Time to act

Hurry up, let's act!

In this lesson we had the opportunity to meet a professional danish actor, Rasmus, who introduced us to some warm up drama exercises. From the beginning I could see how open and how enthusiastic he was, which gave me positive energy to start the lesson and learn a lot about how to use my body to express things but also many useful exercises I could transpose into my teaching with the pupils. 

Let's warm up

We started the lesson waking up our bodies by jumping, moving our body parts and warm up our vocal cords. I could understand the importance of waking up our body physically first, because acting is not only about being mentally prepared to think and switch expressions but also about being physically flexible and loose. Then we had to be in pairs and do the "leading movement" exercise, which was all about focusing on the partner's body movement and decisions. For me this exercise allowed me to be concentrated on every body part, feel it and try to create a connection with the person in front of me. One last activity that we did was to count from one to ten in a group without talking to each other. In the beginning it was very hard to get higher than five but in the end we managed to get to ten even fifteen. During this challenge I felt a strong connection between each other and think that this activity was all about paying attention to the others and feel the "inner" intentions each of us had.

A shot of emotions

As we could already experience it with Malte a week before, this time we had the chance to get even deeper into emotions' expression. Indeed, we were standing in a big circle and had to introduce ourselves, tell our names and one thing that we liked, in the emotion that would be given to us from the previous person in the circle. Shy, happy, scared, in love, sad, upset were the emotions that were expressed in many different and personal ways. For me it was very exciting to see how people, that I already knew before, would change their facial expression and attitude by appropriating these emotions. The next challenge for us was to meet other people with an emotion. All the class was standing in two lines one in front of the other. Everyone had to be facing a partner and had an emotion, chosen by Rasmus, that had to be shown to the other person when meeting each other. This part was very interesting because no one knew which emotion each of us had to express, which lead to strange meetings such as saying "hello" in a sad way to a person that would say "hello"in a happy way. This mix of emotions made me understand how challenging it was for me to feel things internally and externally but also to let go of my mind and body's restrictions.

"Freeze"

At the end of the lesson we experienced some improvisation by getting into the "freeze" game. The idea was that one would start to do an action without sound and wait until someone else would come and join the action by adding a movement. The actions would go on until someone screems "freeze" and add a new movement to the "frozen" action that was going on. I really loved to do this activity because it was a living proof of our wide imagination capacity. It was interesting to see how each of us would interpretate a movement and add another one to make sense to his imagination.  In this same idea, I had the feeling that the way people would perceive the movements and add new ones were little pieces of information related to their personal traits. I really had a lot of fun doing this activity and laughed to all of our crazy ideas that came up.

 

Use drama techniques at school

This session gave me a lot of new ideas that I could use in my class with the pupils. In fact, the first thought I had is that these different activities could be used as "active breaks" anytime I feel that the class energy has to be "reboosted". The group connection and complicity that is created through these different exercises is very important to keep a safe and confident atmosphere in class. Indeed, school is also about getting the pupils together and transmit different values such as respect, collaboration and empathy. These exercises are different "Ice breakers" that bring the pupils in an authentic body and mind situation. Also, working with emotions is important for me in order to make the pupils understand that it is important to accept them and try to make them feel the impact they can have on their body and be able to face them and get the best out of it. As acting is for me an important aesthetic way to express feelings, experiences or a knowledge, I will reuse these activities and allow the pupils to enlarge their creativity and imagination. However, I am conscious that using drama in class can be very challenging for the pupils and that's why I will always try to give the opportunity for each to partake or not.