- Drama
- Senior
- Sixth Form
This week all the Lower 5 and Sixth Form Drama students took part in a workshop led by Kerry Frampton of Splendid Productions. One of the pupils involved, Alice W, Lower 5, describes the event:
"Since we are in the middle of creating our mock devising pieces, this workshop was a great opportunity to learn new techniques for our pieces. We started by discussing what we would be doing and some basic terms that Kerry explained in a bit more detail. We then spread out across the room for the first exercise Kerry took us through creating a short sequence of eight moves completely mimed.
"This was very interesting to do because we didn’t have time to prepare, and we couldn’t talk during the movements. We then looked at scaling this sequence up and down, so we started by doing a very small version of our sequence. We then moved onto the main bulk of the session, which was all based around a fairytale of our choosing, with a focus on food poverty which we had to intertwine with our chosen story.
"Our first task was to make a scene where our character that would evoke empathy by the audience. Then, we had to do the exact opposite and look at how we could make our character be the most hated by the audience. This was quite challenging as we had to switch very quickly and only had a few minutes to do this. After we had done this, we looked briefly at other techniques, such as making placards with our bodies and making graphs to display statistics solely through the use of physical theatre. We also looked at using a song and changing the lyrics to reflect our character. Finally, we had three minutes to put it all together before splitting into smaller groups to watch everyone’s performances, which were all amazing!
Overall, this was a wonderful experience as it really aided our devising skills and helped us to improve at thinking quickly on our feet. I'm sure that all the groups will bring some aspects of this into our final pieces. Kerry was absolutely amazing and kept the energy up throughout the entire three-hour workshop, and we are all very thankful to her!"