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.

Articulation and movement

This week has been truncated by weather and a day off for staff development (tomorrow), so I've only had this class twice, but both sessions went really well. I taped a lot of it, even though I didn't blog it. Days off mean that the subsequent days back are twice as hectic.

Basically, I used my usual articulation exercises but enhanced them with movement instructions. We built on the vowel work, which helps actors understand the power of lengthening vowel sounds in words. Lots of Word Tennis with vowels and then consonants. We start with sounds, then go to words, and then to a specific word from each actor's poem.

Today we moved to the initial line of each poem, using it as the only line of conversation in pairs, back and forth. "Try to make it a meaningful conversation, even though you can only use that one line over and over," I coached. "Physicalize it when you respond," was another coaching prompt.

I gave them ten minutes to go back to their original poem partners to work on their presentations. For the last ten minutes of class, we looked at volunteer performances as "works in progress." The improvement was manifest! I asked them at the end what they had noticed in the presentations in terms of change over time. "More expressive!" "Using articulation!" "Stronger voices" "Projection!" The latter has come about without any prompting! All the shy voices are noticeably stronger -- and I believe it comes from the physical work added to the voice training. Next week, we will go into the auditorium, a much larger space and do some deliberate projection work to build upon what they have already achieved.