By Ollie Dodd, 6.2 Drama Scholar
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On Wednesday, A Level Drama students had the opportunity to be a part of a brilliant three-hour workshop with the Artistic Director of Splendid Productions, Kerry Frampton. Splendid create challenging, entertaining, politically engaging theatre for young audiences. The workshop taught us a great deal about their techniques and gave us invaluable devising skills.
The workshop began with us becoming aware of the concept of dialectics (two polarising ideas coming together to create a final product), which would inform a great deal of the workshop. We were then led through a variety of techniques and exercises such as mime and sign language, each time honing and developing the skills.
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The workshop was amazingly useful to us and gave us a much better understanding of the devising process and a great set of tools to use in our devised productions in March. You can read more about what the workshop entailed below:
We took to our feet as we began an exercise of walking around the stage in a straight line before turning suddenly. Simultaneously the technique of clocking – two people meeting each others’ eyes – was introduced. This exercise had layers introduced to it progressively, such as changing the speed, theatricality or energy of our walks. These factors were then brought into the exercise of mime-writing our name, to which the lenses of size and proficiency were added.
With the skill of tweaking aspects of our work added to our repertoire, we split off into pairs, where we learned how to tweak others work. We were given a word such as ‘cut’ and had to build off the action our partner associated with said word. Following this, we described giving special attention to the texture and mimed an object that was special to us. Our partner would then mime the item back to us, before becoming that item and giving us a piece of advice as the item would. This activity taught us a lot about listening to our partner and creating through play.
We moved into bigger groups of five and between us chose a fairytale or nursery rhyme that our group would adapt. We created five freeze moments that would be set off in canon and between them had moments of chaos, where each member was responsible for a different aspect such as asking questions, miming the scenery or describing the characters. We then put these on for each other and spoke about what we could do to improve.
The final exercise gave us an understanding of how to sign eight different emotions in British Sign Language (BSL) before we were tasked to create massively over the top versions of a snobbish rich lady and a working class West Ham fan. In our groups we had to make these characters criticise a character from our earlier piece using the BSL signs as a basis to show their emotions.
The workshop was amazingly useful to us and gave us a much better understanding of the devising process and a great set of tools to use in our own devised productions in March.
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