Third Week !! One week away from TAPS trip!

WEEK 3! 

Monday 24th September, we performed our first, short piece that we produced last week in our two lessons. Considering we did not have that long and that we were all shy and new to eachother, we pulled it off! Our piece was called "Museum of Life" and was about the journey of a womans life and the how decisions she could have made would have changed her life.

Our strengths were:

1. All helped one another do their best, contribute and improve on everyones ideas
2. clear structure in our short piece
3. added aspects from all researched theatre practises
4. preperation in class well spent, communicated during weekend via facebook
5. nervous with a new group but all worked well together in the end

Our negatives were:

1. musical theatre practise did not work out or appear in the performance 
2. learn about theatre of the oppression more to make this theatre practise more noticable in our piece
3. be louder and more enthusiastic when acting, push ourselves more
4. use music, more costume and props

Wednesday 26th September, in our first hour we watched Mary's "Me" presentation. We took notes on her strengths and weaknesses to help her improve on her next presentations. I enjoyed hearing about her interests and why these interests and experiences connected to her as an IB theatre student. 

We then gave eachother the feedback we had written down on their presentation and they gave us our feedback too. It was helpful to see how we can improve next time we have a presentation. 

I needed to develop some slides more and connect my slides more with how it connects with me being an IB theatre student. 

My positives were that I had good relations to images, I spoke clearly to my audience and I had notes and good preperation but it turned out I didn't even need them!!!

On our second hour, we watched a play called "The Container" by Catherine Bailey.

We took notes on:

• our immediate impressions
• Brief Summary of the Story
• Direction notes
• Technical notes
• Performance notes

The point of taking these notes was to help us prepare for how and what we are going to take notes on when we watch theatre pieces on our London TAPS trip. It will help us gain a better understanding of Drama vocabulary and elements. 

Thursday 27th September, we discussed "The Container" with Mr Fearnehough and a class as a whole. We gave eachother ideas on direction, technical and performance aspects. We talked about the concept idea of the play, the directors concept which I think is making the audience have an emotional connection with the real life story by putting the audience in the container. 

Next week, our last week before we go to LONDON! A week today for our TAPS TRIP :D 

Week 2 of IB Theatre...

On our first lesson of the week Monday 24th of September was the day we performed our 5 minute piece to Mr.Fearnehough, personally i thought we worked quite well and managed to include 4 of the 5 theatre practices we learnt of each other.
- Peeking Opera - love story that never works out.
- Vaudeville - food and drinks .
- Kabuki - gender swap.
-Theater of the oppressed - audience participation.
We then talked about our thoughts on the strength of the piece we performed. And we all thought we worked quite well as a group and we listened to everyone's suggestions and ideas.


On Wednesday 26th of September we watched and listened to Mary's presentation about herself and her theatre practice that she choose to show the class. Like the other classmates presentations i found that i was very interesting to learn about everyone and the presentations were a good way for us to get to know each other.
In the second hour of our IB theater lesson we watched 'The Container' by Catherine Bailey. 
This play was very emotional and talked about a serious issue that is happening in everyday life

- Refugees seeking asylum in the UK and travelling in a container.
- Thought provoking for the audience.
- Knowledge and a different views on refugees and how hard their lives must be.


On Thursday 27th of September we discussed with Mr.Fearnehough the message 'The Container' was set out to send to the public watching it. We then talked about our 'Me' Presentations with each other and i learnt that

- I spoke Clearly 
- I was Confident.
These 2 positive aspects of my presentation helped me because i don't think i'm very confident when i'm on my own in front of an audience so this really helped me and helped me think positively about future presentations in any subject.

- I have to be more planned 
- I say 'um' a lot 
- I need to look more at the audience.

These 3 negative aspects of my presentation were very much the truth and i already know i 'um' a lot when i do presentations and i don't make enough eye contact. I agree also that i wasn't planned as much as i could be for this presentation. I'm going to work on trying not to say 'um' in presentations and make more eye contact with the audience

Voila For Week 2. Bekki xx

Week 3: Our First Plays

This week...
On Monday we performed our short play.

