IB Theatre – Is it believable…?

Thursday 8th October -

  WOW… My head is spinning, what an eye opener that was, and I thought theory of knowledge spun my head.

Today's, lesson was based oh how an actor is able to make a character believable, for us to understand this we took part in a few different activities:

• Just Keep Clapping – This activity is exactly as the title suggests. As a group we formed a circle sitting on chairs with all but one person clapping their hands continually. The chosen person then walked around the circle to each person individually and told them to ‘Stop clapping’ however way they wanted. When the person clapping felt that they were being asked in a convincing way they would stop. Each person was then given a go at asking people to stop. It became apparent that the most believable way was to look the clapper directly in the eye as this got their attention.
• Good Times – For this activity the group got into pairs and shared a memory with each other. They then discussed and chose who's memory each of them would perform to the group. Once a decision had been made the circle was reformed and each person in turn gave their memory. The aim was for the group to guess who’s memory it was and establish what gave it away. We found that their was a certain state of mind that was shown when somebody is recalling a memory of their own, they almost become separate from everyone else in order to go through the memory in their head. On the other hand the person lying was able to make more eye contact etc… A very interesting activity!
• Just Sit on the Chair – and that was the task, the group sat end on and watched one person sitting on the chair, that was all the information we were given. This was the activity that hit me the most, it should have been easiest, but instead was the hardest because you unconsciously performed, whether by making lots of face movement (me, very embarrassingly) to simply laughing. This focused on the idea that you become a character rather than just perform as a character while on stage.

  The reason for us doing these activities was that in tomorrows lesson we will be researching a monologue to use as our first assessed piece. It is to be a naturalistic monologue and therefore must be believable for the audience, which should be interesting…