Donmar workshop

Lesson two 

Criminal justice 

In today's second Donmar based lesson we continued with Naomi from where we left off last week. We started with a general discussion as a class, we reflected on last weeks lesson and how Naomi had said she had a brief idea of what we could do for our final performance from stuff we did in the last week. We then done a warmup game led by Naomi I was interested to see what she was going to bring to the table next as all her warmup games have been very energetic fun and engaging but yet challenging and efficient in getting warned properly in all aspects. She done a game which involved our bodies and voices repeating short lyrical lines in beat then eventually moving to the lyrics engaging with other actors in the circle and then finally being confident enough to move around the space dancing singining and engaging with everyone else, considering our class is an acting pathway I genuinely think were pretty good at choir work all sounding in tune and confident. 

As the warm up came to a close we sat back into a circle, and Naomi had told us she had seen this BBC documentary about solitary confinement, and how it was like and how the prisoners were treated. We used the subject as our stimulus for the lesson. She had told us that young teens from the ages 17-18 in 30 years time would be in prisons solitary confinement. She had also told us things that they'd do to communicate with other prisoners, as they are locked up and have no access to communicate with the other prisoners and that they'd be in their cell for 23hrs out of the 24hrs a day and that they'd only be allowed get an hour of the 23hrs to be let into the yard and have fresh air. And that they'd have ways of communicating with each other by using string which would be connected to the other cell and they'd pass notes around once the guard had his back turned. Also when they wanted to protest they'd do many things, either self harm, cover there cell window with tissue, spread their foetus's on the wall or their blood on the wall. So we had a general discussion about that then started our exercise.

After speaking Naomi asked as a few questions these were:

1• what does an inmate do in the 23 hrs they spend in solitary confinement?

2• In solitary confinement prisoners still find a way to protest about their situation - do they do it?

3• All prisons are not allowed physical contact... How do they communicate?

4• What happens when they lose their identity?

5• Can rehabilitation change people if they don't want to be changed? We was then told we had to do a improvisation exercise and at the end we'd find out the answers to these questions using the questions as a stimulus we did an improv exercise. Where an actor starts a still image and another actor joins and then the first actor leaves, the second actor that joins has to connect their image to the first actors, so once the first actor left, someone else would join, no one was suppose to leave the actor in the space hanging, so the still images would continue until we were stopped, we were told to think about our entrances and our exits, so it doesn't look like bus stop acting and looks abstract and flows nicely, After getting a hang of it Naomi then added music to it, so it flowed. We had to think about how we'd come out of the still image without disturbing the other actors image this could mean climbing out their arms bending sliding and twisting. 

Afterwards we were split in half of the circle down the middle, so there's be two groups and we were asked to do the same exercise but this time there was a theme, our themes were the Justice system & solitary confinement. We were asked to choreograph a sequence with each actor entering the space three times, we has to think of 'what the life of the individuals would be like', we'd tell a story with the images. 

Our next activity was in pairs, we were asked to find someone who was a similar build to us my partner was grace the activity was that their is a prisoner and a gaurd, we both sat on the floor and myself being the prisoner had to escape from the guards arms legs or however they had me locked as soon as I stood up yh myself I won. This was a very fun game but yet shows the struggle of a prisoners life and also the struggle of a gaurd who has to keep things under control no matter how hard the situation is. 

Our next exercise was we got into groups ( Conor, Sarah, Grace, Tutu, Gifty) we had think about ' what crimes will our peer group be committing in 30 years time? My group said drugs and trafficking. Then with the same groups we did the prisoner/guard exercise but with blocking, we'd have one prisoner which was Conor in the middle and the rest of us being the guards would be around Conor and blocking him, we first tried a technique of keeping him very close in a compacted area this didn't work as he still got out we then tried a different approach of us being spaced out blocking himhis aim was to try and escape from us. After this we done it as a whole class, Conor again was the prisoner and the rest of the class were guards but this time we'd do the opposite of what he does, when he stands we'll bend, and when he moves to the right we'd go to the left. So we did this activity to end the lesson.