Monday: met the actors for the first time and straight away started with workshops whereby they got into groups and continue from a task that Denise had set prior to me undertaking the role of DSM, once all introductions were made, I was delighted the task of sorting out any technical issues with the company and ways of presenting their ideas for the Tuesday morning.
Tuesday: Company was called at 9:30 for a 10am start and to present findings on "Animal farm" and author George Orwell, in this my role was to link up the projector to my mac so that some groups could present their research findings. i learnt a lot from this personally as I haven't studied the piece of text in secondary education so I found this very much informative and allowed me to catch up with the historical context behind the book as well as to understand the story of 'Animal Farm'.
Wednesday : Company warm-up, lasted 30 minutes including vocal warm up, Denise then asked them to create a small scene depicting the story of the play and how it affects the audience through their interpretation. In total 10 groups performed their pieces and had to critically feedback to each other and allow the groups to take notes to further their acting pieces.
Thursday: company warm-up, no vocal when Denice came into the room and asked them to look at a performance style of physical theatre but no words allowed, this proved to be difficult as things were done with intelligible noises from all the groups. Did a warm down and reviewed all that was produced in the workshop
Friday: looked into War cry's, one in particular being the Haka, the battle cry from the New Zealand rugby team before every match, the exploration for this was to get the idea of possibly using one in the play representing different classes to th animals i.e the pigs have one, the ducks another, hens and chicks have one, in a stylised way of course. In the afternoon of that day Denice asked the actors to look at a piece of stylisation called Botoh, a controlled piece of theatre which explores movement being the main character, once again no talking and the expression of the body and being as one with oneself especially with the body. Later that night the inters production of 'Shelf life' came to a close.
