Unit 3 - Lesson 1

Lesson 1 - Overview
In this lesson we learned many acting skills. The majority of the three hours was put into warming up our voices and stretching out our muscles. Furthermore, we also practised improvising and gathered from each other many different ideas. The activities we did linked in with the play Noughts and Crosses which we read the two lessons before this. As time flowed by we learned about how upper class people differed from lower class people. Their actions, movement, facial expressions were entirely different which showed how segregated the two classes were.

At the beginning of the lesson we were taught and showed how to control our breathing. Breathing is a very significant factor in acting, for example, it helps increase projection to a wider audience. Our group breathed in and out to exercise our lungs and diaphragm and stretched out the legs on tippy toes reaching for the ceiling afterwards. The improvising started as we walked around the drama room putting ourselves into the shoes of different characters depending on the class in society. The classes were labelled 1 - 5 with 1 being the lowest of the low and 5 being a VIP or the prime minister. We showed how we communicated to each other with eye contact and facial expressions. After the exercise we were told that talking was also an important factor in giving the audience your character's characteristics and personality.

From the middle to the end of the lesson we were tasked with creating three snapshot scenes where the only indicator of help was a piece of paper with three sentences of dialogue from the Noughts and Crosses play. Using the parts of dialogue and our imagination we went to work with planning and performing the three scenes. Our first scene represented the segregation between the "Daggers", also known as the Crosses, and the "Blankers", aka the Noughts. The sentence of dialogue we were given resembled "He was with his Dagger friend.". We used this to describe Sephy and Callum's relationship in that they are discriminated against them being friends. The second scene represented how the Noughts were always thought to hang out in gangs, smoke, sell drugs, and be the stereotype gangsters. Our society also revolves around stereotypes such as this, for example, we think that the average person in a suit and tie is extremely important and worth more than a person without a shirt and tie but ordinary clothes. With this in mind our group of four tried to put that image in the audiences mind with our facial expressions and the ending line, "Don't judge a book by it's cover". The third scene represented the pressure that people have in our world and that if they don't give the right answer everything they love will simply disappear. The dialogue we were given for this scene resembled, "I need to give an answer, Think! Think!". Our scene showed the audience that thinking of the right answer all the time is difficult and that Sephy's position in that scene does occur in your life sometime or another.

In conclusion, we talked about what we learned from this eventful day, such as the breathing exercises or the improvising, and  what we hope to achieve in the future of our theatre lessons.