Week 13 Blog ( Week 1 For Shakespeare )

Week 13, Monday 6th-Wednesday 8th Of January 2014

To begin with for the new term, we had a new teacher for Performing Arts, still having our older teacher as a tutor. This new teacher is very kind and very excited to be working with us for this term and I'm sure everyone in the group as well as myself  like her and are willing to be working harder for this new term. We started with a simple warm up exercise. This warm up included with us being very focused and calm, beginning with all of us focusing on our breathing, listening to the speed we breathe, and how deeply we breathe to give full relaxation and focus.  The next exercise had us working our upper body strength, the purpose of this exercise was to warm up our muscles to physical work after a two week break for Christmas. The warm up consisted of our muscles to stretch along with our arms from the sides to the air, whilst inhaling and exhaling our breathe calmly.  I felt that this warm up helped me very much getting through all of today's lesson's.

Once the warm up exercises had finished, we moved straight into the main task for today, our new assignment. The topic was Shakespearean Plays, to begin with, our teacher had us looking up some interesting facts about Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Era with a treasure hunt. Three teams were to find a piece of paper with a clue on the back leading to the next one and so forth, there were 3 papers to find for our team, for other teams, it was more. After finding all these pieces of paper we had to fill in the blanks of words on the front of these papers to reveal an interesting fact about either Shakespeare's Life or about the Elizabethan Era in general. Using the internet as guidance, we found out many interesting facts to do with the life and career of William Shakespeare himself and what an impact his work in theatre had upon the world and history.  One fact we all learnt was where and when he was born which was in Stratford-Upon-Avon, in 1564, and we also find the date of his death which was April 23rd 1616, this date was actually his birthday, so Shakespeare died at the age of 52. He was married to a woman called Anne Hathaway and had conceived three children together. Also, we learnt how his plays broke away from the traditional theatre from Ancient Greek times, as well as his use of certain elements in Drama and Acting which became a huge development in the English theatre over the ages. I felt this was the perfect way to start the assignment since many of us in the group knew quite a lot about Shakespeare's plays already, with me performing The Tempest twice, once for a Secondary School assessment, and the other being a company show with a live audience. This task did give me more info about the famous play writer and delving into his life is very interesting since Shakespeare is one of my inspirations as an actor. We also categorized what genre each of Shakespeare's thirty seven plays were, ranging from Tragedy, Comedy to Historical plays.

I think of this lesson being very interesting and engaging for the whole group, as well as a great start to an interesting assignment, focusing mainly on the greatest play writer who ever lived.  My input to today's lesson was introducing what I have experienced in the subject already in the past years and how much I already knew William Shakespeare's play's.  I have performed Shakespeare monologues and as I have stated before, I performed in a real modern adaptation of The Tempest for an Acting Company a few years ago from now. And I have also delved into many of his other plays. I feel very positive and exited for the upcoming lessons for this assignment as I already know that I'm going to enjoy it very much.

For Tuesdays lesson I came back very excited for what our brand new teacher had in store for us for the next installment of our Shakespeare assignment. To begin today's lesson, our teacher started by spiting the class into three groups, for each group were given cards made by our teacher which on them had a brief storyline for three of Shakespeare's play's, these three plays were: Taming of The Shrew, A Midsummer's Nights Dream and The Two Gentlemen Of Verona. I noticed how these three plays were in the comedy genre in our previous lesson. My group was given A Midsummer's Nights Dream, and our task was to arrange the cards given in order to show the story written for the play. We had a bit of trouble with A Midsummer's Nights Dream as I have never watched the play myself fully, but I had a brief knowledge of the storyline. This resulted in our group finishing last to complete the order of the cards, even having our teacher and the aide for the day to come and help. After finishing with the cards, we began to move on to our next task which is related to the previous task. We were all given this time three sheets of paper which had, on one side, all the character names in the three plays on the cards, and on the other side a short description of their role in the play. Our task was to find out which character fitted which description for all three plays. This task took some time as we had to read through each of the cards for each play very carefully to get the right answers. I luckily had only few mistakes by the end when the answers were revealed but I thought I did a good job overall. For our third and final task for today's lesson, we were again split into groups for we were all given different scripts, but these scripts were the same plays we had before in the previous tasks. I was in two groups with two different scripts, I was to play as both Proteus from The Two Gentlemen Of Verona, and to also play as Puck from A Midsummer's Nights Dream. We are to learn these lines for our Shakespeare assignment in the coming weeks to perform them.

