08.01.20 - FEST - Mrs Williams

ART

In the beginning of today's lesson, we tried to improvise a scene from Art and a scene that is spoken of but not included.  We were 2 boys short today so the remaining 3 staged the "waving away cigarette smoke" scene about Marc's wife Paula.  The 3 girls (including me), then tried to improvise Paula waving away the cigarette smoke which is mentioned but not included in the play.  This was all to help create a theme or characters for us to go off of.

DINNER PARTY

We then had an improvised dinner party with contrasting personalities to hopefully give us some more inspiration.  Louis, Hugo and Seth were friends from school, now adults, with their three girlfriends/fiancées/wives.  This exercise was very useful in developing some of these characters.  The improvisation part of it was funny and surprising with some people's ideas.

WARM UP

Later on, we did a warm up when we had a bigger rehearsal space where we could move around.  We started with finding 3 different focus points around the room, then we were just walking to each one.  Then we had to run from no.3 to no.1, slo-mo walk backwards from no.1 to no.2 and then go from no.2 to no.3 with our bodies as close to the floor as possible in creative ways.

CONTACT IMPROVISATION

In this exercise, we got into pairs.  With our pairs we had to find three points of contact on the other's body.  Then we added these together into a sequence and then used the Frantic Assembly Shift, Through, Round to add to the sequence.  After that, we explored eye contact.  This set of movements had so many different meanings just by changing the point of focus.  For example, when both people looked into each other's eyes, it made the bond between the people look very strong, but when someone looks away it could portray a lack of trust.  We collectively decided we liked this a lot and wanted to include it in our piece.

MONOLOGUE

There were 6 different sheets with 2 different columns to write a monologue in.  Each sheet had a sort of relationship between 2 characters and each column was to be from their point of view.  We then had about 2 mins to write whatever we wanted on the sheet and then move onto the next.  I found it quite difficult to start the monologue but after changing sheets, it got easier as there was already something to go off of.  After we went around to all the sheets, we read out the final product.  We got some pretty good monologues, characters and relationships to use for inspiration.  We liked the relationship between a bar tender and a regular customer the most.