•  I thought we did pretty good considering how little time we had spent on it.
• Although it was a little bit awkward trying to use all of the theatre practices and ad lib our lines.
• Our inspiration from the song was how life can have ups and downs. 
• It chronicled the life of a woman  from her childhood to her old age.
• It attempted to show the relationship she had had with her best friend through out her life and how this friendship had had ups and downs.
• This picture reminds me of life. How it can be a difficult journey with ups and downs and rough terrain. But it is made easier by sharing the journey with others.

On Wednesday...

• We finally got to see Mary's Me Project.
• We watched "The Container"  by Catherine Bailey.

• It is about the issues that refugees deal with and what they go through.
• It attempts to tear down stereotypes of refugees stealing all the  jobs and taking over the country. 
• It was sad but very thought-provoking

On Thursday...
Mr. Fearnehough helped us think about the message of "The Container" and we discussed our Me Projects with each other. Lydia gave me feedback on mine.

Things I need to work on

• I need to make more eye contact
• speak more passionately and clearly
• be more enthusiastic when  I talk about myself

Things I did good

• connected myself to drama
• was open and honest
• descriptive I was about my theatre practice, Peking opera or jingju

Also we have been  planning our trip to London for TAPS.  We will be seeing Warhorse, One Man Two Guvnors, Some Like it Hip Hop, and one other play. CAN'T WAIT! I just hope we can find a fifth person to come since Mary can not make it. :"(

Week 2, getting into it

This past week was a very interesting one. After our 5-minute play, we were asked to give feedback to someone in the group about their earlier presentations. For example, I had to give feedback to Lydia and Bekki had to give feedback to me. In this way i learnt that, although I am confident and I use images well, I tend to speak far too quickly, sometimes blurting out three sentences in three seconds. This makes it hard for people to understand, which means their attention quickly drifts away. As a theatre student, my articulation is something I must work on. We then talked about the upcoming TAPS trip to London,where we learnt that sadly, Mary will not be able to join us. this of course means that we will try bring back as much of our experiences as we can to share with her. 

For the moment, the trip is as follows:

• Arrive on the morning of Sunday 7th. Spend the afternoon touring something theatre related (not quite sure what yet) and in the evening go to see Zoonation's performance of "Some like it Hip-Hop".
• Monday 8th is the day of reckoning, the day we start TAPS. It looks awesome and I can't wait to be honest! In the evening we will go see either "Oh, the Humanity" or "One man, Two Guvnors". The one we don't see we will see on Tuesday.
• On Tuesday will be the second day of TAPS. On Monday we will have been split up into groups and dispersed into several master-classes, so Tuesday will be a continuation of that.
• Wednesday will be the final day of TAPS, and in the evening we are going to see Warhorse! The play that makes the Year 13's green with envy!
• And finally, on Thursday is our flight back to Toulouse and back to normality.

Last Wednesday, we watched a play in class, called "the Container". This is an incredibly interesting play for many different reasons.

• Number 1, The entirety of the play is set in an actual shipping container. the audience sit on benches on the side.
• Number 2, the only lighting is done by the actors holding torches, to increase the reality of the play. the sounds occur from outside the container, making the audience feel like they are refugees too.

In fact, the whole play is designed to make the audience feel like refugees. The fear of the actors,the lack of light, all is designed to make the viewer open his eyes to the real-life issue of people smuggling. as homework, Mr Fearnehough asked us to write a review of it.

On thursday, we started working in class, each researching a play. i was told to research "One man, Two Guvnors". We will finish the research on Monday, after which we will present our plays for about 5 minutes each.

That about sums it up for the week, bring on the next!

The First Week of IB theatre

We do our ME PROJECT, it is a powerpoint presentation, that it is my first time to know what is theatre practice mean, and it compose of 7 images, which include our background about our family. We learn from Mr. Fearnehough new things on how to present very well.

THE NAME GAME - this game is just walking around inside the room and point out the thing and tell the name of it, and the other way is to tell the name of a thing in a different kind of name.
       
