Lesson 1 (Thursday 10th September) Physical Theatre

In our first lesson, we spent sometime looking at the physicality of different characters and how we can use our bodies to create interesting characters without using a script or text to respond off of. We split up into groups of three and we had to come up with 8 movements that would make us come off as aggressive or thuggish. Our movements had lots of different styles, that ranged from very big aggressive attacking movements, we made these sharp and really in your face. Where as some of the others were a bit more subtly aggressive and more intimidating. One movement that we did that fitted an intimidation style was a brush of the shoulder and a head movement.






We then took this routine of movements and put then into a technique known as they known as a shoal of fish, this is where you parole an area but staying in a close group and when ever someone in your group moves off, so do you and you have to stay together. Once we had our routines of the movements, we started to add more depth, making some of the movements, attacking and then categorising the other movements into intimidating and then parole. For intimidating and parole we did some subtle gestures to show our status compared to others in the scene. To get more of a story to our routine we gave our characters a purpose for being there, we came up with that this was our territory and we felt a high status being in this area. Once we put this to music, it picked up the pace and brought our characters to life.




Over all in this lesson I found it quite easy to come up with lots of different movements that would fit the character, which ranged in different levels, dynamics and speeds. I think that having all of these different styles gave the routine some depth. My target for next time we work on these routines is to think more about my physicality and how a thug would hold themselves differently to I do. I would also like to look at changing some of the timings towards the song, to see if we can do somethings on certain beats and some on off beats.