Improvisation and Improvement!

Monday 11^th of March:

We spent the entire lesson back from the holidays on improvisation activities. We were separated into 2 groups, at for the first few times Mr.F would give us a sentence and we would have to go from there. He then gave us an object and we had to use that as a different object in the teams’ improvisation.  For the last improvisation activity we were given a scenario and from that we had to work from that and entertain the other group.

After we finished everyone one of the scenarios, sentences or object we talked about each one and said the positive and negative things about our improvisations. We then were told to create a list of DO’S and DOESN’T to do during improvisation.

-          DO Always work with your team. (go along with their ideas and build on what the other person says)

-          DO Listen to your team!

-          DO React to each other

-          DO create a relationships for the characters.

-          DO Help your teammates

-          DON’T REPEAT YOURSELF

-          DON’T USE REAL NAMES

-          DON’T IGNORE YOUR TEAM MATE

On reflection after all doing this exercise I think we all found it a bit hard to start improvising because we did not have set characters and there is the same problem of the ‘Cop in the head’.  I think my team could of worked better and listened more to what Mr.F was saying when he was counting down the time we could have had to talk and make things better in our improvisation. I realised after doing this that I was more comfortable doing improvisation when we were working on our commedia piece.

Wednesday 13^th of March:

Our double lesson was a discussion of the areas of improvement for our commedia piece. Mr.F read out his notes from when we performed to him before the holidays which were very helpful to listen to:

What was said:

-           - Figure out the scene changes and who will be moving what.

-          -  Shorten some scenes and everyone should remember the order of the story of by heart. A poster has now been created on both sides of the studio so we know exactly which scene comes when.

-          - Get the audience even more involved!

-          - Definitely fix the last scene! (a bit messed up, and wasn't quite understood why we were all there)

-        -   Make scenes like the hoover scene more understandable.

-      -     Roses (Isabella) reactions need working on.

-        -   More romance when the lovers meet

-      -     Re think what chairs we should use in cinema scene

Thursday 14^th of March:

Mr.F was not in so we started working on the last scene and tried to make it better and more understandable to why all the characters have ended up in Roses house :p