The day started off with a few vocal warm up exercises and a
game of ‘Yes, Let’s…’ then we were put into groups of six; I was with Zulaiha,
Sally, Josiah, Jireh and Tarkan. We thought of the idea of coming up with a
story by saying one sentence and then your partner will continue your sentence.
From this, we created a piece of theatre which we rehearsed a few times and cut
out any unnecessary gestures and actions we didn’t think were needed in the
piece. The next day, we sat in a circle with our groups and brainstormed ideas
for what our workshop should be about. We were told it was a workshop for GCSE
drama students. I suggested to start off the workshop with a name game to get
to know the students in the drama class, then we decided to play a game of splat.
After the game, we’d get into an exercise where we split the class into small
groups and appoint each group with a well-known actor at which point they would
create a 30 second fragment of a movie of their choice to then perform to the
class in which they had to guess the name of the actor and the movie. After all
the brainstorming, we tested it out on the class to see if our ideas worked out
well in which they did. On Thursday, we each went round and evaluated each
groups workshops and gave feedback on what went well and what could’ve be done
better. The main feedback that was given to my group was the fact that the
class really enjoyed the last activity with the actor and the short trailer
which really helped use their brain. However, for the name game they didn’t particularly
like so much because it was quite tedious and they suggested we make it more
lively and fun by adding to it. I thought the feedback would really help in the
future when we officially start our devising pieces with our assigned groups.
After having two weeks off college for half term, we came back to finally start off our devising. We were put into chosen groups for devising and we allocated jobs for each other then we began brainstorming random ideas about what our devising pieces should be about for our performance to secondary schools in January. In the image below you can see that I was assigned the role of doing the research of where the schools are situated and managing what transport we would need to take:
As a group we all liked and agreed on Tarkan’s idea of a crime mystery theme and we decided to name our devising piece American Noire. Our devising piece is based around two English detectives who are sent on a mission to America to solve a very difficult crime. We jotted down some of the styles of performance we would like to use such as physical theatre, flashbacks, props and set and make-up. We discussed what characters we would want to have in our piece and we each came up with our own names for our characters. We then later discussed what activities we would like to do in the workshop and a few of us came up with the idea of playing ‘Wink Murder’ to set the theme of the play. In addition, we came up with the idea of staying in our characters throughout the whole workshop because we thought this would be quite unique and a way for the students to look forward to our devising piece/
