Workshop with Helen Leblique!!

Monday 27th May-
Today Mr Fearnehough gave us more advice on how to d better at TPPP's & Our Blogs.

For our TPPP's:

• ask for most advice and help now because you can't for the real thing
• use all the notes he gave us
• and use the markscheme

For our Blogs:

• write more about what we learnt, how it is useful and reflection
• don't write about what we did and how i found it, write more!
• use quotes, pictures, links to help us in the future with our tppp's.

Even though our blogs have improved, all of this help will help us for when we come to producing our TPPP's.

Wednesday 29th May-

 Today, we had a workshop by director, Helen Leblique.
She worked with us for three hours and i thought it helped me so much in confidence and with Brecht.
At the beginning I felt quite nervous because everyone was very quiet but after the first exerise, I got into it fast and became more confident.

The first exercise was called the funky chicken. We had to move a part of our body on the count of 6 and countdown till we got to one and we looked like a funky chicken. It sort of broke the ice because we all look weird so that was a good exercise to begin with.
We then did a game called the stop game.
We had to walk around on our own in neutral, when an instruction was shouted out we had to do that instruction. The game got harder because when Helen shouted out an intruction, we had to do the opposite instruction she said instead. It required a lot of focus.
It connected to acting because that requires a lot of focus.
The third excercise we did was " Analysis of how we move".
We had to take it in turns to basically was the catwalk in our neutral walk. The ensemble shouted from the sides, something we did in our walk which we then had to exaggerate. After everything was shouted out, you had a completely different and very exaggerated walk which was funny to watch. We could still see traces of our personality in the walk though. The actual walking I felt very uncomfortble physically and mentally. It was quite painful to walk like that for 5 minutes, let alone an hour and a half play!!
Mentally, I just felt like I looked stupid and it made me feel really uncomfortble doing it infront of everyone but I feel like if you feel stupid or uncomfortble doing it, your are probably doing it right because you arn't yourself.
I found this exercise very useful when it comes to performing because it helps to remind ourselves that you shouldn't be yourself physically or mentally.

We did a Bretch exercise where we went into pairs and created a 5 line sceanario using our exaggerated walks and personalities where we had to great one another. I was with Axel and I thought we did pretty well at this bcause we stayed in our very excited, jumpy, loud characters. After we had to put naration before every action we did "she was walking down the street and met an old friend she hadn't seen in years and said..." I found this VERY difficult. It required a lot of focus like the exercise we did before and it was really hard to go from neutral to our jumpy characters. I struggled to get my wording right on the narration which let my focus go a bit but for a first try I thought it was okay. It was good because it helped me understand Brechts style of acting better.
After we discussed Mother Courage and our thoughts towards the play, when we discussed it more and more, I realised more about what I thought about the characters and the message the play was trying to portray. I got a lot of set ideas from just discussing it which will come in handy for our set design project.

Thursday 30th May-
Today we wrote down the three things we learnt from yesterdays workshop, our most proud moment.
It was good to see everyone else three things too because I felt the same as them just didn't realise it.
My three things were:

• clearer understanding of how to use the A- effect in the performance concept of mother courage
• Exaggerating is important in Brecht aswell as Commedia so we can use that knowledge
• Not being myself at all when acting a character. 

I thought that one of Abby's points was good " Give the audience a question to answer." It is very brechtian and will be useful when creating set design for mother courage.