Year 10 Term 1 Skills Bank

Character Creation Exercises

Research character/play

For this character creation exercise we had to find out more about the play by researching things such as the Rwandan Genocide which is a theme in the play ,to research the play you should take a theme from the play and find out more information about it . we researched and explored the character through out character Blogs which put us into the correct frame of mind for playing the character.This exercise helped us understand our character and the play better, we were able to use this information to build up the characters past life and experiences and then use it to show the emotions of the character.

Looking at historical, cultural, social and political background

When studying a play it is important to research the background of it. you should find out in what year / era the play was set , the more accurate the better as it will help you to understand the play more closely , The Witness is a very political play and if you didn't research it you would just be repeating lines and pretending  which is bad acting rather than understanding what your saying. Its also important to look at cultural and social background when studying plays because that is what your character knows and understands, this can be anything such as the foods they eat to the clothes they wear as long as it had a strong link to the character this will help you play the character better.

finding the given circumstances 

to create your character you have to find the given circumstances , these are the  circumstances in acting are what the author or play have given you as an actor to work with in terms of where you are, who you are, what you are doing and why you're are doing it.This is vital because if you don't know what your doing you're going to be walking around stage confused and awkward which unless your character is awkward and confused is very bad

hot seating

hot seating is when one student/actor sit in a chair in character . the other people will then ask questions to the actor for him or her to respond as there character, this helps both the actor being questioned and the person asking the question , it allows them both to explore the character in depth.

improvised scenes

we took our characters and created scenes from our minds, scenes that related to the script but weren't actually part of it . we made it up as we went along and this helped us to learn to stay in character no matter what it taught us to think like the character which made out character stronger.

Create the previous scene

we created improvised scenes from the scene before ours , this helped us to understand what could be happening in the scene we are performing.

Working with physical objectives

An objective is the basic purpose behind the process of acuminating the given circumstances-it is essential to know your objective because it makes it easier to move through our scenes.

Playing  objectives and finding useful objectives

we walked around the room and had to play different objectives to see how they could be portrayed .this helped us because it showed us a variety of ways we could play our objectives and what good objectives are.
3 line scenes

for this exercise we ran through our scenes using only 3 lines this helped us with objectives because we were focusing on the actions we were making and were more aware of our stage presence rather than focusing on the lines we were saying.
Working on a prescribed set
this helped us because we knew what we were working with when we are performing