29/4/14

Drama Journal: 29/4/14

Hey, it's another journal entry!

On this day, we mostly focused on practical activities, though we did receive a few theory sheets at the start of the lesson.

We engaged in two 'prac' activities, the first being a warm-up called "Ali Baba and the 40 thieves". I have decided that the best way to explain this is with a brilliantly drawn diagram by yours truly:

Look, I learned how to actually caption images!

This exercise is all about working as as group, keeping focus, and memory (as well as a bit of improvisation on the part of the first person). I feel like I did quite well on this, not flubbing once, but a few other people had quite a bit of trouble - whether because they just couldn't do it or because they couldn't be bothered.

After this, we divided into groups of 4 (I was with Liam Negus, Jack McGee and Travis Wettig) and created a short piece about the process of getting ready for a first date. Our group had the shortest performance, but could also be considered the most innovative. Most other groups' performances consisted of one person playing the lead role while everyone else played secondary characters or props, while our group had two main characters (showing each side of the date preparations) and two people playing every prop used in the performance.

A few notes just to finish off:

1. Each of these last two journal entries has been a day late - this is because I didn't have time to write a journal on the day of our first class, and I only had time for one last night so I figured I'd do the first one first.

2. Expect my journal entries to become more well-formatted and professional as they progress, and as I learn more about this software. Incidentally, these last two days have been the most fun I've had writing journal entries as far as I can remember.

28/4/14

Drama Journal: 28/4/14

Continued our new unit of Non-Realism - apparently I missed the first lesson of this (despite the fact that I'm pretty sure I haven't missed any lesson recently) because we were halfway through a task that I had no idea was even happening.

We watched a few videos of drama performances, both realistic and non-realistic, and noted how such techniques as movement, sound and transitions (and a few others) were used.

I feel the need to include an image at this point, because blogs usually have images strewn throughout their posts.

There we go, much better.

So. We then engaged in a few basic practical activities to bring us back into the swing of things for the new term. I honestly do not feel like explaining 'You' again, please refer to one of my older (non-blog) journals for this.

Finally, it has been requested that I talk about my opinions on how non-realism compares to realism. I haven't had much experience with non-realism so far, but it seems that non-realism allows for a wider range of performance and character choices, as well as (perhaps) making it potentially easier to cover mistakes and flubs with nonsensical improvisation - since the rest of it is also nonsensical, the audience probably won't even notice.

That didn't feel like a proper way to end this entry, so:

THE END

Much better.