12/09/18 Improvisation day 2

In today’s lesson we continued with improvisation work. We were split into groups of five and told to each choose a movement that lasted for four beats. The actions we chose were: picking up a box; ‘party’ in British Sign Language; four claps; a wave; and a dance move called a ‘dab’. Standing in a line we had to do each person’s movement going down the line in sync.  This exercise was good for our ensemble skills as we had to work together to make sure no one fell behind and our piece looked clean. It also tested our ability to stay in time without looking at the other members of our group, this is important on a real stage, as an actor will have to stay in time with a chorus without visual reassurance that what they’re doing is correct.

We later developed this exercise. Our groups were given a title each and told we had to come up with a theatre piece, lasting at least 3 minutes following a beginning, climax, and end structure.  The title we received was ‘Water under the bridge’. We had to incorporate each one of our movements into our story. As some of our movements could be used as a dance move, our scene started at a party. Our story begins with a group of three friends (Ben, Troy and Tomas) talking about the party, two best friends arrive late. Little to the first friends knowledge, her best friend Katie is in love with her and jealous of her boyfriend. As the scene continues, Katie gets increasingly jealous as she sees the couple together. The couple go into tableaux and the remaining two friends become Katie’s conscious. There is back and forth dialogue between the ‘good’ and ‘evil’ side of Katie’s conscious until evil prevails. Katie shoots the boyfriend as the climactic point of our story and the friends have to dispose of the body.

I enjoyed this task because it required you to think outside the box to incorporate some fairly obscure movements into a story. It encouraged the creative side of each group member to come out.

After performing our pieces we received our new scripts. We were given an extract from a modern rewrite of Medea written by Euripides. This version of Medea was written to be performed by one person. 

The extract begins with an air of panic. Medea’s friends are outside her house where she has locked herself inside with her two children. They believe that she has been driven mad by the news that her husband Jason is leaving her for a younger woman. The friends are trying to convince her that this is all for the best and her children will benefit from the remarriage. Medea finally appears asking about her husband’s bride to be and reminisces about how beautiful she once was. She is told that it is only natural for men to swap out their wives for younger women because they age slower than women and ripen with age, whereas women deteriorate. Medea refuses to accept this and believes that they have all been brainwashed. She wants to seek revenge against her husband by killing her two sons so he can be crushed and she can be reborn. The extract ends with Medea stabbing her children to death.