Our new acting sessions
Tonight is our third week of acting sessions and it has been lovely to see the group grow and develop. I thought it might be good to do a recap of our first two weeks to give people an idea of the sort of work you could expect if you wanted to come along.
Impro Club ... This session is very much an opportunity to explore some of the basic foundations of Improvisation, inspired by Viola Spolin's teachings. For the first week we looked at acceptance - this is something that we will continuously return to throughout the sessions. Impro teachers will always start with the fundamental of "blocking" or saying "No!" to someone's ideas - Scene's struggle to develop unless players are willing to take what they are given and run with it. However another key theme around acceptance is the basic trust that you can do it, you have all the answers you need to make a scene work as long as you trust yourself! Our second session looked at developing characters, it is often easier to improvise if you feel you are playing someone else, it is less exposing and ultimately have the excuse that it isn't you saying or doing those silly things it is someone else. I'm sure there is a fancy psychological name for this but for me it is returning to the playfulness of childhood. Making up big characters and seeing what their worlds are like.
Tonight we enter the joyful world of Gobbledygook - one of my favourite places to play. By freeing yourself of having to make sense with words we will be exploring sounds and meaning. I think it is fascinating what language people create, mine often sounds vaguely Russian.
Our Pro Acting sessions have only met once, last week and we started to explore how we can develop character from text. We used the open scene from an amazing play by David Hare called The Permanent Way. This is a brilliant example of verbatim theatre and was a great challenge to look at how to create characters truthfully and simply.
Tonight we will be keeping on exploring text and characters but this week looking at the power of listening and responding.
