Catching up with the work

Weather and personal days off have kept me from this diary, but the work has continued on with some starts and stops along the way. I did take two days to show the class a Charlie Chaplin film. I have made it my mission as a drama teacher to expose every student who comes into my Little Theatre to the work of Charlie Chaplin. This group watched City Lights and enjoyed it immensely.

The class now has two choral pieces and a bunch of individual Shel Silverstein poems that they have been working on. As we can't perform every single poem, we are going to combine pairs into quartets. They will pick two poems from their four possible choices and add in actions for all four actors.

One day last week, we worked with concept words (rough, smooth, bumpy, tall, thin, etc) -- moving in the space to the words, then applying that to the poems. Sometimes the concept words were not ones that normally would leap to mind when working out the actions to the poems -- but we found that these odd juxtapositions often added something delightfully new to the interpretation.

One observation I've been noting is how projection has increased among all students -- without any need for me to coach for that specifically. I'm hoping we can get into the auditorium this week for some work in the larger space. There are only three more weeks before this class ends.