Jan 11th: Drama

On January 11^th, we were given a sheet with lots of different drama conventions and techniques on it.  We then colour coded it so that the one we definitely knew we coloured green, the ones we kind of knew were amber and the ones we’d never heard of were red. 

I did know all about the basics such as keeping in roles, hot seating, slow motion, facing out of the drama and also things like house management which I have done a bit of out of school and set construction.  I didn’t know the difference between a monologue and a soliloquy but now i know that a monologue is addressed to the audience whereas a soliloquy is more the person talking to themselves and reflecting their feelings such as the famous Shakespearian quote ‘to be, or not to be’.  I don’t really know how I felt about this, I was pleased that I finally knew the difference between the two but a little disappointed that I hadn’t worked it out for myself as it is a term that has been mentioned in English classes before.

I researched Mantle of the Expert for my homework as this was another term I was unfamiliar with.  Here is the definition I came up with after researching it...

Mantle of the Expert

This is when children are put into the role as an expert in a particular field.  The teacher sets a task and if they were to do it in the style of ‘Mantle of the Expert’, they might say something like ‘right, as you know, the ‘event that’s been studied’ is coming up and I need you, my best reporters on the job’.  This instantly puts the children in a role as an expert reporter and this is helpful as it can boost confidence levels and make the pupils feel good about themselves.

In the drama studio, we learnt about sound scapes.  A sound scape is usually performed by a group of people as apposed to a solo and is where the performers make sounds and noises to create an atmosphere and enhance the scene. They can be used as apposed to or in conjunction with music and digital sound effects.  At first, as a whole group, we made a sound scape for a jungle or a rainforest.  We each came up with a sound individually.  We would be using those later.  Miss Woffinden started the sound scape and sent it round the circle with gentle clicking.  After that slowly made its way around the circle, she started slapping her legs quite lowly.  I realised we were symbolising the rain, slow at first and as it picked up we slapped our legs harder and faster.  We then slowed down again and eventually went back to the clicking then silence.  We repeated this procedure and as the rain picked up, Miss Woffinden pointed to random people to indicate to them to o the sound effect they prepared earlier.  Afterwards, we split into two groups to do the same task.  We then performed our sound scape to he other group while they sat in the middle of the circle with their eyes closed.  I think pretty much everything we did worked.  Miss Woffinden recorded our sound scapes on her phone and we listened back to them.  We concluded that although our group had more appropriate, authentic sounds, it wasn’t as well organised and structured and a lot of our sounds got drowned out as we were all going at once.

We also did a conscience alley as Jack was unfamiliar with this.  A conscience alley is a good technique to use when a character is faced with a dilemma.  This provides a way to perform a decisive moment in greater detail.  The class form two lines facing each other.  One person takes the role of the person with the dilemma and as they walk down the ‘alley’, the members of the class speak their advice to them.  It can be organised so that people on the left give apposing advice to those on the right.  It can also be called a Thought Tunnel.  We took the topic of anorexia and split into two groups.  Beth was the person going down the alley with the dilemma of should she try to eat or carry on dieting.  I was on the side telling her she should eat.  As Beth came down, each person came in one by one to say the piece we had prepared ourselves then froze in a position that was relevant to what we were saying.  

This is a diagram of our conscience alley

The first people, at the top of the alley were quite far in and the people at the end were out so everybody could be seen.

We changed it quite a bit before we got to the final piece.  We had to readjust the positioning so you could see everyone because the first time we did it, the positioning didn’t work.  I think that the fact that everybody played a significant person in someone’s life worked well for example their friend, brother, doctor, mum etc. It really helped us choose what to say and gave us all a specific character rather than ‘those for’ and ‘those against’.