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.