Professional Drama Practice with Jonathan Grieve

This module will allow us and give us the opportunity to work with, experienced and freelance theatre director, Jonathan Grieve. We're going to have a series of 8 workshops in this module to experiment and challenge ourselves creatively and physically as an actor. I myself am excited as I enjoy being push to my limits, especially on the creative side of drama.
We started this module on the 30th of January and will have to perform on the 27th of February which puts pressure on us because of the lack of time we have. I, myself see this as motivation to work harder knowing we have little time to produce a play and don't want the pressure and stress from our last play to be brought back into this module.

I missed our first session with John on Monday due to pains on my left and right deltoids. I did hear a lot of physical work and activities were done and that a script Michael wrote was handed out. Therefore, I came to Uni on Tuesday prepared to work hard and to the best of my ability although I didn't have the right attire and my shoulders weren't fully healed I did as much as I could.
We started off the day doing a lot of physical games such as running around catching a ball. We also did some yoga to control our body and our muscles. We then proceeded on doing a concentration task that Michael did.. He'd throw a ball across a room and we'd al have to try and get to it but in slow motion. This was also another physical control challenge. However, once any of us would get near the ball Michael would throw it on the other side of the room and have to get to it again in slow motion and this would be ongoing for a long time. It was very challenging.
We then got into pairs and had to create strange and abstract postures that show us reaching for the ball but at the same time show struggle.

After the physical activities, we attempted to sing a song about patriotism which originates from Ireland but the context on the song is similar to the context of the play Michael wrote ('Der Mischlinger'). Once we worked on the song we did an activity that required us to improvise. We had guards and prisoners. The space was empty and we had to walk into the space in character doing whatever we thought was appropriate that represented our characters best into a freeze frame. We had to do this three times,

• First time: Guards authority over prisoners
• Second time: Prisoners rebelling
• Third time: Prisoners rebelling, guards on the verge of dying/ dead

John then said we should make a transition to each freeze frame, but in character. I thoroughly enjoyed this because I thought we came up with a very decent short scene that could potentially be used in a play to represent foreshadowing or something similar to that.

At the end of the session we all just sat down and discussed characters. I'm playing witness 9 in the play 'Der Mischlinger'.