Haka dance

The beginning of our play uses the haka to intimidate and signify war. Here are two videos that i found of the haka, watching them is helpful in understanding the concept of the haka. The Haka is a ancestral war cry or challenge from the Māori people of New Zealand. It is now most commonly used during rugby.  It also represents strength and unity which lnto our performance as we all work as an ensemble.

Week 1- Tuesday 15th March

First of all when entering the classroom our director Ben told the class to take our shoes off and to clean the whole space. He said the because we should treat the space like its sacred   Ben also briefly mentioned how this was inspired by Yoshi Oida.

Warm up:

We started out our lesson with finding neutral and rolling up and down our spines. We also looked at weight distribution to the hands and exploring different ways to move our bodies that is not usual. This warmed up and body’s and released any tension and helped me prepare for the lesson. This exercise will be repeated at the start of every rehearsal before our warrior side stretches. I closed my eyes whilst doing this exercise and this helped me to be more invested in the movement rather than what was going on around me. The next part of the warm up was to lie on the floor and just let my spines explore the floor. Then are arms, legs and the rest of our body. Slowly exploring and finding new and interesting ways to move our spines will be important during our rehearsals as alot of our acting and physicality will come from our spines.

Side stretches:

Next we moved onto the next part of the warm up that we will be using every rehearsal to energise out selves and find our self in the rehearsal space. The exercise helped me to focus and also look at starting to develop more physical strength. I have drawn diagrams of the stretches so I can remember it and also refer back to it.

1. start in a low horse stance position. Arms out with open body.  Straight back with pelvis tucked in

2. 8 stretches to either side straightening one leg starting with right side.

 3. Final stretch in ‘superman’ pose.

 4. Stretch with hands between legs place legs out and do one press-up and lay onto stomach.

5. Roll under onto back into a resting position.

 6. Legs and arms in air, head up looking through legs engaging core muscles.

7. straighten legs and arms  and slowly lower them until you are in a resting position again.

8. Roll back onto front and into prayer position. turn palms upwards and then roll up the spine into a sitting position. Stand when you feel the correct energy.  Find the stillness and focus, wait until cue for final release.

 9.final relase of energy with ‘huh’ sound.

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Rehearsal:

For our first rehearsal we were told we needed to do a full run, this was very daunting as we had no direction or really understanding of the play. However after completing the exercise i found that i had a much better understanding of the play, i realised that this run was not about being perfect it was about exploring and playing with the text to help us get a better understanding of the text. This especially helped me as there were moments where i wasn’t sure what was happening when i read the play however found it much easier to understand after exploring through simply playing. We also weren’t allowed to have our scripts so we were all muddling through, however by the end of the run most people had scripts in hand as it was near impossible to do without. This made me conscious of how important learning my lines for this term would be.