Sara's Lessons

In our first week on the course, we were introduced to Sara. In our first session with her we did many warmups, we do these in every lesson with Sara to, as the name suggests, warm ourselves up for the day.  We start off with some stretches to make sure our muscles and bodies are ready to act to our full potential. Next, we go through some vocal warmups, which is vital to acting, we need to be heard by our audiences. If we don’t do these warmups, we might lose our voices after so many performances and cause other problems.

I find Sara’s lessons to be quite different, as she comes from the musical theatre side of acting. Due to this she is able to present us with different styles of acting and different techniques. With Sara we always do tongue twisters, I have found these difficult for a very long time. I generally can’t get my mouth around the phrases. Hopefully, with more practice I can say these phrases more fluidly. In addition to this Sara has taught me how important our bodies and voices are as actors. Not unlike those in professional sports, we need to keep our bodies in good health, to make sure we can do our jobs properly and too our full potential.

Sara’s lessons also include plenty of group work. For example, we has a small script to work off of and as a group we must put together a performance. We would split off into our groups, look at the script and try to create a performance. In time we would be put against another team, in some friendly competition. We would take our time running through the scenes and when we were done, we would perform them to Sara. She always had some great feedback to help us improve. According to Sara group work is very important, she said that we needed to get to know each other and work on building good relationships. Working as one, we could read one another and take our cues. This creates a piece that’s more fluid and easier for the actors to work through. Sara managed to make our class into a better group that can work together.

In much of Sara’s lessons, we have been focusing upon monologues. Monologues are very important to perfect as an actor, this is what lots of casting directors ask for in auditions. Sara went through a monologue with us and highlighting to us everything we need to understand a monologue. As well as how to learn one and make it the best performance we possibly could. We had to choose out of a selection of monologues one that we wished to learn. One that we could understand fully and manage to do an accurate portrayal of; one were we could become the character. We would have to perform these monologues to Sara, she saw us one by one and helped us to develop our performance. These monologues would be used for our show reel. These would-be important videos to give to the film crew, for any auditions we might wish to be put forward for.