Shakespearean Insult Generator

We were given a list of Shakespearian Adjectives and insults. We had to read through the list and choose 3 from each column and learn it off by heart. We then had to go around the room and say them to different people in the class. We tried out different volumes, stress words, gestures, body language and speeds of saying the words. This helped us understand and learn some of the language used in the play a bit more in a fun way and start to think about different voices and ways to say our lines. This exercise may also help a lot for the fight scene between Helena and Hermia as they say similar insults in the scene. This taught us different ways to accentuate those lines and make them more interesting/effective. Therefore, helping us to make that scene better.

Physical Archetypes Exercise

Thought about different physical archetypes, their physicality and their personality traits. Analysed positives and negatives about them. Thought about their voice, eyeline and if they would want to interact with others. I believe we were made to do this exercise to make us think about how our characters may have many different levels to them in different scenes and we could think about using some of the archetypes in our performance to give more depth to our characters so that we can fully understand them and enhance the performance. For example, all the lines we were given to decide what archetype would say them were from Puck. Puck is usually seen as a Trickster archetype but some of the lines we were given, such as "Pretty soul" relates to the carer archetype. 

Amoeba Starter Game

Amoeba game. Start at beginning as an amoeba (transform your physicality into a small bacteria like sort of creature), you find another amoeba and then play Rock Paper Scissors, whoever wins transforms their physicality into a fish. After that: a bird and then Diana Ross. If you turn into Diana Ross you sing the line "stop in the name of love" the first person to sing this is the winner. This got us up and moving at the beginning of the lesson and made us start to think about character physicality. 

Gesture exercise

We were given a scene from A midsummer nights dream between Helena and Demetrius from the beginning of the play. We were then shown 3 gestures that we could use during the scene and use along with the lines to make it easier to understand through gestures and body language. It also helped us understand the two characters, Helena and Demetrius as we could choose which gestures suited them most. The 3 gestures were: probe, hook and dismiss. We then had to go through the lines and pick certain words that we should stress during the lines to make it more effective, the gestures were usually used on the words we decided to stress and helped us to make the scene more interesting or understandable for the audience. This exercise could help us to think about these things in our own scenes.