Rehearsal - Reacting to stimuli

This term we are doing a physical theatre play. This play is called The Devil in Drag. We have been told to use our bodies more than we use our minds/speech. My initial thought about what we have been told we would be doing seemed to me like it would be a challenge because we would have to show our story/plot through more body actions than speech.

We started with a physical warm up, this included stretching and warming up our bodies so that we are ready for the tasks throughout the day. We also did a voice warm up where we controlled our breathing and used voice effectively whilst doing the task.

We then went onto playing body tennis, this consisted of a circle of people who passed and repeated gestures from one another. We then added sound to the gestures. This warmed up our reaction skills and focus. We were also able to make our actions big and over the top which lead us on to our next task.

We next played the Fisherman game this made us think about leading with different parts of body which included: Pelvis, Bum, Lip, Head. We had to take into consideration making our actions big and enthusiastic whilst also making it realistic. The task was to be in a pair on opposite sides of the room and pull in the 'fish' by a different part of their body.

In the session after break, we started off by practising/creating different simple characters walking from their knees (being quite a slouched person), chest (strong character), nose (know it all), chin (analysing everything) and bum (love myself/slouchy person). This helped us interpret what kind of character we think these people would be. We included a phrase that would go along side this character and if we were chosen we would say our line in the role of our character. We gave our characters name and purposes which made our characters seem more realistic.

We were given some text from a part in 'The Devil in Drag' as stimulus. We were asked to create a scene which was comedic and used the same themes as what the text involved. In my text we focussed on racism. We were leading with body in different ways to also make it comedic however showing the form of racism. Our scene was set in a class room with three chav girls who disobeyed the teacher. Another boy in the detention decides to stand up for the teacher where we realise our mistakes and apologise for them. It was a simple plan however really came across comedic by the actions we focussed on.