a shop and there is an angry customer. The young worker gets into an argument with the customer. We showed the location by making everyone do different actions to show what they were doing. For example, I was taking things off the shelf, and other people were doing things like walking down the aisles or talking to the worker. Frankie, who played the worker, also used movements to show that she was working the cash register. We communicated the characters through sound, movement and levels. To show the anger of the customer, I kept on pointing to the worker and giving her sly looks. I also leaned over her a lot to show that I was angry at her and that I wanted to be in charge. We used certain words and lines from the tale. For example, when we started, ended and switched customers, we always looked towards the audience and said "Kerr-ching" to make it sound like the cash register was opening. Our group also used the dialogue between the angry customer and the worker to give a better insight on the story. I think that our group did very well in the performances, considering that we didn't have a long time to rehearse.