Rehearsal Progress

Rehearsals are going very well. Over the past few weeks we have been focusing heavily on building up various skills as Actors and as a group. We have been covering many areas from Improvisation to team work skills and devising. We have been participating in many games which requires us to work hard as a team and communication skills. This would simple be a game in which carrying one another from one end of the room to another. Although this sounds simple, it proved as a difficult challenge for most of the group. We all struggled to communicate in quick amounts of time under pressure and competition from another group. Even though this proved as a difficult task, it helped us to work together and solve problems, also bringing us closer as a group.

Improvisation I feel is one of my weaker areas in performance. I find it difficult to be able to think of a character and a scenario in a short space of time. Our director Jay really tested us on this skill by asking us to get into groups and stand in front of a class and begin improvising a scene. This proved as a difficult task and at the start I felt that I was being challenged a great deal. This however was a good thing because the more we kept improvising various scenes with one another, we began to identify many important aspects of performance, including use of space, dialogue and movement. At the start we all seemed to bundle up into small groups, but eventually we all began to make use of the space we had, making performance look much neater and less of a mess.

As we continued to complete tasks of improvisation, we all began to get more comfortable in what we was doing and go from one scenario to another. This required quick changes of character and other techniques such as the way we spoke and moved. This was a good way to learn how we can change ourselves into another character and use our movement to convey different characters.
After completing many of these tasks, it has made me far more confident in this area and I have learnt many things from it. Rehearsals are really helping me to grow as a person and as a character, am gaining more confidence, and learning new things within performance that I can then apply into my role in Ten Tiny Fingers.

I feel that being pushed as an actor is a very important thing to help me grow as a performer and learn new things. Jay made us try out something new to test us and see how we coped doing something completely new. We were given a song to listen too and then had to compose a piece of contemporary dance to match the piece of music and tell a story. When we first tried this, it was needless to say that each and everyone one of us was stuck on what to do, most of us just standing there listening to the music. This on its own taught us that trying something straight away is more likely to lead to something rather than standing there clueless thinking what to do. The first routine started well but then drifted off as the piece came to an end. We then was given a second piece and this made me realise that stepping in to take control of the group was a good idea and others did the same and this allowed us to all incorporate our own ideas. The second piece then worked as much more of a success. We all thought of a story together and our own ideas and each of us took the second routine more seriously, all of us seeming to learn from the first performance. We then seemed more comfortable and familiar with what we were doing, enabling us all to focus more and think of some creative ideas on how to use dance to tell a story. We then again split into groups and completed the same thing, again devising some nice performances that our director Jay was then to video. This has helped me to learn that you don't know what your going to be like at something until you give it a go and try new things. This has also helped to realise how powerful movement and music can be and how using movement can tell a story by itself without any dialogue.

We then completed some more activities. Such as a game in which one of us went out as a character, acting very over the top pretending to build a house, then one after the other each of us would join as an individual character and ask to help. This was again a good way to develop characters and using over the top movement and voice, is a good thing that some of us can apply into our characters for the play that we are working on. We again focused on some activities that required us to feel more comfortable with one another, using eye contact to take focus and follow one another's movements and being able to communicate in various ways, with over the top movement to restricted use of fingers to have conversation. This helped us all to work together and feel more comfortable. We then completed some team building exercises in which we had to create objects in short amounts of time using more physical theatre and arrange ourselves into various orders such as age, shoe size etc. This tested each of us as a team and helped to use our communication. Finally we completed trust activities such as getting into a circle and holding a person in the centre up from falling. This tested each of our trust on others within the group.

Overall Rehearsals are proving extremely beneficial. Our director Jay has made us complete many activities that I feel are really benefitting and enhancing us as a group. I am also learning many new skills and trying new things that I never thought id be comfortable doing. I feel than now we can continue rehearsing on our Play and apply many new skills into it to improve it and each one of us can apply some new skills that we have learnt such as the use of space and movement that help to give an impression of various characters and what they are like.