Physical Theatre - 18/01/14

In today's lesson, Mr Crowther covered our lesson. We began the lesson by playing two warm up activities - These were 'Splat' and 'Honey, I Love You'. The game 'Splat' is meant to try and get yourself focused as you need to be concentrating during the activity so that you can react quickly. 'Honey, I Love You' is an activity that is used to help you stay in a character and gain concentration.
After these warm ups, we got straight into devising a new piece of Physical Theatre for our performance of "Tales Of The East End". The class was separated into gender groups (male & female). The males in our class had the task of devising Tale 2 and all of the females had to devise Tale 1. I and many others put forward our ideas to the group so that we could start devising a piece of Physical Theatre for the play. Some of these ideas were drinking pints of beer, being rowdy in a pub and having emphasis on many words and actions. Many different movements were used to put together this piece of theatre. For example, we all parted from a small group on the word 'cold' to show that we were all singular and distant from others, but then we all joined together and made the movement of a heartbeat on the line 'but warm on the inside'. We also interpreted different types of women and created actions for them, when one of the males is talking about what he looks for in a woman. Many of the decisions we made are working well but we need to now work on progressing with the piece to get it finished and polished.
Towards the end of the lesson, the class went back into their original tale groups - In my case, with Frankie, Phoebe, Louis and Raneesha. We had already planned out and started to act out certain parts of the scene. In this lesson, we chose to act as if we were all parts of a supermarket and a cash register. For example, Phoebe would say things like "Cashier number 3 please', or Raneesha would push her arms forward to look like a till was opening. I was continuously making a beeping sound and swiping my arms as if I was working at a checkout. Every time a character spoke, they would stop being part of the cash till and walk forward to speak. At many times in the scene we all say "Kerr-ching" and quickly bob our heads up and down. Our aim as a group is to try and finish the tale as soon as possible by putting all the scenes that we have rehearsed, together.