Exploring team work and Improvisation

In this lesson the first section of the lesson was taken by one of our learning mentors, Sax. We explored a few new warm up games that all we focused around character improvisation. The first one was called park bench, this one was very open to interpretation, as you are aloud to make up any character, and then using that character just go up to the bench and try to get rid of the other character by changing the story around.

My character was based off someone in my class, but  to make it even more comical and out of the blue, i exaggerated every movement and sound. I enjoyed this task as i think it brought everyone out of their shells and gave everyone a chance to show their funny side, and it was nice to see people perform  like that, as i had not seen everyone yet.

The next exercise that we did was a game with a few more boundaries. we were all given a strip of paper with a random sentence on it, and then we had to take turns going around the group and reading them out. mine was "Why did you take my puppy". As I had not read this before my go , it came as a shock and then my partner and i had to make short scene, using this sentence as a starter.

I think  that the beginning of this lesson was really valuable, and by exploring improvisation and taking a scene further, showed me how much a scene can change around by exploration. I think that we should use some of these techniques that we learned in some of the scene in WWRY, in particularly the bohemian scenes, and explore improvisation for the background character, to make it look like a lot is going on.


Team Work

In the second part of the lesson we look into what makes a group work well, and how we all can work together to create the show that we can. We took it in turns to write something that we thought was important to have in a team or ensemble. this is what we came up with.

As you can see in the picture, we came up with things that really were quite varied. some of the things were emotional things, such as support and looking out for one another, and others were practical things such as punctuality and taking risks.We all came to conclusion that all of the things that written down all linked into working as a team and team work.

If some of these attributes were missing from this list, it would not make a successful team. For an example if everyone in a cast had all of these values but not everyone was punctual, it would not be successful. If you had a rehearsal where lots of people we really supporting everyone and were helping one another to take risks in the session, but people were turning up late and not motivated it just slows down the process.

Another example would be if determination was missing, and everyone in the group was there and really supporting everyone in the group,but the actor that was receiving the support had no determination and just kept giving up, the rehearsal would never be moving or getting anywhere.

Personally i would like to think that i try to take on all of these attributes when i'm rehearsing and always want to feel needed and supporting to others. But if i had to improve on at least one of them, i would  like to have a bit more compassion when im rehearsing, for example i would like to be more understanding that other people can take more time to understand things, and other way round as well, that it may take me more time to get things, and i would hope people would have compassion with thattoo.