Thursday 15th January 2015

Thursday 15^th January 2015

This lesson we focused on Tale about the Taxi man. We were put into groups of roughly 8 and had to make a routine that lasted for our part of the tale. We had to make actions for each person. We got into a diamond shape and when someone spoke they would be at the front of the diamond. We kept changing positions in the diamond. Whenever someone new spoke they had to create a new action to describe a typical East End taxi driver. My group was; Michelle, Raneesha, Thiago, Chris, Zach, Clement and Nancy. We divided our group into two so on one side it was Michele, Clement, Zach and I. We made up our routine and whilst we were performing ours the other side of the group would be in freeze frame. After we said our part, the other group did their lines and then we crossed over. I thought this looked very effective because it made it eye-catching to the audience as they looked somewhere different every time. I contributed many ideas to my group’s performance, for example I gave my opinion to have two mini-groups and I also decided to cross over.

Our group has finished our piece and we have made sure we know our lines and we also included ensemble work in our piece. We had individual lines and lines where we said things as a whole, for example; “youknowwarimean?” In my group we included levels so some people were sitting on the floor some people were crouching and some were standing up straight, therefore it gave the audience something interesting to look at. Our group understands that we must co-operate with each other and nobody should dominate what and what not to do. Everyone is free to give their opinions and ideas and we all co-operated in putting our piece together.

Something our group needs to work on is our spatial awareness. Our stage is quite small to fit everyone on stage in their positions for this tale as the whole of our theatre company is on the stage at this moment. Our group is in the middle of the other two groups so it is hard for us to use our space when we are squished in between two other groups. We need to work on how we can make our actions less big so that we don’t look squeezed together and that it still looks good. We can do this by looking at different positions to stage ourselves.

Also we worked on our “all girls’ tale”. This is going really great! Our group have nearly finished our tale. We need to sharpen, perfect and finish this tale and then I am very excited to perform it. We used a lot of physical gestures in this tale and we all listened to one another and everybody contributed to the group. My idea that I suggested (that is in our piece) is the part where Nansi talks about the physical features of the man we are describing, “Spikey hair, mixed race, bit of stubble, but unemployed.” For this my idea was to physicalize the man’s hair. So our whole group gathers around Nansi and act as her hair. This is effective to the audience because they don’t see us as people anymore, but they see us as hair, which can be a different view on theatre/acting.

Three things we will develop as a group in our “all girls’ tale”

1.       We will finish our tale and we will also make the ending effective and eye-catching.

2.       We will develop our use of physical theatre so that we always have a theme of physical theatre.

3.       We will make sure everyone has an idea that we have included in our tale.