In today's lesson we did a few tasks we sang and listened to a song, we used our body and voices to become explores and experiment different ways of gaining height.
We listened to the song the tiger sung by Patti Smith who is an artist, musician and song writer who focuses on political themes. The song was originally a poem written by William Blake who wrote the poem London and was inspired by the world and also the death of his brother. William Blake wrote the poem in his brothers notebook and Patti Smith was inspired by William Blake as an artist so decided to sing his poem as a song.
The song we listened to talked about a tiger and also about god which we could see in the line 'Did he who made the lamb make thee?' Patti smith sang the song in a very haunting way which may be scary for the children. Also the rhythm was very repetitive, the word were quite difficult to understand, it is in a low pitch and it sounds like a dirge, lament or hymn. However we can now adapt the song to make it more interesting and entertaining for the children. To make the song less haunting more than one person should sing it, we could perform it in a round making the song more up lifting and jolly to sing. We could adapt some of the words so that the children could relate to the song and join in if they want to. The song also needs some more energy, a catchy rhythm, maybe a faster pace a song that you want to listen to with instruments, change in pitch and less annoying and dreary. We can adapt this song to make the children not loose interest and so that we can make it fit with what is going on stage, for example if we sing the song when we have made the tiger out of butterfly nets it might be slowly drifting around so the song is sung at a slower tempo or maybe we are hiding from it so we sing it in a whisper. This will make the song fun and exciting for the audience to watch. We also learnt how to sing this song keeping our necks loose and changing the pitch to suit our needs.
After learning the song we did a becoming explores exercise. We were told to have the objective to search/look. At first we were all creeping around really slowly but we soon realised to make the piece more interesting we had to vary our tempo and our rhythm so that we were able to work as a group and move around the space creating and exciting and fun atmosphere. By staying low and really looking at things this will engage the children making them wonder what you are looking at and making them want to join in. We all then were told to say a short something about what we had found. We made an order so we could quickly repeat one after the other. Having a gap in between someone's line would break the energy in the room so we had to breathe in near the end of the person before us sentence so that we could quickly say ours. Some people were not giving enough excitement so they improved this by staying at a high level for the whole of the sentence so the energy didn't drop. Having us all spaced around was a great idea because the sentences were fast pace moving allowing the children to quickly look from person to person and so that they could grab their attention.
Finally at the end of today's lesson we were trying to lift up Fenton to make him stand out compared to the rest of us. We all came together in a big group and had three sections, low, medium and high. We moved from these sections making sure there was an equal number in each and then Fenton had to climb on top of Charlie shoulders. This idea was very successful because it was difficult for Fenton to get on Charlie's shoulders and Charlie found it difficult to support him. It didn't seem very safe and wasn't very stable so we decided to experiment with a different idea. Our next idea was to try and create a human pyramid. We managed to get up to three layers however it still wasn't very stable. For next we we are going to try and find a safe a quick way to create this human pyramid without jumping on really quickly and hurting people in the process.
Research on Human Pyramid = http://hollygarciatiger.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/human-pyramid.html
How do you think it contributes/will contribute towards making TTWCTT?
Having this song now gives us a stimulus that we can explore with and experiment with in different ways. This song is very appropriate to our topic because it talks about a tigers appearance, yes we may need to make it less complicated to help the children understand but having a song means that we have something to work with. As I said we can now use this to hep the children learn facts about the tiger but in a more interesting way, we could adapt the song so that it could be telling facts but due to it being in a song format the children wont realise they are learning they will just be drawn to the energy we give from the song. using this song we can create lots of movement and sounds maybe using our voices or instruments to accompany it. Also listening to this song taught us how to sing, it showed us that we needed to change it to a higher pitch for some of us because we found it difficult to sing, we also experimented with how singing was just extending vowel sounds and it only sounding good if we kept a soft neck and if we wanted to sing high, think low and visa versa. From learning how to sing this song we now know if we sing together it makes it more powerful which we might use in our performance.
This exercise was extremely useful because it helped us create who our characters were going to be and also this is going to be the opening of the show. Creating these characters and actions of searching a collecting allowed us to think about the props we will need for the performance in order to make it believable. For example I am collecting small insects, fruits and anything I can find so I now know I will need a bag and maybe a clipboard in order to record my findings. I did not mention this above but we also got into threes and created different activities we could all do together, this is important because we have now come up as things such as looking at tracks which we can all do as a class and we also have little scenes that can be going on in the jungle together as a team. We now know that our performance has to have a varied rhythm and be at a fast pace because through this activity we all felt the energy drop when people were not putting in enough effort so we know we need to be at a high energy consistently because if we felt the energy go the children definitely will and then they will loose focus.
This has contributed to the making of TTWCTT because we know we need to lift Fenton in our performance so by having the freedom to experiment with different lifts is useful because it will allow us to find the best possible way of lifting him. Also doing this lift made us work as a team in TTWCTT we are all going to be working together including other strands so this exercise has helped us work together which we will be doing in the dress rehearsal and on little peoples day. It has also shown us that if some things don't work straight away we can find another way to do it and it may look even better so in our whole performance we should make sure we perform to the best of our ability and if we don't like it we still have time to change it.
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