Drama diary on movement Essay

Today in our drama workshop we investigated movement and physical action in drama. We carried out many different practices to help us lay out the importance of movement and how it should be used effectively. To communicate plot, and characters relationships to the auditory sense. Firstly in our workshop we were give the task of creating the most abstract freeze frame possible, we were draw up into groups of 6,2 people being the directors and the remaining 4 creating the freeze frame, My group managed to produce a freeze frame based around a piece of scaffolding.We did this by placing people one by one on the scaffolding in ways, which we thought were different and challenging. Once we had created a successful freeze frame our instructor gave us the task of placing our t able-bodiedau into context. When asked we had to give a performance to the class, still in the original freeze frame but with dialogue explaining our obscure positioning. The reference then had to work out what the situation the characters were stuck in simply by listening to the few lines of dialogue the cast spoke and paying close economic aid to the positioning and movement.The audience did guess the situation, which was good. We did a piece of dialogue that explained that we were stuck in a lift that had broken down. There are many soils why we did this exercise the most Copernican being to verbalize the importance of physical action and how actions when used effectively can communicate to the audience with the character on phase and show the characters feelings through movements and not words. It also helped us understand that movement can help the audience understand the context of the play and that close charge must be given to the physical/visual elements of drama.After completing this task and discussing it we then moved into groups of 4. One person from each group was given a paradigm to examine for 1 minute only. Once their time was up they were asked to put the people i n their group into the positions, they had been examining in the go for development only their memory. The director adjusted the actors one by one creating what they thought was an accurate copy of the original image they had been studying. The whole group then examined the picture and gave it a title, which they thought was appropriate to the events, taking place in the picture.The picture, which we had to recreate, was a still image of an old woman talking to a man in the picture there was also a sheep and a little child. We named this image shepherd lost in Italy. By doing this it helped us realize that one picture can explain an entire scene without words and the importance of movement in a play. Our final exercise was to pick 3 major scenes from a taste of honey and present them through freeze frames with only one line of text from each character.The first part of the scene we chose to convey was when Geoff is severe to kiss Jo the lines we used were let me kiss you and Jo s aid Leave me alone, get off me. First we tried to create an image, which showed the audience the essence of the scene without dialogue. This didnt go to successfully as the audience could not guess the moment they commented on our performance and said that we needed more physical contact than we had. At that time we had Geoff leaning in for the kiss and Jo leaning away. With the help of the rest of the class we decided that Geoff should be really trying to grab Jo whilst Jo pushes him away.This should hopefully show the audience exactly what Geoff is trying to do and Jos response without words being used. The next scene we used was when Peter enters the scene and Helen is pointing at him. Helens line is I told you to wait outside Peter responds dont point your bloody sense at me. For this part of the scene it is very important that we include physical action as well as vocal strengths because the author is gives us a playwright clue on to how he wants these cardinal lines to be ac ted out on stage Peter saying dont point your bloody finger at me tells us that Helen should be pointing her finger at Peter.We set this scene up with Helen and Peter standing in the entrance of the door with Helen pointing her finger at Peter and Peter slapping it away. This is showing the audience that Peter has authority over Helen. We then had Geoff and Jo sat on the sofa with facial expressions that showed they didnt really care this shows the audience the relationship between Jo and her give is blatantly not very secure.The whole point of this exercise was to help us see the importance of physical action in drama and that even if at a point in a play a character is on stage but has no lines, that character is still able to communicate to the audience via facial expressions and physical reaction to the surrounding situation. Before this workshop on movement our piece contained little physical action resulting in a mainly static performance on stage or movement without reason. We now see the difference between movement for a reason and movement without a reason. We plan to make a movement map next section to liven up our piece hopefully for the better.