Mask Work

week 1

We began with a warm up as we do every physical theatre lesson. Eloise some students to stand infront of the mirrors with the rest of us sitting behind to see wshat's going on. She gave them all neutral masks to put on and taught us that we can't put on a mask facing the audience.

With their masks on, Eloise gave them all feelings and emotions to show with just their body standing still. For example: neutral, sad, happy or exited. But it all sounded easier than they imagined. Eyeline is very important, where your chin (masks chin) is, high or low for example, is very effective to the whole mood, but not only is it just the chin, but shoulders, knees, arms and even stomach.

Wearing a plain mask is very hard to show your feelings not being able to talk and see your face, so we need to work with our body very well to show how the 'person' feels. Although I didn't get to have a turn with a mask that lesson, I did learn so much from watching my peers.

week 2

This week after our usual warmup we got straight into mask work again but this time we started of focusing it on teddy bears. Eloise told a couple of people with the teddy's to control them and move their bodies to what emotions she says, just like some of the class did last week. They had to think about how the teddy stands and moves and how his head is placed and what its arms are doing. Elosie made us do this as the teddy can not talk, or have any facial expressions, like us when wearing a mask; this helped us understand and learn more about how we need to use our bodies.

Two of my peers went up in masks and performed a piece they made up on the spot, they chose to have a thief. Eloise and the class watched and we then all gave them feedback to tell them what we liked and disliked so they then tried it again with the improvements. Watching them I did know clearly what was bad and good as to me it was quite obvious.

Having your head down, touching your mask, not exaggerating feelings were some of the things that needed to be improved.

I was ready to have a go and wear a mask.

We had to partner up with someone to do the same thing, either 'love at first sight' or 'thief'. I paired up with Iwona.

At first we wanted to be different and do love at first sight and we tried out different scenarios, like a guy seeing a girl try on a dress at the shops, or meeting a guy at the park, although it was harder than it seems. But the after I thought of the idea of two friends meeting at the cafe and one of the friends- Iwona, show me a knecklace she bought and I try to take it when Iwona is distracted. My strengths today were understanding what was wrong and right and being able to know how to behave in a mask.

week 3

After we rehearsing with Iwona, we did an excercise with Eloise; a human sculpture exercise. Eloise got one person to go outside while she gave them a title, for them to come back in a chose some people to sculpt and tell them what to do with their body so that at the end everyone could walk around as if it was a museum to guess what the subject/title is. For example, I took part in being a sculpture for 'poverty' and 'unemployed'.

Being out of the picture is interesting to view it from different angles when walking around and being in it is interesting as you get to have a better feel of how to use your body forf people to understand what the finished piece is.

We did have to recreate 'unemployed' but we all got involved and figured out how it should look.

After the exercise, mine and Iwonas piece got chosen to perform and it went much better than we expected. Eloise and our peers laughed, which made me boost my confidence while performing and the feedback was really good. They loved our story line and how I exaggerated my movements and emotions with my body, Eloise said that we used our space wisely and we gave time for each character to introduce ourselves. We also adressed the audience very well.

We do need to improve on tocs and moving too much and also using too much of our hands as a 'language', but overall, it was good for a first try.

week 4

After our usual warm up we went to rehearse. Myself and Iwona used the feedback we got the week before to improve on our piece. We decided to change up a few things, not getting off our seats as many times; just twice until the end, let the theft touch and even wear the necklace for a bit, go up and get food together, so that there are different ways of me stealing the necklace and more exaggeration in our emotions. Together me and Iwona discussed that we need to make the performance for clean and crisp, rather than all over the place, so we still had to improve on that.

I think that our strengths were creativity and listening to our feedback to improve our performance. Our weaknesses were not thinking about our faces in the mask, while rehearsing we've been making facial expressions forgetting that we will be wearing a mask.

After rehearsing we watched two performances to feed them back with feedback. They also lacked a lot of emotion in there body and wasn't clear with who was doing what. I saw a lot of the top of heads and hands touching the masks face. This made me think about what else we might be doing wrong in our piece.

week 5

This week was the performance day, where we have had to film our performances.

We have had some time to rehearse before hand and talk about what we need to make sure we do right and not forget.

We cleaned up our ending and made it clear. We decided that the thief gets caught. We gave eachother tips and encouragement. We were very proud of what we we have been developing and were pretty confident.

We performed infront of mirrors for a few more minutes before the assessement.