To end our lesson today, our teacher gave us more 'Blog Notes'. Firstly, she asked us to briefly summarize the three plays we worked with today. Starting with A Midsummer's Nights Dream, the play is all a love story with comedic humor at certain moments. The love story is actually interesting since nearly everyone in the play is madly in love with each other and is later resolved to conclude the ending. Taming Of The Shrew is also a love story with comedic humor. This play is all about Petrucio, a character in the play whose description entitles that he is A gentlemen of Verona, and suitor to Katherina, as he goes on his journey to simply put 'Tame The Shrew', Katherina is the Shrew, and also older daughter to Baptista, who is a rich citizen in Padua, the place where the play is set. And finally The Two Gentlemen Of Verona, which is also a love story with comedic humor. This play is about Two Gentlemen called Valentine and Proteus, these two men, to my knowledge which isn't high for this play currently, is that they both love the same women and for the whole play I'm guessing there is some sort of rivalry. Also everyone else in the play seems to have another romantic interest.

Secondly, she asked us to talk about our 'trailers' which we made in the lesson, and the techniques we used for them. She split the class again into two groups, and my group were given the task to improvise a trailer for A Midsummer's Nights Dream. We started by giving some narration as all trailers in modern day films have, such as 'This Summer', 'Coming To A Theatre Near You' etc. We included and acted some points in the actual play to the best of our ability, which turned out to be quite humorous to watch from our other classmates perspective. All in all I think we did well on this task, it was also recorded by our teacher so when we come to watch it, I already know its going to be funny.

Thirdly, She asked us what parts of the lesson we engaged most in, and I can say very briefly, that I engaged in a lot of today's lesson with all the tasks given as this assignment makes me want to work harder since its something I enjoy doing a lot.

Finally our teacher asked us to include about what we inputted for the lesson, ranging from the trailer and the previous tasks. Again, just like the previous 'Blog Note', I thought that I inputted a lot in this lesson in all the tasks we were to complete, and in general I had a fun time doing so.

On Wednesday, we returned to our Physical Theatre lessons. In today's lesson we started with a focusing exercise to, again, get our brains working nice and proper from after the Christmas holidays. This focusing exercise had all of us catching tennis balls in a rhythm, our teacher had us all shape in a circle and paired us up with another member in our class to throw a ball to each other. We threw the balls one pair at a time, this resulted us in creating a rhythm which eventually our teacher wanted to get faster and faster. This exercise helped a lot as it did actually help me focus more in the later parts of the lesson. After the focusing exercise, we moved on to our regular leg exercise's that we already performed on previous weeks. Once we had finished our exercise's, our teacher moved on to our first task for today's lesson. Our task started with me being picked by the teacher, and he instructed me to walk around the room just like I would normally walk everyday, after asking me to say the phrase, 'Good Morning', to another person in the room just like I would normally say it in everyday situations, and after asked me to lie down on the floor for a second and get back up on my feet, just like how I would normally do it. For each of these steps, our teacher asked everyone else in the room to try and copy my movements with the same posture and tempo at which I moved for each of these steps. From what I could see, no one could exactly copy my movements, since I was so used to moving my own way, and them focusing on me the whole time to try and copy me exactly probably resulted in them trying to hard and doing it wrong. After all of this our teacher would compare us to an animal that we had the same characteristics as. My animal was a Meerkat, he explained this by saying that I'm always very aware and I also looked tensed as I moved around the room, and I was also quick with my movements. This task to me was another focusing exercise, as we had to look at each person's normal movements and the tempo at which they do the movements in, to eventually copy them after. But also this task did help us in our next task which was also related to animals and how they moved with a unique tempo.

Our second task was to create our own animal and later on perform to the class as this animal. To complete this task we could use other real life animals to picture how this new creature would move or we could make a completely new animal with our own imagination's. The animal I wanted came to me as our teacher was explaining the task to the rest of the group. The animal I created was to be aware, just like a Meerkat, which is what my teacher compared my own characteristics towards. And as this animal moved, it would bobble side to side using it's arms as support its stability. I then thought of it's diet, I was very unique with my animal, as when we came to perform these animal's, I was the only person to say that the animal changes it's diet seasonally. I explained that in the Spring and Summer seasons, my animal would eat more healthy foods, such as fruit and vegetables, and in the Winter season, when the Earth starts to get colder, my animal would eat more meat to stay warm. Our teacher, after everyone had performed their animal, gave us his thoughts and opinions of the animal created. He thought of my creature again to be like a Meerkat, but at the same time, a rabbit, since at one point, during all of our performance's, he asked us to eat food like our animal would eat it, and he thought my creature looked very rabbit like when I ate the food that I had imagined at the time, which was an apple that fell down from a tree.

After this task, our teacher gave us homework to complete for next weeks lesson. He asked us to go look online or watch nature channels to pick an animal and find out how it moves and performs in the wild, this could be on how it catches its Prey, how it protects itself from its on Predator etc.