lesson review - 13.4.15

Today we worked on our chorus pieces as a class. It's important for us to remain focus because we are working in such a large group.

To warm up, we did an exercise where we had to create the physicality of the characters in our play. Usually when being given a character, I think about their voice rather than physicality so this exercise helped me think about how they would stand. Afterwards, we walked around and reacted to the others around us. This made me consider Antigone's feelings towards people like her, people of a higher status such as Creon and how this would affect her stance. This will go towards my development of Antigone as a character which will make my performance better. We also had to try and find people who were the same character as us, this encouraged us to exaggerate our body language so people knew who we were.

We then started the first choral piece where we stood in a semi circle and learnt actions that linked to the words being spoken. I think moving in unison emphasises the fact that the chorus is one and is working together. However, i also like when we separated into five groups and were given a line each to choreograph. We then performed these in canon, the build up of movement is really effective and projects the emotions the chorus is trying to present. This is important because the chorus is there to almost bring everything together and reinforce what has been set previously, whilst moving the piece forward in time.

For the second choral piece, we used multimedia by including the lights on out phones and a water sound effect. Personally, I think the skyline section is the most effective out of the whole choral piece. We use our bodies to form shapes similar to the buildings in a skyline, because this is performed in the dark, it'll make our shapes more effective and possibly more realistic. Also at this point, we use our phones. The lights pop up on certain words in the script which could come across quite mysterious as the room is dark. After this, we all sit cross legged as a group and start to sway as the water sound effect kicks in. Because before that we created buildings separately or in small groups, it's nice to end the piece with us all swaying in unison to bring the chorus back to one again. For this it is very important that we sway in time with each other and in the same directions because one person who does the opposite to everyone else will ruin the feel of that section.