Acting and Performance Workshop 29/10/15

Acting and Performance Workshop 29/10/15

Introduction

This was the next session of the acting and performing workshops. We had a different tutor from last week and was another external actor who came in to do the session. We started with introductions in a circle and then began the session.

Session

We started with a game of 'Zip, Zap, Boing' where we all stood in a circle and had to either: say 'Zip' to the person next to you, say 'Zap' to a person across from you, or 'Boing' to someone who had said 'Zip' or 'Zap' to you. This was made to warm us up before the session and to wake us up as this session started at 7:00pm. i enjoyed zip, zap boing because it was a fun and competitive game where you always had to be on your toes and know what was happening to know how to react to the situation if a zip, zap or boing was aimed at you. 

This was followed by another task where we walked around the space within the room and where given different masses and had to react according to the 'gravity' of the situation. One situation was when the tutor said we were on the moon, we had to then walk as if we were on the moon. There was another where the gravity was ten times stronger than earth's and another where we were in chest high water. This challenged us to understand our own mass and how to manipulate our movements to convince the 'audience' what our mass is in the situation. I felt that I gained a better understanding of mass, weight and power and how this can translate to my animations to make them more convincing and effective. 

After that we did group tasks again,. much like the last session, where in two teams we had to re-create scenes, animals, and objects just using the people within the group. This included: shapes, a tower, a throne scene and a dragon. 

This challenged us to work as a team and to clearly communicate with other team members as we had a limited time to re-create these scenes/objects.  This added a competitive edge to these games and were both fun and challenging. 

This session ending with a final task where we had to re-enact five scenes from a film to represent the entire film to the other group who didn't know the film. This required us to choose five key sections of a distinctive film to re-enact these scenes with no dialogue and to depend on our staging as a group to represent the scene and characters. Our group chose the 'Lion King' as our film, and we acted out these five scenes (Spoiler Alert): 'The Start' where Simba is held over Pride Rock. 'The Death' where Mufasa was murdered. 'The Time Skip' the iconic scene where Simba, Timone, and Pumba are walking a log and represents time passing and Simba growing up. 'The Fight' Where Simba and Scar fight and Simba claims his right as King. Finally 'The End' where Simba is on pride rock establishing his role as King. This challenged our staging as actors, team work and communication skills. 

Conclusion

I found this session enjoyable and I felt that my exaggeration and staging has improved as well as my confidence. I felt that I have learnt about the audience's presence within the session as We had to make sure we did not obscure the audiences view of the stage or what is happening on it.