Lesson 1

In todays lesson we started by doing basic exercises to warm up our body. We started by pretending to chew gum which warmed up our mouths and then we did lots of different shapes and movements with our body, like when we got on all fours and pretended to be cats and hissed at each other to exercise our mouths. I liked beginning with that because it got the awkward tension out the room by embarrassing ourselves in front of each other. We the worked on our breathing, we did this by breathing in then slowly letting it out. After we practised our articulation, by saying A, E, I, O, U. But to try to interpret Naughts and Crosses into our exercise we said A, E, I, O, U to each other in way a character in the play would say it. This was good because we were able to start thinking about the play and the characters while working on our articulation. We then worked on projection and pitch, we sang words like "moo" and "me", we sang them in different pitches and at different volumes. 

After the warm up we started to think about the play. We had to walk around and talk to people like we were equal, we did this by constantly flattering each other. This I think symbolised the Crosses, by them being the best and the main reason of the play, equality, but changed it so everyone was equal.We then had to go from 1-5, 1 being the least important to 5 the most important. In the play 1 would be the Naughts and 5 would be the Crosses. I liked being the numbers in-between, because they were the most interesting to me. This is because you had to think more about them, as the 1s are very poor and sad and the 5s are very rich and happy. For me I liked being in the middle, because your not poor but your not rich your just happy as you are, you don't live on the street and you don't live in a mansion with loads of friends and a lot of parties to go to. You have a very normal life with no high expectations and your not constantly looking down on people, your just you and go on in life. I also liked this because in the play you don't really think about the middle people, so it was interesting to think about them as well.

To end the lesson we got in groups of 5 and prepared freeze frames. The first time I did it with my group we had 3 sentences but could only choose 2 words in each sentence to use in the scene. What was interesting was that everyone used the same words but all had different scenes. I liked from this activity being able to create a scene with only 2 words and freeze at the end but still can show a lot about the characters and the play in the short space of time. We then did the same thing but used the whole sentence and had to do it in slow motion. What was good about doing it in slow motion was that you could see every movement and facial expression a lot clearer and when you performed it made you think more about that then you normally would.