Professional Drama Practice- A new project.

We have started a new project which will be lead and directed by an outside director called Jonathan Grieve - we call him Jon.

The Monday morning started with warm ups and icebreakers to get us in a creative space, soon after the session was led with discussions about varied social issues, and how important these social issues were, how relevant they are to us and what we thought of them, how we regard ourselves related to these social issues. For example, how important is music to you, on a scale from 1-10 10 being the highest, how religious are you? Are you an atheist or regard yourself as spiritual? Do you feel woman and men should be equal, or does each person have certain roles?
Through this exercise It was interesting to see how every person has different views on these social subjects and has individual personal views.
We also ran a series of still imaged frames, using the space, one person would have to pose in a certain way, whilst another would add to this pose to create a scenario. It was amusing of what might come out of nothing into something.
We also tried a few other specific scenarios, such as the recent riots, each person took on a character to create a freeze frame, shortly in slow motion we had to act out the next five seconds, then the freeze, then the next five seconds, then rewinding back ten seconds.
During these exercises it's important to be controlled with the slow motion so that the viewer gets the full effect. This can be challenging as an actor and therefore needs to practice to achieve this effect.
Later that day Michael and Jon handed out the stimulus script and text for the play that we will be performing on February 27Th. The idea is focused on The Holocaust and Jews that fought for Hitler. (Sounds controversial I know). The scripts consists of a series of scenarios, scripted text of a scene being placed in a court room with a judge , several witnesses and various other characters. There is also a poem by Samuel Beckett. Shortly after reading the script together, Jon taught us a song called Patriot which is a kind of chant, army song.
The next day, we warmed up with some games and some challenging yoga positions, following that we started practising our slow motion movements, using desperate emotions to reach a ball that was laid on the ground further away from us, the aim was to move towards this ball as if it were terribly important to us, to find meaning for our movements was the key aim in this exercise.
The next part of the session was mostly focused on creating the similar freeze framed and slow motion scenarios that we where introduced to us on the first day. This time these scenarios were based on the script, the scene was set to be at a work place of a Holocaust camp. We had to take on the characters of guards and work victims, soon we had to change the scenario by switching work camp victims in becoming aggressive and soon there was to be a revaluation, this was acted in slow motion, back and forward using the same movements to distinguish each part of the scene.
Later that day Shakira, Mackeda and myself had the task of learning the the full Patriot song and teaching it to the class, the song is a little challenging to learn for the timings are not of western rhythm nor flow. Before learning the song I led a vocal warm up which was fun!