unit 4 & 6 clash of the concerts

January -

Thursday 5th January

Due to it being our first week back wet started the day with drama where we began our new project of "The Dumb Waiter" (Written by Harold Pinter in 1957 and is a Comedy/drama) where we looked through the script and discovered that the play was about two assassin's, Gus and Ben and were living under a restaurant and were waiting for a signal from someone to kill someone and we explore the relationship between both men during that time where it starts as a normal relationship when they both begin to get annoyed with each other when finally at the end the phone rings and we see Ben being told through the phone to kill Gus and then it ends so we don't know what happens to both characters. 

Friday 6th January

We were given the choice to either continue our blogs or work on our duologue for "The Dumb Waiter".


Monday 9th January

The day started with a lesson with Becca where we started a project on the costume for our chosen celebrity which was Jennifer Lopez. I finished the design by the end of the lesson by looking at her past performances and how it would also match the chosen song my group have chosen for her.

Tuesday 10th January

I started the day by having a Drama lesson with Rob where we went down to give a first look at the script of "Dumb waiter". We were next given the task of being paired up with someone who would work well with one another for the end of term performance. We both were then give the assignment to rehearse certain sections with our chosen partners, this was very effective as it gave us a sense of getting use to stage directions and using them for performances as well as characterising our characters. The next activity was to perform our part of the piece which was done in chronological order, this was effective so we knew the array of what scene was next and when to go on stage and perform. There were 4 rules we were told to consider while performing and that was 1) Why am I there? Think about why the character we are playing is there and try and continue the story and narrative one. 2) Describe the environment while learning the script we should describe the environment in our heads, for example why is this character pacing up and down and where is he acing up and down, is there stuff on the floor? 3) What's the relationship? What is the relationship between this character and that character, are they best friends, are they siblings, do they hate each other? If they do then we should portray that through our characters so that the audience identifies that clearly. 4) Play so > PLAY.  (Rob wrote this down to remind that this is a play so that we should 'play' the character fully so that we portray the character that we meant to)

Next I had Mandy's movements lesson where the lesson began with a drawing of a circle on the whiteboard done by Mandy and a few movements in the sections were it was set out like a pie chart. The first task of the lesson was to give an example of each movement for example 'Flick'.





After this task we were asked to perform one of the movements 1 by 1 in a random order without using our hands, once we had done this the class was spilt into two groups and we were told to create a mini performance associating with the movements but with various awareness to make it a completely different order than the original one, by the next lesson these performances will be elaborated. Next we had a blog lesson with Becca where we continued to work on our blogs except my group and I continued to work on our Jennifer Lopez concert outfit.


Thursday 12th January

In Robs Drama lesson today we didn't do any practical work where instead we watched the second years 15 minutes performances that was split into 3 sections after each performance for example one of the performances was about a murder case and we were given clues throughout the piece that were not obvious about who commited the murder, I liked this piece as it gave the actors a chance to interact with the audience to see what they really believe happened, at the end we were asked to vote who the killer was and the majority of the audience voted the right killer. Next in the same lesson the seconds years led a workshop that involved the whole audience where the aim behind it was to help up in the future when it comes to acting.

Monday 16th January
The day started with a blog lesson where we continued with our blogs where we next had Drama and began rehearsing with our partners with "The Dumb waiter" script. We were trying to merge the characterization skills we were discussing last session that included about why our characters were there as well as their motive. When our 15 minutes of rehearsal time was over we were asked to perform in chronological order with our partners this was essential as it could help us get use to the running order for the actual performance day. The summery for the whole lesson what we were told from Rob was that we needed to work on our use of characterisation more as well as to begin to practice the use of the magic 'if' which involved us as actors to portray that character for the full extent i.e. "What IF we were this character would our walk change, the way we speak or even our posture.

Tuesday 17th January

In drama we began by rehearsing our lines as well as practicing with our partners where we then got taken each other one at a time with Rob to another room to go through it in front of him so he could help us improve e.g. with our pronunciation and posture etc but he mainly helped me and my partner on our body movements as well as our facial expression. After each group had been seen to we all assembled around the main classroom computer and started analysing key points about what we have inferred about Ben and Gus i.e. each their statuses and which one of the two had a higher one.

