Class

At the start of every lesson, my drama class began with warm ups of the body and the mouth. We would all come into a circle standing neutral with our bags and coats tucked away in the cabinets. We always checked our feet to make sure that they were parallel with our shoulders, our backs were up straight and arms down by our side so we don’t fiddle with our hands. Usually we imagined that there was a string hanging from the ceiling attached to our head to help us stand straight or we were imagining as if we were holding heavy shopping bags to keep our arms down by our side and not moving.

Another warm up we did was expressing our vowels and consonants such as ‘K’, ‘G’ and ‘T’. This benefited us with our pronunciation and articulation of words for example, saying ‘Th’ in a word instead of saying it as an ‘F’ like the word ‘Three’. Usually people would pronounce it as ‘Free’ because they’re not articulating properly.  By doing this, we were able to control our breath at any pace and help sustain our diction. This was useful for our Greek play we were doing where the words and phrases were different to the normal modern language so it was a challenge for us all to pronounce words. When we breathe in our stomachs go out and when we breathe out our stomachs go in which means that it is the result of our lungs expanding in order to sustain long breaths and have good projection in our voice. From doing this you will know that most of your vocals are from your diaphragms instead of your vocal cords because they can strain and hurt. Moreover, in order to help with our articulation we did tongue twisters such as ‘She shells sea shells by the seashore’ and ‘Red leather, yellow leather’ repeatedly three times.