March 09, 2021
On Monday, we started the day off when we arrived at the Westside Community Center, immediately jumping into the famed car wash dance. We then practiced moving by leading with different parts of our body, which ranged from simple tasks like leading with the chest to ridiculous, creative scenarios like leading with the left heel.
We then played a game where we tried to advertise a product to our viewers (the rest of the class) without explicitly saying what we’re selling, and then opening to questions from the audience. The catch? The audience is informed of what the advertiser is really selling, but the advertiser stays in the dark. You might think you’re selling a microwave, but you’re actually telling your audience all about why they should buy Taylor Swift! Many shenanigans ensued, of course. I thought I was an enterprising con man selling glasses of water for $50 each, but I was surprised to learn that I was actually talking all about how famous figures like Barack Obama drank eight of my used toothbrushes a day!
More serious work then began as we gave monologues we’d received the Friday before. They ranged from Snow White monologuing to the dwarves about why she needed to stay at their place to a self-proclaimed tough guy describing his traumatizing experience when sharks started advancing on him by the beach. I myself delivered a monologue lamenting the oppressive regime of mandatory PE classes. We received direction for how to improve our monologues, honing our expressiveness and projection, and mitigating the nervous “floaty dance.”
We then recited the plays about the prom written by our fellow peers. We were prompted to write a play based on the premise of a popular girl asking a nerdy geek to prom studying for an exam, and from their imagination took flight. One was about a nerd who was secretly a prince, and one was about the popular girl playing a prank on the geek. Mine was about two egotistical students who realize the error of their ways when they bicker with each other, ending with them growing closer. We then returned to school, repeated the monologue exercise (but this time, we had to match our emotion with requests from the audience), and concluded another dramatic episode of the playwriting ECS.
