DRAMA

My second art subject in Term 2 was Drama. I enjoyed this class and we covered a lot of things whilst having a heap of fun. We were introduced to movement, body, voice and space, the four drama techniques, and covered mime, scripted plays and various other exercises. One game was to each have a colour that we had to respond to, in order to catch someone else out across the circle. Another was when we had a sound and had to find, blindly, the other person with that sound.

Miming started with small games in which we had to pretend we were a flower growing e.t.c, and to make up a dance routine. Freeze Framing got us thinking upon how we could make statue poses interesting, which, although I needed to work on this at the beginning, I managed to eventually get.
Marcel Marceau was a famous mime artist, so homework early on was to research his life. Something useful I learnt were all the positions onstage, such as centre stage, front stage left, and so on.


Movement brought us into activities making us mime things like milking cows (which I was praised for!) and lawn mowing! The end of the mime unit saw us miming moving furniture out of a house, spontaneously but with brief planning, in groups. This assessment got me Merit, which I was grateful for.
We then learnt about voice and vocal cords. It introduced us to theatre sports and we learnt 18 important features of this, such as advancing, blocking, offers when acting, pimping or spontaneity. It also got you improvising, which was fun although I don't feel half as prepared as when we did scripted plays! A small group of us had to improvise a scene where I, as a single mum, announced to her three children that we were to move house. It was a fun character to play!


In Snow White, I acted the evil queen, for a change, and we twisted the story into a funny, modern set of scenes. In this unit I also got to play an unimpressed employer and was privately proud of myself for accepting an 'offer'. My employee unexpectedly dropped to her knees begging, and holding onto my ankle, I was able to discreetly move her into centre stage, for she had previously been invisible to the audience because of a big box being in the way. As far as improvisation went the next day, we were to devise short skits about various things in pairs. When asked for one about the 'latest model', my partner and I acted out a model being late for her shoot, and were the only ones to make the brief into a pun; for this we were praised!
A few improvised plays later the unit was concluded, and I was keen to start on myths and legends. The big assessment for this part of the course was, in groups of five, to act a scripted play about a myth. We chose Romulus and Remus, and I played the mother wolf. As a secondary role I acted out Numitor, the advice-giving old man, so quite a challenge, but I managed! I took charge of writing out the script and we started rehearsing in our drama lessons, exiting, blocking, entering e.t.c. Sorting our costumes was something I enjoyed, and although a little nervous on the day, our play went very well. I wore an old man pillowcase and cap for my role of Numitor!


Our term wrapped up on the shadow puppet plays of our myths. We all made shadow puppets on skewers of our Romulus and Remus characters and performed, but the live version was far better.


I enjoyed drama very much, and given enough space for Drama as an option next year, I will take it, but I will have to factor in my other subjects too!