Our First Piece Of Performance example essay topic

Drama coursework: response portfolio Scaramouche Jones This year in year 10 G.C.S.E. drama we have been studying Justin Butchers play "Scaramouche Jones". We read, discussed, developed and preformed certain parts of the play and using some of the explorative strategies of drama we gained a deeper understanding and appreciation of the play text that was explored. Before we began to read the play text we were put into groups of 2 and we were made to perform a one minute piece of a clown show. This sketch was based completely on our own interpretations of a clown act. This helped us to get into the character of a clown for what might have been our first time. For this piece I was put into a group with Stephanie Gor sach.

We preformed a classic slap stick comedy clown act e.g. throwing imaginary pies and hitting each other. After we did this piece we began to read the play text for the first time. My first impression of the play was that it was very odd and was going to be incredibly boring. I was wrong! The first section of the play we explored was he opening scene. In the first section of the play we first meet Scaramouche Jones.

We find out that he is a clown as he comes in from one of his many performances. Our first piece of performance was a 2 man show. It was the first scene of the play. For this piece I was put into a pair with Tash an Baptist. This piece was surprisingly hard for a first major piece as we had what I thought was a short time of 2 weeks to perform the piece. This was made even harder by the expectations of our teachers and the amount of pressure.

This was our first introduction to the character of Scaramouche Jones. This piece helped me to experience the character for myself and after doing the slap stick clown act with Stephanie I could just about imagine how tired he would be at 100 years old. The next piece of development that we did was the thought tracking process. For this piece we were put into small groups and asked to act out what we thought Scaramouche would be feeling at that moment in time. Unfortunately I missed this lesson but I asked one of my class mates to help me by going over this with me.

After I did the thought tracking I felt as if I knew Scaramouche. This helped me to get into the character of Scaramouche Jones. The next piece we did was a short piece where we picked out a paragraph and used certain phrases from the paragraph to act around the piece. This was also the first time we had used proper physical theatre in any of our performances.

This helped me to get a real sense of how Scaramouche was feeling when he said the line. The last piece we did was a sequence of mimes. We were slit into groups of 4 or 5 and we had to act out a mime from each of Scaramouche's white masks. For this piece I worked in a group with 4 other girls; Veena Du lpi, Eve Marshall, Charlotte Disney and Rebecca Hussein. In our seven mimes we depicted seven of the things Scaramouche experienced at these times during his life. Our first mime was of the birth of Scaramouche.

The second was of Scaramouche on Yasu's boat. The next mime was of him sprinkling "magic dust" around Benjamin Disraeli's wicker basket and so on. This final piece helped me to understand his emotions at all these times. And this for me was the most important piece.