Tuesday's work -- the warm-up

I took them through the warm-up I use with my drama students and play casts. It starts with the spine and then works all the joints from neck to toes. I was careful to include breathing and sounds with the warm-up, before going on to the breathing exercises. We worked on breath awareness and resonating sounds from various points of the body. The sounds were timid at first, but gradually the volume in the room began to pick up as they discovered how to power their voices.

After the warm-up, I sent them off into their pairs again, this time giving them two additional tasks.

1. They could change their actions if their poem called for it. Both could act and both could speak-- it was their task to figure out how to distribute things best for the poem.

2. They were to try finding different ways to resonate their words based upon the warm-up work.

At the end of the class, I asked for volunteers to share their work. It was quite exciting to see and hear the improvements. All of them found a way to enhance the sounds of words within their poems by using resonance. They also developed their actions much further and added sound effects in some cases.

On Thursday, I will begin with some articulation exercises. There are a number of students in this class who mush their speech or tumble the words out too fast.