What is Theatre Essay Example
What is Theatre Essay Example

What is Theatre Essay Example

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  • Pages: 5 (1224 words)
  • Published: September 25, 2017
  • Type: Essay
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At the beginning of the unit I didn't really know what theatre was, I suppose I had never really thought about it before, and had just assumed that by theatre people just meant the plays they performed or went to see. Throughout this topic though, I have learnt that its not just being on stage and playing your part, it how you play your part and the work and effort that goes into a performance and the exploration of the character you are playing. As we progress through the unit my perception of the word theatre changed greatly as I realised how much work it really was.The areas we worked on during this topic were, concentration, to do this we interrogated a member of our group.

We looked at stage fighting and created a piece of drama involving this, we

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studied body language and character this is important so that the audience knows exactly what is going on and who you are. We also looked at movement, voice and ritual, which we explored in the form of a funeral. When we worked on the interrogation I was in a group with, Hannah Gess, Jennifer Routledge, and Sam Gore.We inqusitioned Sam, I thought this was quite a successful piece of drama because we all managed to keep straight faces throughout, even though the questions we were asking were completely unrelated and made no sense whatsoever.

We weren't quite aggressive enough when doing this but we managed to keep eye contact for most of the time. Another piece, which I thought was quite successful, was when we were studying old age and we had to attempt to

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do an everyday task.I worked with Kinnari and we decided to try to change a light bulb. I think we managed this well because we were constantly thinking of how old people act and take much longer to do everything and that they find things much harder because they are full of aches and pains and they're eyesight and hearing are deteriorating. You also have to change the way you are and how you stand speak.

This was a hard thing to do because it is very alien to do something, which you are not used to and have never experienced.It is very difficult to know what it is like or how to act in every situation, but it was very satisfying to do when you think you have played the part to the best of your ability. We also had to do a piece of concentration work on our own, we had to talk for about a minute about ourselves, information, tell stories, things like that I found this quite challenging as it was telling people about myself and I was unsure of how they would react.It is not as hard when you are playing a part because its not really you and the attention is focused on the person you are playing not just on the person you are. During this I found it quite tricky not to fidget, as I didn't know what to do with my hands and feet. I found myself preoccupied with things in the room that I had never noticed before as it was easier to focus my attention on something other than the people I was talking

to.

When working on another piece of interrogation, I worked with Holly, Hannah, and KC.The aim of the piece was to try and brainwash KC, we asked him a series of simple questions that anyone should know the answer to and if he answered the question correctly he would be punished by having his fingers chopped off. The more he got the questions right and the more he was tortured the more he panicked and the quicker the questions got and the more intense the scene became, until he finally cracked and started answering the questions with the wrong answers, the brainwashing had been successful.I think that this was an effective piece of drama because it showed the real strain on KC as the situation became more intense and out of his control.

At the beginning he was in control because he was being defiant by answering the questions correctly, but by the end he just couldn't take the pressure anymore and he just cracked and gave in to what was being forced upon him.We also worked on the first scene of 'Romeo and Juliet' as a class, this was quite a hard thing to do because as there were so many of us it was difficult to get organised. This was because everyone had their own ideas to contribute and we all had to listen to each other. It was also quite laborious to make sure that not one person had their back to the audience and that everyone knew they're role in the scene, as without this organisation, the whole thing is very difficult to pull together properly.

The way we did this was

that we allocated all the parts and the rest of us were all citizens of either the house of Montague or the house of Capulet and the scene ended with a large fight that had broken out being ended by the Prince's intervention. This scene worked quite well eventually but to begin with we did have some problems with communication, in that nobody was listening to anybody else but we sorted ourselves out in due time.The thing I found hardest to do throughout this whole unit was the section on movement, voice, and ritual, as for this we had to do a burial scene. We had to make the scene serious and with no jokes in it at all. I struggled with being serious for the whole time, as some of the rituals like walking into the church in procession were very hard to take seriously when you had to chant at the same.

The first time we tried this we let a bit of humour creep in, as this is the kind of work we usually do, but the second time round we managed it just about.I think that this is the area I personally need to work on, and concentrate hard when we revisit it. From this topic I have learnt, that everything has a lot more effort and preparation put into it than it would first seem. When playing a role you have to think about every aspect of the character's life and how they would react to the different situations they are presented with. It takes time and effort to fully develop your understanding of a character and until this is

done you cannot play the part to the best of your ability.It may seem like a great deal of work to put in but once done it makes the understanding of the character much easier.

You have to think about a whole range of things to do with how you present yourself to the audience, such as body language, tone of voice, posture, emphasis, pace of delivery of lines and eye contact. It is also important to remember that being still is sometimes as important as movement. This topic really Opened my eyes as to what really goes into creating a piece of theatre.

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