The Flea Exercises - Listening and Responding

We did many different exercises in our lesson - all to do with the poem, "The Flea". We used this poem as it is our stimulus for our experimental play and we need to be able to do different exercises, as this will allow us to experiment with many different ideas and help us to find an interesting and responsive way of creating our piece.

The first exercise we did was to do with the exercise we did before where we said something about a person and they had to respond - e.g. "You've got brown eyes." "I've got brown eyes." We practiced this exercise again, this time making sure that we repeated exactly what they said. Then we had to repeat back exactly what they said - e.g. "You've got brown eyes." "You've got brown eyes." - which was a lot more difficult! We then were allowed to respond to them saying what we saw back - e.g. "You've got brown hair." "You've got blonde hair." - this was a very hard exercise as it really relied on your concentration and awareness.

We then learnt the first two lines of, "The Flea" and had to say them to each other like a conversation and make it seem believable - e.g. "Mark but this flea, ands mark in this, How little that which thou deniest me is;" "It sucked me first, and now sucks thee, and in this flea our two bloods mingled be." - this exercise was really effective for trying to get us to sound like we were having a believable, natural, flowing conversation. It worked really well at helping us learn to respond to each other, so that when we're on stage, we don't just reply with our next line, but we listen and respond accurately to what they're saying. Which will help our acting to stay fresh and not become too boring or repetitive.

I found that when watching the three common ground play's that the Year 13's did - the ones that worked a lot more effectively are one's that kept the audience engaged because the actor's seemed to be saying the lines to respond to what they had heard. For example, "Earthquakes in London" was a fantastic piece of theatre because of lots of different elements, but the main one was that it seemed to be really fresh to the actor's and although they had obviously rehearsed it a lot, they kept the audience intrigued and alert, because they were responding and listening to each other on stage.