After this lesson we had Mandy where the lesson began with warm up exercises where mandy wrote down 1-8 where each number included an action we had to perform e.g.

1. Walk
2. Run
3. Stop
4. Drop
5. Turn
6. Pose
7. Jump
8. Gesture!

The context of this activity was that Mandy would shout out these certain numbers while walking around the dance room and do the activity at hand i.e. if she shouted 4 then we would all have to drop to the floor and come back up, half way through the exercise we would begin to change the speed we were walking in as well as changing direction occasionally, one of the main activities that were involved with this exercise was that we would have to walk in slow motion from one corner of the room to another to "win a bar of chocolate", this exercise worked well as everyone wanted to get they're quickly to receive this chocolate. Next we worked on our core by doing core exercises, one of these exercises involved a sweeping exercise where we would have to sit with our legs stretched out straight and then sweep with both arms halfway off the floor with our heads up as well after doing this a couple of times we then had to life both our arms and legs into the air with only our backs on the floor.

In the next lesson we had Becca's production lesson where we finished off our concert costumes by adding colour to mine where I decided I preferred it grey to symbolise the diamonds that will shimmer upon Jennifer's body when she dances. After my group and I had to do a presentation explaining the choices behind our outfits

Thursday 19th January
In Rob's Drama lesson we began by doing a full body warm up which included tounge twisters, stretching and other different vocal warm ups as well as it helped to focus us as well as relax for the on going lesson, next we continued practicing our Dumb Waiter scenes with our partners to later on perform them which we then got feedback on.

Friday 20th January

Blog continued the same where we updated them, next in Drama we continued the practice for the Dumb Waiter like in our previous lessons after we did this for half an hour we started practice on a new piece for our upcoming Silent Movie project which included all of us into the Cops and Robbers production.


Monday 23rd January

In this Blog session I mainly added some more work to my Blog that I did not add from Friday. In drama we began by doing a full body warm up involving a vocal warm up then after we continued on rehearsing for the Dumb Waiter.

Tuesday 24th January

To begin the day we had Drama so while everyone else was rehearsing my partner and I were taken out to do another 1 and 1 practice in front of Rob, this then designated to concentrate more on our section of the performance and working with Rob was an advantage as we got to practice more on our facial actions in detail to make sure the piece runs smoothly, after this we went back to the drama room to carry on rehearsing. In Mandy's Lesson we continued using the board number warm up which then continued to a full body warm up along with stretches and various muscle workouts. In Beccas lesson we began working on our concert layouts, we looked at various examples before being told to give a shopping list of the materials we would need to create our own model boxes for our concert that we were creating.

Thursday 26th January

This morning in the drama session a photographer came by and took our photos doing our warm ups as well as group activities, when the photographer left we carried on with on practicing the Dumb Waiter.

Friday 27th January

This afternoon we continued our blogs to then to go to Robs room and do more run throughs with our Dumb waiter piece where we did a full run through in the classroom in front of our peers where we also received feedback from them as well as Rob which would then apply to our next lesson to then use that feedback and work on it in order for our piece to go smoothly.

Monday 30th January

Drama was not on today so everyone went in for Blog

Tuesday 31st January

In Drama to make up for the lesson that we missed yesterday we began with our usual warm up of stretches and vocal warm ups that included tongue twisters, humming and the use of repetition of the letters C,G,L,N,D,T,B. We did this so that we could be better with our pronunciation as well as articulation of letters so that every word came out pronounced correctly and be heard clearly. After this warm up we moved onto another run through of the piece. In Mandy's class we began with a small warm up by walking around the room in different directions and doing different muscle workouts. Once the warm up and our usual exercise's were done we then got into different groups from the last lesson and began to join all the pieces together to create a whole piece of different sports mixed together this then got recorded. In Becca's lesson we continued working on our concert layout using model boxes, this was usual as my group had a visual imagination of our dream stage so all we needed next was the materials for our stage.