Josh Liu
Theatre 9
6/8/15
Theatre 9 Self-Reflection
This was my first year studying in
America as an exchange student, and I studied many new subjects that I haven’t
heard about before. Theatre as communication was one of the most remarkable new
subjects that I’ve studied as a ninth grader. For me, performing in front of
people was always a skill to have, but after I joined theatre class, I didn’t
have that sense of fear anymore. In theatre class, Ellen taught us many warm-up
activities that helped us to get prepared for the class and for performing. We read
tongue twisters, played the word ball game and did some strange dances that made
our voices louder. Warming up was always an important preparation before our
class, and Ellen always supervised us in those warm-ups. Another part that I
liked about theatre class was performing scenes to our classmates. Ellen said,
performing would be a very important skill to have at school and at work, so
start practicing in theatre class would definitely be a brilliant choice. According
to her advice, I started to put time into reading plays written by great
authors like Shakespeare and Geoffrey Chaucer. The reading was a challenging
experience, and I learned a lot of vocabulary as well as writing and reading
skills from the reading. After I read the plays, Ellen directed us to act out
the scenes we liked from the books. We spent a long time to rehearse and
prepare for our scenes, and finally we performed and left a great impression to
our audience. Besides performing, I also got the chance to make a short movie
in class with three friends of mine. Ellen gave us a very interesting project
of making a movie by ourselves in quint 3, and I gladly accepted the project
and used my movie making skills to tell a very hilarious story that happened in
our school using videos. We spent weeks to film with our cameras, and I spent a
few days to edit the movie according to our group mates’ advice. In addition, I
really enjoyed acting and playing games with Ellen and Michaele, because they
gave us many instant tasks of telling audience a story by acting it out in
class. Those acting games helped us understand the roles of people in the play
Macbeth better, and the games sped up our speed of rehearsing in a certain way.
Last but not least, I really enjoyed making props with Jeanne from sculpture
class. In my opinion, it was very important for actors to know how to make
their props on stage, and Ellen invited Jeanne to our theatre class and let her
teach us how to make puppets, decorations and masks for our performances.
Without a doubt, with many teachers’ help, I had a memorable year in theatre
class, and I believe that I will always use the skills I developed in this
class everywhere.
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