Response to Practitioner - Frantic Assembly: Beautiful Burnout

Exercises
The School Of Fish
We did another exercise during the lesson called 'The School of Fish'. This exercise was where we had to stand close together as a group, and what ever way we were facing, the person nearest the front would be the leader, and every time the group changed direction, then person nearest the front in that part of the shape would be the leader. The leader's responsibility was to lead the rest of the group in the direction they were facing using a movement such as a jump for example, and the group would also have to copy what the leader was doing.

'Three Points on the Stage performance using 'The School of Fish' exercise with Alex, Kitty, and Charley.
Link: http://worthingacademyofperformingarts.blogspot.co.uk/#!/2013/12/adrian-as-3-points-video.html
We later used the 'School of Fish' exercise again, but this time we would be in smaller groups, and we would have to make a sequence using different movements related to Boxing. I was in a group with Alex Mockler, Kitty Smith and Charley Bennett. We would have a home position which we would start from, and we would also have three other points on the stage of which we would have to go to during our sequence before reaching our home point again. We decided to lay our group out in a particular way, and it was Alex as the leader, then Kitty and Charley would be standing next to each other behind Alex, and finally I would be at the back because it made sense with what movements each of us were doing and also who was leading the group at a particular time. In our performance, we would have to use one jump, one turn, and one down which means we have to fall on the floor.

Our sequence started with us jumping sideways in the stance of a Boxer, and then we would fall on the floor at our first point and spread out like a starfish; our next movement was to use a skipping rope in mime to get to our next point; when we were at point two, we held our hands up in the stance of a boxer and we would then do a 180 degree jump and turn, and we would then stay in this stance and shuffle forwards to our next point; we would then once again stay in the boxing stance and we would do a slow turn towards our next point which was returning back to our home point, we would then wipe sweat off of our face and in mime, throw a towel over our shoulder and walk to our home point. After this, our drama teacher read out a very short extract of Beautiful Burnout to us.

On the first occasion, we would perform it with just the movements. But on the second occasion, we would have to use three bits of dialogue from the extract our teacher read out to us to use in each movement before we reached each point in the sequence. Our first one was 'your jaw is connected to your legs'; our second one was 'hold your guard', because this movement was when we were in the stance of a Boxer holding their guard; and finally the third one was 'relax', because this movement was us wiping the sweat off of our faces and throwing a towel over our shoulder, and after being defeated we needed to be relaxed. I think dialogue which shows  words of encouragement and advice would work well with this approach because quite a lot of the dialogue we were saying in our piece like "hold your guard" would be something a coach would say when they are training with their boxer. The point in this activity was to look at what sort of movements that boxers tend to show during a match, and also what sort of dialogue would best be suited to this approach.