With the Anglolympics on and TOK for the year 6s, today’s (7th Feb) drama workshop was certainly, let’s just say, a little more personal. With Year 5s understandably EXTREMELY BUSY with their participation in the Anglolympics, the dance studio was pretty bare. Nonetheless, we persevered and had much fun.
The warm-up exercises, as always, were challenging. As Mr. Ferdinand taught us about the different dramatic techniques and skills that were involved in the warm-ups, I couldn’t shake off the weird feeling that it was much like a Yoga class. After a lot of balance, concentration and relaxation, our bodies were ripe for the activities.
“Walking the curve” was certainly an interesting activity. Whilst we had undergone this exercise before, we had not expected Mr. Ferdinand to “take it to the next level”. The falling and picking up of people while randomly walking around was interesting. It helped us grow more conscious of the stage space, the speed at which we were walking and inculcated the ability to respond to certain actions while still maintaining the flow of the big picture. This was further enhanced by the game of acting emotions while walking randomly.
The final activity was the usual skit at the end of the day. The genre was first introduced as comedy. Easy enough right? Then we found out that no actual words were allowed to be said (only the word rhubarb and any other random onomatopoeia). The story had to also be based on a princess (who never smiles) trying to find Mr. Right by getting her suitors to make her laugh. Of course this was highly challenging given the circumstances that my group did not have a certain Joshua Cao. Nevertheless all groups came out with pretty entertaining skits with the most amusing one obviously being Cao’s group. The ending to that group’s skit, however, was not really clear but that can be forgiven for the very reason that Cao is in the group.
