March 03, 2021
When exploring theater, one thing comes to mind: acting! And that’s exactly what we did Tuesday morning. Dr. Longo started us off by giving us a very basic script that could be interpreted in many ways. With the script we were given, we acted out the gaps of the story that were missing by creating scenarios and characters with detailed backgrounds. We did this by changing the tone and expression in our voices when reading the lines. This activity was an excellent way to emphasize the fact that acting doesn’t have to do with what the person is saying, but how they say it. It also allowed us to expand our creativity; with Dr. Longo’s help, we revised our initial scene and turned it into a deeply expressive segment.
Later that afternoon, we headed down to The Funky Theater Company with Chris Medina. There, we warmed up with “the car wash,” a dance we had practiced the day before. After dancing, we then played a series of acting games.
The first game consisted of three characters: a talk show host, an alien, and a translator. This game was pretty simple; the host asks the alien questions then the alien responds in a foreign dialect (gibberish). Based on gestures the alien makes, the translator then translates the gibberish into whatever they please. Easy, right? Although straightforward, this game was quite fun, and we got a laugh out of it.
The second game we played was telephone, but this wasn’t your typical game of telephone. Rather than transmitting a spoken message, we passed along gestures. When doing this, we noticed that everyone interpreted the gestures a little differently, almost like actors interpreting their lines differently.
And finally, we wrapped our day up with a fun game called fruit bowl mix-up, pretty much a modified version of duck duck goose and musical chairs. Over the day, we learned a ton and had a blast while doing it!
