As an actor I am confident I can embody many different types of characters with many different styles of movement. Following the characterisations from Commedia dell’arte especially helps me initially to create a characters movement through their personality. Using this I can better distinguish between two different characters by their movements alone, without needing to speak I feel I can portray a lot about who a character is by just their movements. This works well for nearly all types of performances, whether it’s a film, a theatre performance or for a devised piece. Depending on the tone of the show and the performance I am giving influences how far I may choose to deviate from the basic Commedia Dell’arte movements. If the show called for a Stanislavski esque performance, then I would add elements of realism to the movements to create a character that moved truer to life.
Another strength of mine is that I am able to learn movement choreography quickly. A lot like learning lines in a play or the lyrics to a song learning and remembering choreography comes naturally to me. This is good for devised pieces that we make in a short time period or for quick workshops. I think this really helps with my performances as not having to spend as much time learning the choreography gives me more time in which I can perfect the movements themselves. To help maintain this, what I can do is to try and challenge myself to learn a new movement piece every couple weeks, along with improving my ability to learn choreography it will help me to perfect them aswell.
Although I can learn choreography quickly, I can find it more difficult to perfect more complex forms of choreography especially the ones in the form of dance. This is partially because one of my weaknesses is my flexibility. This is for several reasons, one of which being that I have gained some weight over the last couple years due to being less active and having a poor diet. This has caused my movements to be heavier and slower which means I am not able to move as freely or as gracefully as I used to be able to. Another reason my flexibility isn’t very good is that I haven’t been doing any stretches to help me with that. This causes my muscles to be stiffer initially especially when not warmed up. This does also mean that my muscles are at a higher risk of straining or becoming injured when doing certain movements, which for an actor is a pretty big weakness as you could be required to be able to move in that way in order to get the part. To help myself with this there are stretches I can do to help with the flexibility of certain muscles, I will be using these stretches to create a workout I am able to do quickly every day and over time improve my overall flexibility. The key muscle groups I want to focus on are my legs, back, hips and arms. Specifically for my legs being my hamstrings, my glutes, my inner thigh and my calves. Stretches that can help me with this are the lying hamstring stretch, the recline knee to chest for the glutes, the butterfly stretch for my inner thighs and the downward facing dog for my calves. Stretches to help with my back would be roll down exercises, which are a Pilates workout designed to help with spinal mobility. For my hips I can do what’s called a floor leg swings which should help to loosen my hips, legs and my lower back. For my arms there are many stretches I can do, but I want to focus more on mobility, so the exercises I have found are arm swings, punches and side stretches with should help to stretch and improve mobility for my arms and my sides.
Another weakness of mine would be stamina. This is due to similar reasons to flexibility, being my weight gain and my inactivity. My stamina isn’t always bad, depending on the character I can keep going for ages but if the character has to be running or moving quickly for any extended period, I will get tired and out of breath quite quickly. This is especially bad if the show we’re doing is a musical as I’d likely be singing, dancing and acting all at the same time which will get me out of breath quickly and is not ideal. To help with this as part of the workout I’m creating I’m going to include exercises that will help improve my stamina, along with my strength and my core. These exercises include side to side jumps which will help warm up and strengthen my legs and get my heart beating and my blood flowing. Ducks, which will help warm up and strengthen my thighs. Knee ups and kicks which will help stretch my glutes and improve leg movement. Skipping which will focus on improving my stamina. Burpees which will help strengthen my core, stretch my legs and back and help improve my stamina. To finish it off in-between the exercises I’m going to add short sprints that will increase my heart rate and get my blood flowing which will help to improve my stamina and movement.
This video is a section from my workshop focused of improving my stamina. These exercises were picked because they help to warm up different parts of the body. They are meant to be done in sequence so that it increases you heart rate and will help to improve your stamina.
This video is another section taken from my workshop which is focused of improving my flexibility. I picked these stretches because they focused on parts of the body I wanted to focus on, Particularly my thighs, calves, back and arms.
In this exercise I got everyone to write down the type of character they were the most confident with from Commedia dell'arte. We then as those characters did an improvised scene where we moved and acted like those characters. afterwards we swapped all the characters around so you got a character you wasn't as confident in and we acted out the scene again as our new characters. The goal of this was to get people out of their comfort zones and to experiment with new styles of movement.