Drama diary on movement (physical action)
Today in our drama workshop we investigated movement and physical action in drama. We carried out many different exercises to help us establish the importance of movement and how it should be used effectively. To communicate plot, and characters relationships to the audience.
Firstly in our workshop we were given the task of creating the most abstract freeze frame possible, we were put into groups of 6,2 people being the directors and the remaining 4 creating the freeze frame, My group managed to produce a freeze frame based around a piece of scaffolding. We did this by placing people one by one on the scaffolding in ways, which we thought were different and challenging.
Once we had created a successful freeze frame our teacher gave us the task of placing our tableau into context. When asked we had to give a performance to the class, still in the original freeze frame but with dialogue explaining our obscure positioning. The audience then had to work out what the situation the characters were stuck in simply by listening to the few lines of dialogue the cast spoke and paying close attention to the positioning and movement. The audience did guess the situation, which was good. We did a piece of dialogue that explained that we were stuck in a lift that had broken down. There are many reasons why we did this exercise the most important being to show the importance of physical action and how actions when used effectively can communicate to the audience with the character on stage and show the characters feelings through movements and not words. It also helped us understand that movement can help the audience understand the context of the play and that close attention must be given to the physical/visual elements of drama.
