Short but good!

English Theatre Lessons of January 25th with Anna of course, Florence, Alain, Gwenola, Thibault, Farida, Joss and the pianist who joined us after a while - hope I have not forgotten anybody?

Warming up
First of all, Anna asked Gwenola to lead the warm up, and she did it in her special way, which indeed was quite funny and efficient.


First exercise
Anna asked us to walk through the room with large movements, and, when she clapped in her hands, we had to freeze.
Then Anna asked each of us (one after the other) to go on with our frozen movement, saying loudly one or several sentences inspired by the freezing process. She then selected one of us to improvise a short story with our movement and sentence(s). After that, one person (the leader)was asked to stand behind (or her) to repeat some chosen words or sentences, and all the others (the chorus) stood behind the leader and were asked to repeat with emphasis the same words or sentences altogether. We also tried singing the chosen sentences.


The bus
Improvisation with a bus driver who is the leader of the story, with three passengers who enter and then leave the bus when the driver decides it. The passengers had to improvise a scene, talking to each other.
Another exercise with the bus was to sit in the bus and follow all the movements created by the driver: turning right, left, braking, etc...(Some drivers were really crazy by the way, says TT aka the guru)


Hamlet
As Anna still did not receive the play, she had printed for us a short summary of the story of Hamlet, and the second part of our English theatre lesson was to play it all together.
After reading this summary, it was decided that Florence would be the director of the story. While reading the main elements of the story, we were playing the scenes described by her, this time in French.