I was back at the same location in East London, where we were in the basement of somebodies office where there was random pieces of art such as bananas on sticks and lego houses.

This week we were focussing on where we left off last week – keep remembering to react and accept what we were given and develop it even more then before. Making sure that everything matters to that the audience see the justifications and agree along with the scene that is being played out in front of them.

We started the day with a sequence warm up game where three different topics were going around the circle and  we had to make sure that we passed all of the patterns simultaneously. This is usually a game you play just to get you focussed – however, in this instance we used it as a way to get idea for warm up scenes. The strans we ended up getting was furniture, weather styles and shoes.

In the first set of scenes i ended up in one about Ikea and another about playing golf to train to be a tennis player. We played these scenes again only this time we had to make sure we justified everything with a ‘because’ and ‘therefore’.  So we re-did the first three scenes and the dynamics and the style of the scenes completely changed.

The Ikea scene that I was a part of became a story about a woman facing her fears by going to the store and buying the wardrobe with her new boyfriend that her ex-fiancee locked her in and dumped her. The original scene was nothing like this and by changing the dynamics of the scene because everything had to be justified and have a reason for saying it, it completely changed the whole dynamic and created humour to the audience.

We then discussed and talked about the second beats of a Harold and what needs to be done to make it stronger and more effective to an audience. By talking about the dynamics and what needs to be kept in the next stage (the game of the scene, a character in a different situation, a flash to the past or future).

We then did a couple more scenes and scenarios finishing off with a scene about two of the guys working as chefs at a kitchen by the beach. The last part of the lesson was creating quick fire second beats for that scene as to where the scene could of gone in the second part of a Harold. For example – we could see a scene with one of the guys and their girlfriend, another one about the other chef being interviewed by his supervisor, and then another one taking the game about the theme of stress.
Case Study 1 : Blink-182

This is not a group i thought i would use as a case study, but Carleen said something about improv and the way to develop a scene that made me think of this very explicit song and the lyrics. Carleen described improv as effing the right dog. I will put this in more nice terms as i don’t want to keep using that terminology but that is what I mean but going to explain it in a more diplomatic way.  You all have to make sure that you are in the same bubble so that the scenes make sense. You can’t be in loads of different bubbles as the scene will lose its way and there will be loads of bubbles around the stage and the audience will get lost. This reminded me of Blink-182 as they have a song pretty much about this subject and the song burst into my head and didn’t stop playing on repeat during the rest of the lesson.