Theater 3 Acting Activity

Today in my other theater class we did an activity with reading lines with a partner that reminded me of something we would do in IB Theater. Initially we were paired up with someone and given a one page script. There was a person A and a person B and each person’s lines were short and vague. Our first assignment was to come up with a backstory for our characters and read the lines in a way that fit said backstory.

My partner was Ava and we started by just reading the lines and seeing where it would take us. We quickly came up with our plot and characters after doing this. We decided to have our characters be at a bed and breakfast and be falling in love and by the end they kiss. We read our lines a couple of times and practiced the movements we wanted. Once we got up on stage we got our props which included 2 stage boxes, a phone, and a blanket, and performed out short skit. This activity reminded me of IB Theater because of the devisement Ava and I did together to get our backstory and characters developed. We worked around the script and bounced ideas off of each other. I think that just reading the script initially with no ideas really allowed us the freedom to go wherever we wanted with it.

The second activity we did was doing a blind reading of the script and person B followed person A’s lead with the story, so we were not able to create any story this time. Our script was two people talking about how they have been and how long they’ve known each other. I was person B so I followed Ava’s lead on where the story was going and who our characters were. I played off of her tone and physicality and our characters became either ex lovers or friends who had run into each other for the first time in a while. We discussed how we each had been and how long we’d known each other. We portrayed it as there was still a lot of love there and that maybe there was still potential for a relationship/friendship.

I really enjoyed this activity because it allowed us to work together and devise a story we were proud of, while also allowing us the chance to work off of each other and play into the other actor’s ideas without directly communicating them. I also enjoyed seeing how other groups with the same script interpreted it and wove a story out of the simple script. It was interesting to see how many different ideas and story can come from one script.