For this lesson we were given a short section of script from the play "Let the Right One In". In this scene, the group of school children are playing about on the ice. Oscar gets bullied and threatened to be forced into the icy water, however, Oscar finds a stick and hits the main bully with it. On his third hit, Oscar hits him on the head, causing a nasty head wound (resulting in him going in to a coma later on). At this point the teacher - who is aware that Oscar has been bullied for a long time but has done nothing about it - come over and demands to know what has been happening. The scene ends with Oscar telling the teacher that he "could have done something" but he didn't.
We were told to create a physical theatre piece around this and perform the scene as well. Instead of ice skating, we decided have a snowball fight instead, as there was more we could do if we pretended there was a lot of snow, instead of ice. We thought it would look silly if we all pretended to skate, so we thought we could find a few movements to portray a snowball fight and start them in cannon to then form unison once everyone has joined in. We ducked, scooped our hands together, mimed rolling a snowball, and then jumped and threw our snowball. While we all joined in the sequence in cannon, Lewis (who played Oscar) mimed shovelling snow out of the way. Everyone, except Lewis, started on opposite sides of the room to do our snowball sequence. We continued this sequence for a while on the spot, and then did the same sequence in unison facing the front and travelling to cross over to be on the other side of the room. The purpose of this was to represent Oscar's confused state of mind and to suggest that it seems the whole world is rushing about him whilst he is stuck in the middle.
Lewis then repeats the sequence we all do, whilst we turn our back on him - as he turns round to see what we thought he sees us walk away into a tight circle at the back. This shows that no matter how hard Oscar tries, he will not be accepted or popular. When in our circle, we move round in the circle to create tension and suggest that things are about to spiral out of control. We opened up our circle and invited Lewis closer only to reject him and push him to the floor. Rob and Lewis did a mini support lift to get Lewis to the floor (Rob grasped Lewis' neck and moved his arm as Lew jumped up and dropped, to make it look like Rob had picked him up and thrown him down).
We went a little bit Brechtian by giving Kat a whistle to blow to end the physical theatre section and to begin the actual scene itself. Ollie (Kelly), Lewis and Rob acted this scene naturalistically downstage, whilst Ollie and I mimed having snowball fights and playing in the snow whilst Kat watched.
I really enjoyed doing physical theatre as an acting style because I enjoy using movement to tell a story. I like how there are many different ways and different types of movement to portray different things. I also like how it doesn't have to be just movement - you can use speech, sound and stillness as well.
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