SCENARIO DOWN!

Monday 17th December-
We began the lesson with Stanislavski's Relaxation Exercise that we did the week before.This was to calm us down and bring focus to the class. This time I didn't read out the exercise and instead I took part in the relaxing. I realised that it was obviously more relaxing than reading but at some points I felt alert like I didn't focus properly. This was only at the beginning but then I got into it more. It is a great exercise to help bring focus to the room and keep everything else like problems and excess energy outside of the drama theatre.

After, the group then went into the other room and we discussed our ideas for a scenario for our commedia piece. We got all our ideas out but we really struggled as a group to combine these ideas and discuss the negatives and positives of each idea. I think we did take something from this and learn that we all needed to cooperate better and also give constructive advice for other peoples ideas and try produce the best as possible. I found that in that lesson, we were able to say what we liked from eachothers ideas but not put it all together which was a task for at home. We HAD to get the scenario down before the christmas holidays!

Wednesday 19th December (double lesson)-
We did a lot in this double lesson. We began the lesson with a game and warm up. The game was called "The hug game". We had one person who had to try tag another person with their hand on the other persons stomach. The only way you can prevent yourself from being tagged is to hug someone next to you or run away. After playing the game, we reflected on how it went. Mr Fearnehough told us from what he could see when we were playing the game, a few of us just decided to run instead of hug the person next to us. Some other people were just flinging themselves on people haha. It made the group realise that we can't leave people and we have to help one another out. We have to rely on eachother a lot in theatre and I can see that the group is getting closer and closer which is good. Doing our commedia piece together will definetely bring everyone together and let us be able to trust eachother in theatre more.

After the game, we did some mask work. Mr Fearnehough talked to us about how when using masks, the audience has to be furthur back otherwise is spoils the reality of the masks. He then demonstrated using one mask. I realised that when wearing masks, you have to rely A LOT on your use of body and exaggerate moves to match the facial expression of the mask. We all realised as well that when Mr Fearnehough was demonstrating, we were producing dialogue or a story in our head to fit to the mask and body. Some of our ideas were different to eachothers which showed our specific and good the moves have to be if you want your audience to have the right story of a character.
We were then introduced to the commedia masks and put the commedia characters to the masks. This helped me remember each other the characters and the names so I found this very useful.
We then had our own go at picking a mask and putting the body to the mask infront of everyone. I picked the mask of a servent. I quite liked playing this character because it is very energetic.
We got some constructive critisicm from the people that watched us. Halley said mine was good but the hair was a little distracting, so i will have to keep it out of my face. I found the hair distracting myself and I couldn't see where I was going. Bekki said that I sometimes came across as a little scary, which didn't fit to my character. Maybe this meant that I should tone the mouth expressions and less moving of the head. Or maybe bekki was just scared of the masks haha. Its good to get some criticism so that I know what to try hold back on or add for next time. We are still not sure if we are going to use masks but it doesn't matter just yet. We learnt a lot about the characters and we learnt how to use the masks.

Thursday 20th December-
This lesson we had to get our scenario done!
So we all got together and had the lesson to come up with a plot, character roles and also tech roles for each person. My tech role is costume and makeup. We have done some research on basica commedia dell'arte costumes and there are very basic features for each character in commedia dell'arte. With our story and ideas, I am a little nervous about how I am going to create something modern but with the aspects of commedia characters and costume too.
We got everything done and we are all pretty happy with our story. We got our characters and I was surprised we managed to give characters out so quickly and everyone is so happy.
I am excited to put this piece together but a little nervous to perform it. I hope we all just get everything done and perfected in time and everyone is happy.