Students will demonstrate an understanding of blocking by roughly blocking their scenes and writing down blocking in their scripts.
Materials Needed:
None.
Hook:
Draw a diagram of the stage on the board. (9 squares.) With the students’ help, fill in all the stage areas. Briefly review how to write stage directions.
Draw a little couch center stage of your diagram, a table up left, and a stick figure on the couch. Draw an arrow of a stick figure’s blocking path on the board and see if the students can write the stage directions. (such as cross DSR or XDSR.) Ask students to change writing implements with the person next to them and draw an arrow of the stick figure’s path as you read the following directions.
1. The man gets up from the couch. 2. The man walks down stage and talks. 3. The man crosses up stage right behind the table. 4. The man crosses to up (center) stage. 5. The man does a circular cross around the end table to down stage left. 6. The man exits down stage right.
Have the students come up one at a time to draw one step of the stage directions with arrows to see if they were doing it correctly. Remind them of ways to keep left, right, up and down straight.
Instruction:
Go over the three different types of onstage movement.
1. Movement from Place to Place – Just what it sounds like 2. Gestures – Using our hands, arms, face & body to communicate non-verbally. (We also use gestures to add to our verbal communication.) 3. Stage Business – What we do with our bodies on stage. Are we fiddling with a prop, sitting with our legs crossed, knitting a sweater, etc?
Individual Practice:
Allow students time to work on their scripts and to work on blocking.’
