Improvising Skills and Group Bonding

First day: Improvising Skills and Group Bonding

What skills are needed to become a successful/professional performer.

• Confidence 

As a performer you need to be able to stand in front of people who are going to judge, and you need to be able to continue no matter how you are judged or how they react to your performance. Confidence isn't a trait of a person its a mindset, this mindset can be altered if you're willing to alter it to help you be more confident.

• Creativity 

The saying "Think outside the box" is a major part to creativity, being creative by differentiating yourself from others, being unique and showing your own individuality. Some ways of creativity can be doing the unexpected or using your own talents in your performances such as dancing, stunts, martial arts etc.

• Awareness 

Awareness has endless perspectives, some of the main perspectives for performers are being aware of your surroundings, such as your audience, your stage and how much space you have to use and the projection of your voice.

• Discipline

The Performer has to have a level of discipline to stay calm on what he is doing and stick to certain techniques and expressions etc.

• Openness 

Openness plays a big part in acting and being a performer because you can't afford to be tucked away in the corner you need to go out and showcase what you're doing/performing. The group bonding activities we did helped with opening up some people because they were new to the area and didn't know anyone but now that we have done activities with others where you have to open up and familiarise yourself with others therefore allowing us to be more open.

• Voice

Voice, now this is probably the most important play, well you could act a play by not talking but expressing how you're feeling or your character is feeling through words is key, the way you tone your words, how loud you project them, the pitch and so on, you have to be able to project your voice so that the person in the back seats can even hear you clearly, a lot of the times you will still have a microphone but even through the microphone the audience will tell if you're mumbling, this is where most of the other skills come into play because you need confidence, openness, discipline, awareness and creativity to project your words in the way you want to.

• Rules : 

1. Accept Others
2. Don't put others down
3. Don't block

These rules are very necessary seeing that we are a big group, for a big group to work there has to be strong bonds between us all and trust in one another therefore knowing that we are accepting each other and not putting each other down is key, like they say "Team work makes the dream work"

• Group Bonding/Activities :

We did activities as a group to develop our bonding since that is a key aspect to being able to trust and learn off of one another. Examples of these activities are acting out certain surroundings with a partner then shuffling partners so we act and get more comfortable with people we don't know in the group. Another activity we did was where you had to find a partner then pick one person to be Person A and one person to be Person B, Person A would think of 2 lines to say to Person B then the Person B's would shuffle around the group and the Person A's would change between their line 1 and line 2 every time they shuffle this also helped us become more comfortable around people in the group.