Year 10 strike a pose
Year 10 Drama students have had great fun honing their movement skills, drawing on some of the techniques Head of Drama, Ms Crittle acquired overseas as part of her Wenona Teaching Fellowship.
“Late in Term 3, Year 10 Drama took part in a one-day workshop on physical theatre. In creating the workshop, my aim was to introduce the students to as many of the techniques that I had learned on my fellowship as possible. Of course, it was impossible to teach students all that I’d learned in the six amazing weeks I spent in Rochester, New York, Paris and Amsterdam, but I tried to give them a taste of some of the key concepts that I thought would be useful. The workshop was designed as part of a unit on play-building, in which students create a script and then dramatize it using physical theatre techniques.
Drawing on my work with Push Physical Theatre Company in Rochester, New York, I took students through a series of exercises where they experimented with ‘leaning’, ‘pushing’ and ‘pulling’. Working in pairs, students had to create shapes where they were either leaning on each other or leaning away from each other, taking their partner’s weight. A requirement of the final image was that if I removed one student, the other would fall. These poses can be extended in dramatic composition to create powerful theatrical metaphors that are full of dramatic tension. The students had lots of fun, extending their poses to the limits of their balance – leaning on heads, legs and torsos, and creating wonderful images that they could develop and explore later in their devising work.
Later in the day, students were introduced to The Viewpoints. Devised by Anne Bogart and Tina Landau, it is a framework for theatrical composition that acts as a medium for thinking about and acting upon movement, gesture and creative space. I took part in extensive work on The Viewpoints in my work with Zen Zen Zo Theatre Company in Amsterdam. In the workshop with Year 10, I decided to focus on three viewpoints: Tempo, Spatial Relationships and Kinesthetic Response.
Tempo refers to the dramatic timing of movements and gestures, which we often take for granted in real life. When performing on stage, students must consider how they use their bodies. By speeding up or slowing down their movements, they can create mood or set the tone of a scene. Changing the rhythm and pace of the play helps to create tension within a performance, which incites engagement and interest from the audience.
Kinesthetic Response refers to the actors’ instinctive response to an external stimulus. Actors must be very in tune with their surroundings and the other actors they are working with. This sensitivity will allow them to respond immediately to cues and to the nuances of other performances.
Spatial Relationships refers to the distance between objects on stage; one body in relation to another, to a group, or to the architecture. It is a primary way for the actor and director to create meaning on stage.
The Year 10 students experimented with the different Viewpoints by completing activities such as Bogarts’ ‘Lanes’ exercise, which requires students to move backwards and forwards in their own lane, improvising with a theatrical vocabulary that was limited to sitting, standing still, running forward or back and lying down. Students must concentrate on responding kinaesthetically to the other actors in the space. They could only perform a movement in response to another student’s movement.
This activity developed Year 10’s awareness of each other and their theatrical timing. Later in the workshop, students added ‘Spatial Relationship’ and ‘Tempo’ to their vocabulary in an ‘Open Viewpoints’ session. I encouraged them to move around the Drama Room, varying the pace and level. They had to change tempo (accelerating from 1 to 10 in pace) whilst retaining acute awareness of the other actors in the space and only moving in response to the other students’ movements. The workshop was a great way of teaching them how to use a shared space effectively. Using different levels of space through sitting, lying down, walking and running, helped to create tension and interest and showed the students who were watching, that we don’t need words to create a powerful theatrical moment in Drama.
By the end of the day, students were tired, but their brains and log books were bursting with new ideas for how to use their bodies on stage. In Term 4, we have just started to add these techniques to the scripts that the students have developed for performance and assessment later in the term. I hope to ‘drip feed’ them with other exercises and experiences that I learned while I was away and look forward to seeing the girls’ finished work.”
Break a leg girls!