Acting

In this student driven activity, students will work together to put up a short one act play from audition to production within a one week time limit. The purpose of the activity is to show students, quickly, how important it is to work together, to collaborate, and to negotiate as a group. This is also a good activity to apply responsibility. The students themselves are responsible for all aspects of this activity - you should only take on an advisory role. Give feedback when asked but don’t act as a director or make decisions for your students. The point is not a “perfect” production but to give students an activity where they must work together in order to succeed. The process is more important than the product.

Students will explore characterization by examining posture and playing a version of Musical Chairs with “proper” posture. Students will also explore specific character physicality by playing a relay game where they must take on and then pass along the physical characterization of specific characters.

This lesson incorporates physicality into stage relationships and learn to use stage position as an element of blocking that can show the dynamics of and changes in power in a scene.

Students will go over some practical uses of the Alexander Technique. They will be asked to demonstrate an everyday activity to show their understanding of how to incorporate Alexander principles into their movements.

What tools do students need to properly prepare a scene? What exercises? This multi-class lesson plan models and practices those tools and exercises with the full class before they have to take on a scene for assessment.

For this culminating project, students will perform their original monologue from the previous lesson.

Students will create a character and design a puppet for performance.

In their rehearsal today, students will review their blocking choices with a specific objective of making every action in the scene purposeful and theatrical through character wants, audience connection, and vocal clarity.

In this real world application lesson students view videos of a theatre profession, complete viewing quizzes, and hand in a Reflection.

This lesson is a straight up rehearsal period. Students will have 30 minutes to rehearse and decide on a section they’re going to show the class. They will perform their section without scripts.

In this lesson, students will spend time rehearsing their abstract scenes. They will also practice and demonstrate movement skills such as facial expression, posture, gesture control, and balance.

To apply knowledge toward a pantomime performance.

To apply knowledge toward a pantomime performance.

Students will put into action the Stanislavski principles, superobjective, and scene scores as they rehearse their scenes for performance. In these classes students will work through planning, blocking, specific details, a line check, and a final runthrough before the performance.

Students will put into action the Stanislavski principles, superobjective, and scene scores as they rehearse their scenes for performance. In these classes students will work through planning, blocking, specific details, a line check, and a final runthrough before the performance.

Students discuss what it means to not “force” the humour. They play all the games from the unit in a high risk setting, as volunteers in front of the class.

In this rehearsal, students will share their scenes with another group with the specific focus of examining it for actor-driven movement rather than character-driven movement: shuffling their weight back and forth between their feet, playing with their hair, vaguely gesturing with their hands, etc.

Students learn about the resonators and use them in an exercise.

In this exercise, students will learn about the concept of status and how it affects character interactions. Using the good old system of “Rock, papers, scissors”, they’ll determine who moves up and down the status ladder.

The objective of this lesson is for students to explore different ways of analyzing text, to make their character’s lines rich and full of emotion and meaning. This lesson provides three exploratory exercises (which can be used individually as desired) as well as a culminating assignment.