Week 1 Blog

Week 1, Monday 9th-Wednesday 11th Of September 2013

On our first day on Btec Level 2 Performing Arts, we began to know our classmates a little better  with some simple Drama games. These Drama games helped us work on strategies in which a Performing Arts student needed in order to work well with each other.  For example, team building was required in the game of muddled phrases; this helped us work together in order to make a phrase using separate words, this game helped us a lot into knowing our classmates names.  Alongside were games which had us warming up to be more energized for the lessons we had on the day. All these strategies were amongst some other simple drama games also, leading to a good introduction to the classmates in our course.

After our first lesson came an introduction to our Singing lessons.  Once again this was a simple lesson in which our teacher quizzed all of us in our knowledge and understanding of the music industry and if we had music be a big part in our lives. For me, I was new to music as i recently started listening to it more often than I did in the past and I thought that the timing was great seeing we had to be singing each week on a Monday.

On day two, it was our first Performing Arts Production Process, where we had a gathering as well as a meeting with all the Level 3 Performing Art’s students and our task was to read through the script of the end of term project.  Our end of term project was to work with the Level 3 students as they were to be performing a pantomime version of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and we were to be instructed and trained as the crew for the pantomime, but that will come in later weeks. We spent the whole lesson reading through the first written act of the productions script.  The purpose of this gathering with the Level 3 Performing Art's students was obviously to know the people we would be working with in the future, and also to understand the basics of our end of term project.

After a short break, we arrived to our final lesson of the day, Movement.  This lesson was to focus on our strategies with dance.  This first lesson was different to the previous introductory lesson we had; as we were used to games and quiz's, then to show on our own knowledge of both acting and singing.  Whereas with dance, the teacher went to the front of the class room where we could all see him, and began to show us some warm up exercises for the dance we were going to do in the lesson. After, he then began to show us some simple dance movements as we followed along with him. We did all this to show our teacher our potential in dance movement and also gave us an understanding of what was to come in the upcoming dancing lessons.

On day three, we began with our first Physical Theatre Performance lesson.  This lesson was both exciting as we started and interesting because the teacher indicated on how a real actor should stand on stage and become still, relaxed and focus eye sight dead ahead of yourself.  Then he introduced certain character movements on stage, such as a clown doing a tall comedic jog. This was helpful to us because for our upcoming assignment in Physical Theatre Performance, we had to act as a just turning 100 year old clown whom had finished his final performance on the Eve of the new year which was also his birthday.  After the character movements, we then went to look at still images. The purpose of this task was to look at all our classmates' imagination, as the teacher created a scenario and we had to give a still image of our characters reaction/expression to this scene. This task helped all of us in understanding the use of imagination with the scenario portrayed, as well as creativity with the creation of our characters and how this was to help us in performances later on.

At the end of our first week, I would like to say that we all learned something new with all the strategies and techniques revealed to us, giving us a better understanding in the Industry of Drama.