Workshop Blog

Week Two: Thursday 15 May 2008

The wall of the drama studio now looks brilliant!  We had printed out the photos taken last week, of the students’ freeze frames of key plot points, and before the session, we put these up on wall, alongside bullet points of the story and lots more pictures of both plays. This wall will be a great reference point for everyone over the next few weeks.
 
Today’s sessions were all about assigning the script excerpts to the students, which they will work on from now until the performance.  Workshop leaders Maria and Sam started the sessions with some brilliant warm-up games, which generated an incredible amount of enthusiasm, energy and focus.
 
We then recapped on what we remembered about both plays from the previous week, and split the groups evenly so that half would work on The Crucible and half on Rosmersholm. Scripts were given out, and time was given for the groups to read through their excerpts. Their task was to answer in character 'the big Ws', which were:

WHO are you?
WHERE are you? (thinking about both where you are in the scene, and where the scene comes in the play)
WHAT are you doing?
WHY are you doing it?
WANT: what do you want in the scene?

This seemed to be a really useful way to get everyone thinking about specifics, and to begin to analyse the text for information about the world of the play.

After the students shared their findings with the rest of the group, Sam demonstrated an exercise called ‘Point and Place’. This involved going through the script line by line, and whenever the character speaking refers to themselves, each other, or a location, they have to point to a specific location in the room, or to the person they are talking about. The aim was to memorise the line, then say it directly to the person you are talking to, making eye contact. It was quite a tough exercise, and we encouraged the students to be really strict with themselves about the rules of the exercise, especially not reading from the script.  But once they got into it, it became a really brilliant way of clarifying exactly who and what they were talking about. After watching everyone it was clear that their understanding of their scenes had really been elevated through doing this exercise.  Students had picked up on the importance of having an active relationship with the other people in the scene through eye contact.

Between now and when we see them next, we have asked for the students in their drama sessions with their teachers to focus on each line they say in the scene and to identify what it is they want. We will then do some work based on these ‘wants’ in the next session.

In all, a very good day, with lots of interesting discussions.  It is going to be really exciting to see them again once they have had some more time thinking about their characters.