The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe- Week Two: Scripts and Still Images

With introductions out of the way last week; it was all action stations for week two as we dived into creating the first section of our opening scene. Since this term we have such a large story to tell we wanted to throw the group straight into things. To open the session we had a quick game of 'what are you doing?' a classic Anthos game where one person stands in the centre of a circle and pretends to perform an action. The next person steps in and the first must give them an action to perform. The game is loads of fun and usually involves someone jumping out of/into a plane/volcano.

Next we got back to the still images that we created in the end of last week's session. Once everyone had remembered their frames we continued to build on them. We turned them into images of children on trains during WWII and then added some subtle movement to show that they are taking place on a train. In cases like this simple movement can be quite effective. 

We next created freeze frames of the children's parents waving the trains away from the station. Lots of great emotive faces from our group (and some minor fainting too, see above). Once we had these we split the group again. Some Chameleons were parents and some were children. We created small, silent scenes where the children board a train taking them to the countryside. By combining these freeze frames we had created the basis for our opening scene! Exciting stuff (and we haven't even revealed the casting yet).

Moving on from the doom and gloom of the wartime and evacuation; we had a quick break and then got back into the swing of things with a great game of Boal's 'go, stop, jump, clap.' The Chameleons are all very skilled at this game now and it is a great exercise for warming up.

For the last part of the session we gave the Chameleons some extracts from the show's script. We wanted to give them a chance to engage with the text before we begin working with in preparation for the final show. The extracts we chose featured a wide variety of characters, from Lucy to the White Witch- everyone was very excited to jump in and give it a read.

    

The Chameleons mission was to create short versions of these scenes. Everyone did a fantastic job at both reading and acting the text and we had some fantastic scenes performed at the very end of the session. We like to give the Chameleons the chance to play with the scripts in early stages of rehearsal. It means that everyone can have a go at playing all the characters before we give everyone out their final roles next week.  

A rather short blog post this week- it's crazy busy on our end and we're all a tad under the weather so short but sweet (I hope). The Chameleons created some wonderful work this week across the board and everyone is super excited for next week; when we shall be looking a characters, creating scenes, using physical theatre and, at last, receiving their parts. Until then, I leave you with some additional rehearsal snaps (again, not many this week, but enjoy).