Week 2

Monday 14th January

 In this lesson, we focused on the vocals. We began by doing the warm up that we did in the previous Mondays lesson. This consisted of singing "la", "fa" and we added "ga", which I found more challenging as it didn't roll of the tongue as easily at the previous two sounds. Whilst singing through the song again, we realised that people were having difficulty with the wide vocal range of the song. Some areas were lower, and others were a lot higher. During the section, "I have suffered in this jail", I felt like I struggled due to it being a lot higher than the rest of the song. To improve this, I will try to make sure I take a large breath beforehand to make the note come out easier. I also think it would be effective to have stamina based warm ups, such as vigorous movement whilst singing, in order to improve my overall stamina.

My group then spent the rest of the lesson in the suite, going over the second half of the song that we weren't as familiar with. After singing it as a group, our self-feedback was that it didn't sound as intimidating and, overall, very powerful. We decided that we all needed to stand up and stand in an intimidating stance (shoulders back and heavy placement of the feet) and we sang again. We all saw a large different in our vocals.

 As a group, we wanted our target to be to keep the energy that we used today, with every rehearsal we do from now on. We will do this by remembering the context of this song before every run-through and putting our characterisation Into practice in order for our vocals to sound realistic and loud. 

Friday 18th January

In today’s lesson, we focused on character building to create a more authentic and realistic performance.

In our groups, we each spent 15 minutes devising a short piece, showing the hierarchy between big and little kids and some of the stereotypes that could come with it. I decided to step up in my group and create a Brecht piece, aiming to show the social status and the damaging effects that bullying can have of a person. The scene consisted of Jayda (little kid) sitting alone on a chair, looking happy and ready to learn. The rest of us stood behind the chair and one by one, made her feel more uncomfortable. We did this by showing the physical bullying methods, and how they can mentally effect someone. Such as; pushing her head down and making her close off her body language.

The feedback we got was that it was an effective piece and showed the hierarchy and the power that the older kids had over the one little kid. They also liked that we decided to take a non-naturalistic approach as it makes the audience think more about the symbolism. To make it more successful, we were told that it wasn’t exactly clear that it was in a school setting.

We then ran over the school song a few times in our groups, having feedback from our teacher saying that we needed to make sure that our group was in time with each over during the part starting with “I have suffered in this jail”My targets for today’s lesson will remember the devised piece and how my character needed to make the little kid feel and adapt that characterisation into my performance in order to give a more accurate and believable portrayal of a bully.