A few weeks ago, my Year 10 GCSE drama class, along with a few Year 9s and sixth form students, took part in a physical theatre workshop by Frantic Assembly.

It was an extremely interesting and different experience, that was immensely enjoyable and gave a great insight to different ways of performing a piece.

We started the workshop off with a fun warm up activity, including teamwork and following instructions, to get our bodies and minds moving and engaged. It was a very fun activity that honestly made me very out of breath, but it really got energy in my body and helped me be in a freer mindset. Following this we did some great exercises to help with spatial awareness, and verbal and non-verbal communication. It was very interesting to see how people prepare to create and learn a physical theatre piece, and just how much trust you have to have with other cast members.

The workshop instructor we had was a really great teacher, because he was clearly passionate about what he was doing, and very engaging when teaching it. He kept us all getting involved and took away any embarrassment from any of the stranger exercises we did.

The final thing we did was work on our own mini physical theatre piece, with just some bland, emotionless movements with a partner. We then performed these, and me and my partner ended up doing ours on a loop, and being told instructions of what types of emotions we should add to the movements to give a different story for each loop.

It was so so interesting slowly seeing how these physical theatre pieces are constructed and performed, and gave really effective insight on what different options we had for future projects.

erite up supplied by Evey (year 10)

photos supplied by staff