Drama class No.3 19/11/12

By far the most enjoyable drama lesson yet. Initially we learnt about Cicely Berry an incredibly influential lady. Cicely Frances Berry CBE (born May 17, 1926) is the voice director of the Royal Shakespeare Company & is world-renowned in her work as a voice & text coach, having spent many years as an instructor at London's Central School of Speech & Drama. Cicely Berry’s exercises tend to be based on resistance & rougher, physical work. Cicely has written & contributed to many books, articles & publications over the years & her seminal works read by all voice coaches as well as a large percentage of actors are:

• Voice and the Actor (1973)
• Your Voice and How to Use It
• The Actor and the Text
• Text in Action
• Word Play: A Textual Handbook for Directors and Actors

We started off by doing some of Berry's warming up exercises for the vocal chords. 

OO      O      AW      AA      AY      EE

we had to make the noises above and then add each individual letter at the end of the sounds above:

T,   D,   N,   B,   P,   M,   G,   F,   V,   S,   Z,   TH.

We we told that doing this exercise warms up the vocal words, gets the brain into gear and gets you raring to go. Once we had done our warm up we had to show and tell our individual performances that we started the previous week. We had to sit in the 'hot seat' say our name, age, what we do for a living, and then answer questions from the class. Mine is based on someone that is from a more deprived area who has a interesting lurch when they walk, my character is around 22 and has a northern accent. On the seat, we had to improvise with the answers which opened out minds up to all the possibilities that could happen. Once we had gone around the whole class we then had to get into groups of four and make up a film company name. We came up with the 'Hungry Ostrich Productions Limited'. We had to make up a film that we have to pitch to the ret of the class as our interesting characters that we established earlier in the lesson. Our film is about a man called Tibias, who lived around 100BC, he was a courageous fighter and we would do a Historical documentary about his life, his battles, and his tragedy. 

We did a mini pitch to the class where we had to name our company, name the film and what it would be about and our individual roles in the production team. For next week we have to create a script which we are to loosely follow so it can still be spontaneous and random, we have to polish everything up and make it believable.

Drama Workshop Lesson 1 6/11/12 and Lesson 2 12/11/12

Lesson 1 : We were learning all about Diaphragms, how we breathe, the right way to breathe and miming characters, using signs to get your message and ideas across to an audience.
First of all we started the class with some breathing exercises where we all lied on the floor, closed our eyes and breathed in and out slowly. Once we were all relaxed we did some humming exercises, where we breathed in for 4 seconds using out diaphragms, hold for 4 seconds and then breathe out for 8 and hum. Once we had done that a couple of times we ended up seeing how long we could hum for. We did this to warm up our vocal cords which is what an actor would need to do before starting a job.

What happens when you breathe?

Well... When you breathe in, or inhale, your diaphragm contracts (tightens) and moves downward. This increases the space in your chest cavity, into which your lungs expand. The intercostal muscles between your ribs also help enlarge the chest cavity. They contract to pull your rib cage both upward and outward when you inhale. When you breathe out, or exhale, your diaphragm relaxes and moves upward into the chest cavity. The intercostal muscles between the ribs also relax to reduce the space in the chest cavity. As the space in the chest cavity gets smaller, air rich in carbon dioxide is forced out of your lungs and windpipe, and then out of your nose or mouth.

Once we had got the hang of breathing deeply and using our full capacity we then went onto miming, acting out scene with no sound of mouth movements. For me it was to demonstrate how simple movements and facial expressions, body language and posture can get across a lot of information to the audience. We should take this idea into our animation. Words are like the blood in your body, you need the expressions, mannerisms, body language - the heart, to pump the blood around and make everything work. The expressions and mannerisms make it visually interesting and challenges the audience to make their own story. It was interesting to see what time of the day, where, who, what, why, the audience thought the mimes were about. On the whole, the mimes were pretty self explanatory.

Our home work was to look out for interesting people who have a particular way of walking, which is different and we can bring to class.

Lesson 2:

We started the class with some quick breathing techniques that we learnt from last week to see how had been practising deep breathing, 95% of us were using out chest to breathe and only 5% of our class were using our diaphragms! It is shocking really that we as humans don't breathe properly, we are lazy. Todays lesson we were concentrating on the voice box, and warming up the larynx and other parts of your voice. We also looked at warming up our faces, Rudolf Von Laban and his theories.

We started the class by exploring humming noises and making parts of our face vibrate, starting with out lips - for me a deep 'Oh" hum worked best to make my lip vibrate. We then experimented with the top of our head, the temples, the nose and our cheeks.

A  E  I  O  U - proxies and Pricativies

P  T  K  B  D  G  - air flow from the lungs are interupted by a complete closure being made by the mouth.

F  S  V  Z  - Air passes through the narrow contriction that causes the air flow turbulently and thus create a noisy sound.

We then looked at Rudolf Von Laban a Hungarian central European dance artist and theorist, whose work laid the foundations for Laban Movement Analysis, and other developments in the art of dance.

One of the founders of European Modern Dance, Laban raised the status of dance as an art form and elevated the reputation of dance scholarship through his inquiry into the theory and practice of dance and movement.

We were looking at the stereotypes with in movement that Laban created for example, a low heavy character would do punch, slice, and wringing movements, all disjointed, and uncomfortable movements and a light happy person would use gliding, flicking, dabbing movements. Laban did this so when he wrote a script the actor would act his words and then know the action he had to do, but due to their being no confinements, interpret it in the way the actor felt their character to take it.

We then moved onto what you need to make a good scene with out any voice over. With out the five 'W' you cant create something ingaging for the audience.

WHO = status        Gender    Real or Fictional

WHEN =   am    pm    Time

WHERE =  geographical    interior    exterior

WHY = why is out character there? Incentives? Drive?

WHAT = What outcome do you want?