What is Theatre?

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Jan-Feb 2001

What is Theatre?

At the beginning of the unit I didn’t really know what theatre was, I suppose I had never really thought about it before, and had just assumed that by theatre people just meant the plays they performed or went to see. Throughout this topic though, I have learnt that its not just being on stage and playing your part, it how you play your part and the work and effort that goes into a performance and the exploration of the character you are playing. As we progress through the unit my perception of the word theatre changed greatly as I realised how much work it really was. The areas we worked on during this topic were, concentration, to do this we interrogated a member of our group. We looked at stage fighting and created a piece of drama involving this, we studied body language and character this is important so that the audience knows exactly what is going on and who you are. We also looked at movement, voice and ritual, which we explored in the form of a funeral.

        When we worked on the interrogation I was in a group with, Hannah Gess, Jennifer Routledge, and Sam Gore. We inqusitioned Sam, I thought this was quite a successful piece of drama because we all managed to keep straight faces throughout, even though the questions we were asking were completely unrelated and made no sense whatsoever. We weren’t quite aggressive enough when doing this but we managed to keep eye contact for most of the time. Another piece, which I thought was quite successful, was when we were studying old age and we had to attempt to do an everyday task. I worked with Kinnari and we decided to try to change a light bulb. I think we managed this well because we were constantly thinking of how old people act and take much longer to do everything and that they find things much harder because they are full of aches and pains and they’re eyesight and hearing are deteriorating. You also have to change the way you are and how you stand speak. This was a hard thing to do because it is very alien to do something, which you are not used to and have never experienced. It is very difficult to know what it is like or how to act in every situation, but it was very satisfying to do when you think you have played the part to the best of your ability.

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        We also had to do a piece of concentration work on our own, we had to talk for about a minute about ourselves, information, tell stories, things like that I found this quite challenging as it was telling people about myself and I was unsure of how they would react. It is not as hard when you are playing a part because its not really you and the attention is focused on the person you are playing not just on the person you are. During this I found it quite tricky not to fidget, as I didn’t know what to ...

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