Wednesday 8th January 2015 - Audition Workshop

Wednesday 8th January 2015
Audition Workshop

Today we took part in a workshop that was part if our audition for our country's good. Firstly we had to do a physical warm up to make sure that we were ready for moving around and to ensure that no one pulled a muscle or injured themselves during the lesson. We had to walk around the space and then go into different groups of people to create different freeze frames that relate to the context of "Our country's good" such as the transportation to Australia, the conditions the convicts were kept in and the authority that the ship men had over the convicts. We had to make the shape of the front of the ship, this was helpful as we are using this idea in the first scene of the show. Because we have already thought of ideas that we can use we can create a good scene.

We then got into different groups and each group was given a different punishment that we had to create a small scene about. My group was given flogging, this is where criminals were whipped in front of the public for crimes such as theft, people watched this as a form of entertainment in the 1700s. In my group we decided that two people were going to be the officers (Me and George) and two people were the criminals (Paige and Amber), the officers had to drag the criminals and push them down on the floor. Then George addressed the audience and announced the names of the convicts, we counted the whips and stamped our feet in time with it, we did this to emphasis how severe the punishment was.

We were given time to rehearse and then each group took turns in performing to the rest of the class. Each group were asked questions about their characters and how they would have felt in that situation. This was helpful as it gave us more of an idea as to what crime and punishment was like in that time period, we can then use this when rehearing for "Our country's good".