TheatreCenter

Unbelievably, we have reached HALF TERM already (where have the weeks gone?!), so this is just a reminder that there will be NO SESSIONS FOR THE NEXT 2 WEEKS – but that we’ll be back again, as usual on Saturday 5th March 2011! We wish you all a safe and Happy Half Term and look forward to creating some more brilliant theatrical experiences with you after the holidays!
Pip & Jo

Director/Producer/Film Maker James Weisz took time out of his busy schedule to join us this week! As we were a small Junior group we decided to create a ‘Film In A Session’! This invoved coming writing a short story line, a (very!) brief rehearsal and then filming with a ‘Live Edit’, meaning that it everything had to be filmed in sequence, using diferent camera angles and with no second takes! The end product, ‘THE TRIAL’! is looking good; we hope to show it on the Big Screen later in the term! The Seniors started of with a totally hysterical round of ‘Park Bench’ – they truly are masters of this exercise now – and backed that up with a brilliant, slapstick improvisation based on a current news story entitled ‘Super Nan’ (no prizes for guessing which news story that was)!! In the joint session we thought we’d try something a little different, so this week we had ‘Random Music Theatre’! The students divided into 2 groups and chose a random piece of music to inspire a short piece of theatre; which we then filmed. This session produced 2 very emotional movement pieces; ‘The Rejoice Of Happiness’; where the audience sees the human spirits of 2 wolf cubs remembering a time before they were wolves… And ‘AsFISHxiation’; A drowning man gives up his fight for life amongst some friendly fish…

Jo and the students were very pleased to welcome back Melody Roche for the 2nd in her Meisner workshops this week. The Juniors concentrated on focus, observation and concentration with a variety of Meisner inspired exercises including ‘Chief Ape’ and ‘Mirror Wall’; And the seniors impressed everyone with their grasp of the Repetition Execrise; which they then went on to expand into conversations between an ‘emotional’ character and an ‘independent’ character, resulting in some amazing performances! In the joint session we did some text work – not the Shakesperean kind but ‘Txt Spk’! We explored abreviations in our modern language and how ‘non verbal communication’ can result in misunderstandings..!

Your supervisor this week will be Jo. She will be on site from 12.30 on Saturday and can be contacted on 07979 222140

“The foundation of acting is the reality of doing” Sanford Meisner.
Last week we were joined by actress, comedienne and Meisner expert, Melody Roche.
The goal of the Meisner technique has often been described as getting actors to “live truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” The technique emphasizes that to carry out an action truthfully on stage, it is necessary to let emotion and subtext build, based on the truth of the action and on the other characters around them, rather than simply playing the action or playing the emotion. One of the best known exercises of the Meisner Technique is called Repetition, where one person spontaneously makes a comment based on his or her partner, and the comment is repeated back and forth between the two actors in the same manner, until it changes on its own. The object is always to react truthfully, allowing the repetition to change naturally rather than by manipulation. A hideously difficult exercise that both groups tackled with great aplomb but one that the seniors in particular really rose to! We also continued with our series of ‘Random Word Theatre’; the juniors coming up with an intriguing piece entitled ‘Tomorrow’; and the seniors (given the title ‘Who’) with an ingenious take on the well known kids game ‘Guess Who’!