Essay on Character and Spontaneous Improvisation

Submitted By Francesca-MIGLIORE
Words: 719
Pages: 3

During my exploration of Blood Brothers the class took part in many activities such as spontaneous improvisation, hot-seating, many different warm ups to get us ready to re-enact parts of the book etc.
The first activity we was set was to walk around the room as if we were the characters at different ages. This was to work on our spontaneous improvisation and characterisation. During this activity you had to adapt to the character you was set very fast which meant changing your posture, gesture and facial expression very quick. I was Linda and I couldn’t speak so I had to make my body language very clear to suit the character so everyone knew who I was as soon as they saw me. In my opinion playing Linda as a child was the most difficult because she was a lot like Mickey at that age. However, as she turned into a teenager it was a lot easier to portray her character because she was completely different to both Mickey and Edward so she stood out. When developing her character at different parts I would go from rolling around on the floor to emphasise the fact that she didn’t care about getting dirty, to walking with better posture to show she matured.
After this the class had to get into groups of 3 and pick one of the main characters within the play and decide which part of the play there character is from. I was the first one to hot seat and I decided to be Mickey when he first met Edward. I was asked a lot of questions about my friends, what I done during the day and if I enjoyed my life. I had bad posture, a Liverpool accent and couldn’t sit still in my chair so I would constantly be changing positions in my chair to emphasise the fact that Mickey as a child just wanted to constantly play and saw every object as a toy. I was asked about Edward and was very excited to talk about him because in the play they both looked up to each other and didn’t want to be apart. In juxtaposition when I was asked about Linda I would make little comments such as ‘ew she’s a girl’ and wouldn’t have the slightest interest about her.
Our 3rd task was Mrs.J’s living photo album and we wanted to include many cross cuts into different tenses to show the important moments that triggered her emotions to either be happy or sad. Our first scene was of Mrs.Johnstone taking a family picture, normally we would of done it as a photographer taking it but we wanted it to be realistic and show that she wouldn’t be able to afford that. We included sound (camera