1/11/16

In today’s drama session we used a story called ‘The tunnel’ by Anthony Browne to investigate the drama techniques of role on the wall, voices in the head and miming. This story follows a brother and sister who constantly argue and are the complete opposite of each other in terms of personality and their interests. Their Mother forces them to go outside to play together and they find a tunnel. The boy enters the tunnel to discover whats inside and the girl doesn’t as she is too scared however when the brother doesn’t return, the girl goes through the tunnel to find him.

We split into groups in order to work on the techniques of miming. This is when no words are used during acting. We used configuration mime (acts an object) in order to become the tree swaying in the wind. Next we worked on voices in the head, this is where you say what they character is thinking and feeling out loud. We selected two people withing our group, one to be the sister and one to be the brother. I was the girl and i voiced how we were going to be into trouble from our mum and even though i was angry at him for going through the tunnel when i told him not to, i was still worried about him and hoped he was safe. This technique will be great for children and they are using their imagination to thin what the character would be thinking and feeling also by putting themselves into the characters’ shoes they will gain a greater understanding of the story.

We then progressed onto the technique of role on the wall. This consisted of us drawing an outline of a person on a sheet of paper and on the inside of the character we wrote what the character is feeling and thinking. On the outside of the character outline we wrote how others would perceive the character.This activity would allow children to think about the characters thoughts and feeling as well as how people may look at one another, this could show that things may not always be what they look like on the surface and there may be a deeper meaning for things. At the ends of the story they find each other and express how much they appreciate each other. We then revised our role on the wall to see if our opinion of the words and phrases that we wrote down have changed or if we wanted to add any new ones.

References

Browne, A. (2008). The tunnel. London: Walker Books, London.