Beginning the actual lesson, we started with a game passing extreme mask-like expressions from one to another across the room (you wouldn't think coming up with facial expressions was hard until having a mask (figurative) thrown at you and having to come up with one on the spot) this proved to be an extremely entertaining game with some of the faces produced frankly haunting. Expanding from this, we did the same in pairs therefore broadening the number of faces tried so that ultimately we had a facial mask expression we liked - this we then found out would have to be kept on for a length time, now a regrettable decision for some including me, whose face began to hurt after a couple of minutes - but using these expressions we then improvised around it through creating a body language using a technique of moving our bodies in a circle through our nose to find the right posture and from there the voice to create a character. It was weird how easily you began to find a character through using this technique as the face indicated a body posture and the posture a character with a unique voice (don't know what happened with mine, just seemed to morph into my neighbour's voice).
With these characters we then improvised in a 'blind date' for a minute long scene. I loved this, just suddenly deciding my character was a backwards farmer with no knowledge of modern social etiquette or hygiene. To be honest, coming up with the scene was only difficult in that we kept cracking up during the scene or losing the mask face which was really beginning to get very strained and my eyebrow which wasn't raised began shaking. Found my mask face meant it was really hard to fully pronounce words which was quite useful for the characterisation for an unintelligible accent commonly associated with farmers (though I can't do accents to save my life, though I based the character of the local farmers to my home who have really broad Derbyshire accents). Perhaps in the mini performance I hadn't really thought of a proper dialogue as it wasn't too polished and still pretty improvised, but it was fun performing it, evident in the number of times I almost cracked up. All the other performances were top-notch, I was literally in tears at the end of Jenna, Melody and Sarah's performance.
Still utilising these characters, we were again split into groups, this time three of fours and used our characters to represent a characteristic of one person such as self-awareness, or sexual-drive. Still not sure I quite got the brief despite asking for clarification, but I went for it anyway. These were used in a job interview opener thing selling ourselves for the job of cleaner in an organisation. We came up with lines for each characteristic, swapping for each line. It was quite fun exploring three completely alternate aspects of one character.
Our mini performance:
I think I blanked a little on what I was going to say and rushed it a little, so it wasn't as decent a performance as I would have liked, but I loved working up to it. The process is somehow effective (at least internally) at helping grasp characters, though exaggerated, that's probably what I like most about it - not having any real restraints on how much you portray a character.
I loved this lesson and can't wait to explore it more through this term.
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