The examination is on clowning so we had many lessons exploring clowning techniques.

Ok so those people look funny I just felt stupid.

Right we now had facial masks now we needed body masks. Not a trace of ourselves should be seen. Which meant totally masking our personalities. We had to show through our bodies who we were trying to be. To do this we needed to think of clown types. So we sat down as a class and discussed clown types. These are the ones we came up with:

• Terrific Tracy
• Dumb Damon
• Boring Barbra
• Posh Penelope
• Super Simon
• Cool Carl
• Geeky Gary
• Sorted Shirley
• Laddish Liam
• Obsessive Olive
• Sexy Celina
• Shy Sammy
• Stressed Tess

These are all clowns with very clear cut personalities. To get into body masks we did an exercise where we stood in a circle and have a clown type called out we would then have to put a body mask then a facial mask and finally sound in the form of gobbledegook. So for example if you were cool Carl you would have an exaggerated relaxed posture, so almost just lolling around, the facial expression needs to be very ‘cool’ and gobbledegook needed to sound laid back. Basically the entire stature needs to be laid back. We also learnt and revised a few stage fighting techniques. Such as

• Falling
• Pulling hair
• Pushing
• Slapping
• Siw saw
• Arms intertwined
• Falling off block
• Log rolling

We had now learnt everything we needed to know about clowning. We had learnt to be a clown we need three things

1. Facial mask
2. Body mask
3. Gobbledegook

We just now needed to practice before we did the real mock exam. So we basically had a mock of a mock. We were put into groups of three or four and to do a scene with three contrasting clowns. The entire scene had to be in gobbledegook.

Everything we had learnt and practiced in those previous lessons, we now had to put into our mock exam practical assessment. Our first task was to decide who we wanted to work with. We had to hand in a piece of paper into our teacher stating who we did and didn’t want to work with and with good valid reasons not just ‘because she’s my friend’ or ‘because I think they’re good’. We had to say why we thought they were good or bad like ‘they could maintain a certain character. With our choices Miss Grennin put us into groups. I luckily was with people who were on my list of people I wanted to work with. There was no one in my group who I didn’t want to work with.

Now we were in our groups we had to decide a scene we could clown and that would last at least 10-15 minutes. We decided to do a wedding scene. It needed to be funny so we had in it a male bride, a female groom, two bitchy bridesmaid sluts, an extremely rude vicar and a bloated hag of a mother in-law. We tried to sit down and do a plan but nobody could agree on anything so we decided to get up and improvise. Doing so we very quickly came up with a sketch we were all happy with. We also realised this one scene was not going to be long enough so we added a marriage proposal, a wedding reception, a funeral of the bride and an entire scene of gobbledegook between the bridesmaids in the toilets. We managed to also get in to our play stage fighting techniques and masks.

When we actually were assessed I felt that we could have undoubtably done better. I felt that nerves were doing an awful lot to me and my group. We let ourselves down by missing cues and coming in late on lines. Most of that was due to lack of practice. If I had the chance to do the entire piece again I would try and cram in a lot more practice, I would be a lot more clear on what I was doing and on what my character actually was as I felt my character was a bit of a muddle as it did not have the usual clear cut exaggerated clown personality like the ones I listed above.