Class

Every session my drama class had always began with a series of warm ups. Warm ups help benefit the pronunciation of words and to make sure that we know how to control our breath at any pace with consistency. Furthermore it helped us sustain our diction no matter what word was mentioned. Especially in this case due to the fact that we are doing a Greek play where words and phrases are not the language we often use today.

Some of the warm ups consisted of expressing vowels and consonants individually, such as 'O' and 'D' and 'T'. This helped us make sure that our mouths  were loose in order to pronunciate words properly and that they were said with purpose. Furthermore we had used this to expose our projection and how powerful it is when we breathe properly. When we breathe in our stomach has to go outwards meaning that our longs are expanding to the fullest and this in result would benefit in a long sustain in breath and powerful projection. This is due to the fact that we are not straining our vocal chords and that we are putting most of the power of our vocals from our diaphragm rather than just our vocal chords alone. Another warm up we had usually done at the start of every session was that we had made sure our body was always neutral so that we could act naturally rather than forcefully if our bodies were tense. We always had to make sure that our feet was always parallel and that our knees were loose. In addition, we had to make sure our back was straight, our arms had to be by our sides and our heads had to be up as if a a string was attached to the ceiling. This was all to ensure that our bodies were ready for performing and moreover acted as a blank canvas.

Other warm ups we had used were tongue twisters such as 'peter piper picked a peck of pickled peppers' and 'red leather, yellow leather'. This helped us sustain our pronunciation of words at a neutral speed and also helped our articulation. The breathing exercises done before this can help in this exercise as breath control is a key aspect in tongue twisters. In other words, this exercise is a test to examine if we had warmed up our breathing properly.