Friday 19th February 2016 - Mask Workshop

In todays lesson we did a mask workshop, this is because masks were commonly used in Greek theatre, therefore we were exploring the use of them in performance. We got into pairs and worked on a section of the chorus, we had to come up with appropriate movement to go with the lines that were written. Me and Holly worked well together on this we started by coming up with singular movements and then linking them together with transitions to make it more fluid. Once we had choreographed this we had to do perform it with masks on, there were many challenges to this...

• It is hard to project your voice when wearing a mask, this is because there were no mouth holes and therefore you have to speak a lot louder and clearer to make sure that the audience can hear you. Speaking with a mask on naturally sounds more muffled and the sound is not traveling out, it is being blocked. Although I tried to project my voice as much as possible I think I could improve this, when we use the masks in the final performance I would have had practice doing this and therefore my voice will sound clearer.
• When performing with a mask on you have to rely on your body language more as your facial expressions are being hidden. This means that actions we do have to be more exaggerated to compensate, this helps the audience to keep engaged as we are fully projecting out.
• The masks sometimes fall down your face and as the eye holes are small and therefore you cannot see. This means that when you rehearse you are aware of everyone and everything around you so that you can be spaticially aware when performing with the mask on.

In the second half of the lesson we looked at another part of the chorus, we split into groups and looked at how the rhythm of the lines affect how it is said. Because a rhythm is used the chorus sounds more like a song rather than speech. My group decided to use a round, each person took a verse and once each person had said theirs, they choose one line from it and repeated it whilst there were other things being said. This gave it more depth as we had used layers instead of just one person saying one verse at a time, if we had had more time we could have developed this further and experimented with taking bits in and out and using dynamics and tempo to make it sound more interesting.