1.2 Improvisation - arbitrary colours

Activity 7

• You have reached the point at which the production must be put on the stage. The creativity of your thinking and writing and the credibility of the improvisation will now be exhibited. The story MUST be of interest to the viewers, or the audience will not pay attention. Competition between the groups should have a healthy basis, so that you will be able to ENJOY the production. Improvisation gives you an opportunity to forget inhibitions and do something different!

• The above improvisation could be presented to the rest of the school for a nominal fee!

Assessment

Memorandum

IMPROVISATION – ARBITRARY COLOURS

ARBITRARY COLOURS = IF YOU WERE PAINTING, USING ARBITRARY COLOURS WOULD MEAN THAT YOU ARE PAINTING ACCORDING TO YOUR EMOTIONS .

• In this module, we are going to use colours to express emotions. We are going to look at how colours are used to reflect a learner’s state of mind. For many Zulu people, BLUE is the colour of hope. Red, again, is a sign of LOVE for many people - just think of Valentine’s Day, when we get red flowers from a sweetheart. Red also means danger – the learner’s mood may be restless. Red also stands for caring – the red ribbon that is used in the HIV/Aids campaign is an example of this. Yellow can symbolise happiness and blue may signify a feeling of discouragement or exhaustion.

• The different groups of learners may be asked to read up about Human Rights day. What does the Human Rights day poster look like? Are the learners able to design one that can be used appropriately?

• An easier task is to divide the class into groups and allow each group to express an emotion by means of movement and speech. Each group can be dressed in a specific COLOUR, e.g. everyone wears red, or yellow or any of the other colours.

We are now going to become acquainted with Workshop methods. This works as follows:

One of the learners writes down a word, a second learner writes down a word or sentence that relates to the first, a third learner proceeds until a meaningful paragraph is completed. Everyone in the group must make a contribution until a text/script has been created. This is an exciting method and can produce good results. As soon as the text/script is completed, the learners study the words for a subsequent production.

All the rules that have applied to previous improvisations, apply here. Learners can now be assessed on ingenuity in creative writing.

The colour group in which the learner is placed will determine the content of the text/script. It is a challenge to write your own text/script and then have it performed.