  We learned that:

• We should focus on what we are doing
•  Think fast as you can

THE CARD GAME - this game will be using a card with a number, then we should act it base on number card given to know that if you are in a high status or medium or in a lower place.
        
    We learned in this game that:

• We should express more especially the body language so it will know immediately

Then the next thing we do is to listen in the music it's about Igoirmi by Ludovico Ernaud. We had to wrote about what kind of music it is, then after that we just present a 10 minute play, that came from the song, in first we spent more time on how we will present it.

I really enjoy the first play that we do in being IB Theatre Student!!!
               

          

Here goes...

So this is my first proper post on the blog, and as such I hope it can set a standard for my future posts. If not, well, I'll get better! These past two weeks have been great, considering I've never been in a theatre class before. Everyone has been really nice and its been fantastic so far, what we are studying is very interesting. 

In the first week, we learned of the different of the theatre IB exam questions and prerequisites, such as the the TPPP (theatre performance and performance presentation). To practice this, Mr Fearnehough set us the ME project as homework. The Me project is a powerpoint presentation about ourselves and our relationship with theatre. It consists of seven slides:

• A theatre representation we have seen.
• A theatre representation we have been involved in.
• A place we've been in the world.
• A theatre practice we know nothing about.
• A piece of art
• A piece of our writing
• A picture of ourselves.

I chose, in order, Othello, A play I worked on last year, Sidney Opera house, Vaudeville, Banksy's flower rioter, a script I wrote for GCSE and a picture of me snowboarding. All of the presentations were great and it gave me valuable insight on how Mr f

Fearnehough works as a teacher.

Last week, we worked on devising our own five minute play. It had to incorporate all the theatre practises we studied in our presentations. We ended up with the story of an elderly woman telling  her life story to a complete stranger, who then witnesses a series of flashbacks detailing the woman's life. I like to think it was a success because everyone worked together on this and it worked better than i originally thought it would.

I really enjoyed as our group got to know each other more and find out how we worked.

Monday 17^th September

Was our ‘Me’ presentation day, we all presented about ourselves and explained to each other the theatre practises that we had researched.  The 5 theatre practises researched was Vaudeville, Theatre of the oppressed, Peeking theatre, Kabuki and Musical. The presentations helped us get to know everyone better and help us connect in a more theatrical way to people’s interests and made us more comfortable with each other.  After the presentations we spoke about what really needed to be mentioned

-           - Salutation

-          - Confidence

-          -  How it relates to you as a theater student.

Wednesday 19^th September

Was a double lesson day – During the first part of these two hours we started of doing an activity where we had to point at an object in the room and say what it was called, then we did it again but this time we had to point at the object and say a different word to what it actually was. E.g . If I pointed to a chair I would say elephant, if I pointed to a window I would said car and so on. The main reason we did this activity was to be spontaneous and improvising and showed us that in theatre you have to be on your feet and ready to improvise at any moment.

During the second half of our double hour Mr. Fearnehough played us a piece of music ‘IGiorni’, after listening to this soft to this gentle and beautiful piece of music we were told that we had to come up with our own piece of 5-10 minutes long including all of us, and including the 5 theatre practises we learnt about from each other on the Monday. We wrote down what the music made us think of and what emotions we could feel then as a group we talked about what we had written and shared our ideas. From that we developed and idea of “Journey of life”, showing a life journey of a women and her life during the war. After sharing our ideas we decide to start setting up how the stage would be set.

Thursday 19^th September

At the beginning of this lesson we were set a warm up activity where we had to greet everyone in the way we would normally then a second time go round the group greeting people in a different way to what we first did. A second activity was set where we were given some cards and we had to look at what the number was and we had to walk in the status we thought was best associated with the card. Then we did it a second time but this time we weren’t allowed to look at the cards and we had to rely on people’s reactions and associate ourselves with the card we had. This activity helped us with different levels and status we can use during the piece we performed and helped us for the future. 

