05/10/12

In our last drama lesson Ms. Pennell was unable to supervise us which meant the start of the lesson consisted of listening to music and dancing around. When we were caught in the action we justified it by describing it as a warm up. We quickly got down to work and ran through our performance so far. We were not happy with a couple of bits such as our “Party Scene” as when we performed to the other group they really liked it but questioned why we had included it as it did not tie in effectively to aid the storyline we've created. We changed our idea to make life easier meaning we don’t need to build any lavish sets or props as we can create a similar comic effect with nothing more than a plain white sheet. 

I felt like our group progressed well but we felt difficulty in taking on ideas from each other that we either didn't agree with or felt that they could be better so we disregarded them. We were advised by Mr. Maclean in the following lesson that at this early stage we should be taking on every idea that comes up and working it out later once we have all the material there. 

I feel confident that next lesson we will get a lot more done and more material in our performances as they have to be roughly around 25 minutes due to having 5 people in our group (5 minutes per person) I also suggested to the group that if we get stuck again and find it hard to progress and focus on practical work that we should start writing out the script and seeing if we can think of more clever jokes or puns to add in or even possibly continue with our devised performance without having to think about movements for a while. 

Mr Maclean lesson 1

During our first lesson with Mr. Maclean we started by standing around the room and imagined a grid on the floor and began to walk in straight lines along the grid in a neutral emotion. Mr. Maclean then continued to give us different emotions to enact as we were walking along the grid. He used many words such as “Scared” and we needed to emphasise our non-verbal communication skilled to portray each emotion. With the emotion scared I widened my eyes and became more jumpy looking around to see if anybody was too close and acted introvert through my posture which was slightly hunched and shoulders curled inwards highlighting my unease. I tended to hide my face and clench my fists or use one arm bent across my chest to rub inside the other arms elbow. We were also instructed to interact with the other people around the space as we came closer to them and turn 90 degrees if and when we ran into them.

Soon after this we were split into groups and told to annotate our devised performance quote "A cage is still a cage even if you cannot see the bars", my group consisted of: Tara, Pamela, Ariane, and Ramon.

We began by writing a group interpretation all inputting our ideas and coming up with as many controversial and/or regular issues to do with the quote. We came up with many but in the end settled on 3 of them; ‘Disability, personality disorders and being a spy’.