How I found week 2 of IB Theatre

We began our week with presenting our homework presentations about ourselves as an IB Theatre Student. I really enjoyed this piece of homework because I love reflecting on the past and researching about theatre practises I don't know about well. I loved researching and watching videos about the traditional japanese theatre, Kabuki.
I could have improved by:

• relating back to all of my slides as how it makes me a theatre student
• speaking much more passionately about some slides such as e.g piece of art, myself and production i have been involved in.

Our double lesson on Wednesday, we started with a group exercise called "The Name Game". Basically, we had to walk around the room and point out objects and say there name. Then we had to point out objects in the room and address them as something they arn't. For example a chair would be pointed out as a car.

The point of this game was:

• keep focus on what you are trying to do so you get it right and on time
• taking ideas and building on them
• learning how to improvise quickly and well

Next, We played "The Card Game". We got given a card with a number on it and then had to greet people in a group as what we think our status would be as that number. I had three so I was very low in status and i showed this by making my body lower, head down and no enthusiasm. 

I learnt that:

• body language is an important way of showing who you are and how important you are
• knowing how to cooporate when acting with someone that is completely opposite to you

We then listened to a beautiful song called Igoirmi by Ludovico Ernaud. We had to think about what memories and emotions we got from this song. I got happy memories with friends and then sad emotions too.
As a group we had to come up with a 5-10 minute îece from what we got from the song. We have to involve an aspect from each of our theatre practises in our piece. We spent the hour discussing what we can do and what to involve. I think we spent too long talking about what to do instead of getting up and doing freeze frames to get some concrete ideas or see what was wrong or right.

Our last lesson of the week, we did an exercise where we greeted eachother in a group in different ways. It was funny because everyone had different ways and it got awkward when we didn't know how to end such different greetings. 

I learnt that we have to go with the flow and feel more comfortble with how we are with our team mates.
After the game, we got on with our piece. We straight away did freeze-frames and took pictures to remember each part of the play. We did a run through of where and how we are standing and what we are going to say.
I hope it goes well and everyone feels comfortble acting it out our first little play!! 

Week Two- Getting into it

This week week we presented our "Me Projects". They were all really good! It was really interesting to learn about everybody else. Mr. Fearnehough gave us a lot of good tips on giving presentations.

• Passion- care about what you are talking about and make it obvious
• Salutations- sets the mood for the rest of the presentation
• Audience Interaction- helps the audience pay attention better and be more interested
• Eye Contact- look at the audience and not just at a piece of paper

"Name Game"-This game is an exercise on addressing things. We walked around the room pointing at things and naming them. Then we changed it and had to call it something other than what it was, but still go as fast as possible. 

• It showed us how language can sometimes restrict our ways of thinking creatively. It is hard to look at an object and call it something else. 
• We talked about how some people took other people's ideas and built on them.

"Card Game"-This game was about status. Status is defined as  the position of an individual in relation to others,especially in regard to social or professional standing.

• It was difficult to change the way you greet someone automatically. 

• Status is a useful thing to in a performance but seems to be hard to act out. It is weird to think about how other people will gain or lose status depending on who else is there.
• Some people seem to automatically claim higher status because of confidence and others seem to drop down to a lower point because of the lack thereof. It is sometimes easier for a person to allow others to be leaders rather  than asserting themselves. 
• Sometimes characters can switch places after one event. 
• e.g.- the Husband and Wife in Macbeth. The killing of the king gave the husband confidence and the wife regret.
• In many card games you try to get card of the same kind together. Aces with aces or tens with tens. In real life people try to be around other people of the same social level most of the time. 
• Many times if there is a relationship between people of different classes it can cause problems. These are some of the more interesting plays.

We started our first "play" 

• Mr. Fearnehough played a song for us, I Giorni- Ludovico Einaudi, and we used it to write a short play
• I think it is going to be totally awesome!

Sister theatre in washington USA

 Kabuki Japanese Traditional Theatre 

IB IST Drama first post!

Here is the first post for this blog, can't wait to write more!

Here is a picture of Jingju or Peking Opera.

BUZZING TO START IB THEATRE!!!