A Selection of Creative Exercises to Explore the Play Through

Creative Exercises

A selection of creative exercises to explore the play through

Exploring the Play

Creating the Characters - Group Art Exercise

After watching the play, choose a character from the play (see the Come Rain or Shine character list). A class doing this exercise may wish to divide up the characters between them, or you may all wish to work on one or two.

Stage 1:

As a group decide on the information below. You can use what you remember from the play and use your imaginations for the rest:

Name of character

Age

Interests (hobbies, clubs, music dance, art etc)

Job

Family

Email address that would best describe this person (doesn’t matter if they were around before emails!)

Important people in their lives

Favourite Music:

Favourite Food:

School (if they went)

Favourite Subject:

Where do they hang out:
What do they hate about school:

Stage 2:

Once you’ve got a good idea aboutyour character, ask a member of your group to lie on the paper and be drawn around. This is going to be the outline of your character.
Discuss with your group (using the information compiled what your character would look like – you could do a rough sketch to help.
Now using collage materials decorate the outline to recreate your character.
Once you have done this, label the collage to illustrate the facts that you have decided upon in stage one.
Discuss and display

Jasmine and Eddy’s Friendship

Discuss as a class Jasmine and Eddy’s friendship at the beginning of the play. Ask the class why they think that they have drifted apart.
Dvide into threes or fours, and ask one to take on the role of Eddy, the other as Jasmine.
Explain that the class are going to chart Eddy and Jasmine’s friendship through the years by creating still images of them at different points of their life, and the different influences or people that have affected their friendship (parents, Sophie etc). For each still images the pair must come up with a tag line or two short lines of dialogue to highlight the action within their scene.
The different points are: Aged 4, Aged 7, Before the play, After the play.
Each group are to show their work, then discuss as a class the influences on their friendship, how it has changed. Do the class think that Jasmine and Eddy will be good friends after the end of the play?

Day in the Life – Drama Exercise

We meet the characters at certain points in their life. This exercise would be good to get a better understanding about how they have got to the point that we meet them at. So for Jasmine and Eddy, you could recreate their school day, for Miss Bisby – the day after the floods, for Charlie – The Huskar Mine Disaster or life down a coal mine, For Kitty and Willis – The Sheffield Blitz. The South Yorkshire History Resources that are part of this pack will help.

The exercise begins at a certain time of day, generally early in the morning. Ask the group to place themselves, mime the activity, move around the space acting out where they feel there character would be and what they would be doing at given times of day eg; 5am many of the group may be sleeping
7am, some may be getting ready for school, other may still be in bed and pull the sheets up over their head and so on right through until 12 or 24 hours later.
After 24 hours/when they enter the classroom, discuss the characters day.

Facts and Rumours about TheFalkendorfs – Writing exercise

There are 2 piles of coloured paper and pens.
On one colour, the cast were asked to write facts about the Falkendorfs – such as how they met, their past lives, the accident and their marriage. You can use the Timeline section to help with this.
On the alternative colour paper the cast were asked to write rumours about the Falkendorfs
Places the pieces of paper on two tables: ask the class to look at the true ones and the false ones.
They must choose a true fact and a rumour and write a short newspaper article about the Falkendorfs and include both pieces of information.
Share back the stories in small groups. See if the class can distinguish between the truth and fiction.

Create Your Own Scene
(writing, drama, ICT and history exercise)

The writer of Come Rain or Shine Stacey Sampson worked over several months with children and young people from around South Yorkshire to decide which people or events from the past would be in the play.

Think about people you have studied in history, people from your family or local area that you think would have been good in Come Rain or Shine.

Fill in the character profile above for a person or research and event so you know more about it.
Decide what interests you about the event and person
All of our characters have had both loss and hope in their lives – what and how is this in your character’s life?
Do feeling do you want in your scene? Happy, funny, sad, serious? A mixture?
Write a play script showing what would happen if your character came through the astra-clash. How would Jasmine and Eddy react to them? What about Miss Bisby?
What would happen in your scene? Would they help the characters like Derek Dooley or do they need help to find hope like Kitty and Willis?
How can you chance the atmosphere of the classroom to make it feel as if you are with that character ( for example in Come Rain or Shine we used the air raid sirens in the scene with Kitty and Willis, or tiger’s roaring in the scene with Falkendorfs?
Once you have written a short scene, you could practise it in your classroom and film it. You could then show the selection of scenes back to the class.

Characters

The actors in Come Rain or Shine play lots of different characters – one actor plays 5! It’s really important that the actors can make it clear to the audience that they are playing different characters.

During the rehearsal process, actors work on exploring their character’s backgrounds,the way they move, their character’s identity. The actor will then create these using their bodies, movements, props and costumes.

Walk this Way

The way we move and talk gives the people around us clear signals, and we interpret and react to these signals

Ask the group to walk around the room. Think about how they are walking and exaggerate characteristics of the walk.
Divide into fours.
Each group is to watch a group member walk across the room, they are then to copy the walk of this person, exaggerating eccentricities – i.e. swinging of the arm etc...

Character Freeze Walk:

Ask the group to walk around the room and freeze when you clap
Ask the group to repeat the exercise, but take on characteristics that I suggest: old, young, sad, happy, scared, authoritarian, snide etc…
The group is to freeze in these characteristics when you clap yout hands
Now ask the group to think about the characters within Come Rain or Shine.
Ask the class to choose a character and write down three facts about that character (they can be entirely made up, or grounded in some information from the play). Now ask the class to consider how this information could be shown through their walk. Ask the class to stand in neutral position (so a relaxed walk). Ask them to think about what they have discovered about their character and add this into their walk.
Ask for two volunteers to walk in front of the class. Ask the class to watch the other volunteers to walk. Can they guess which character is which? If so, how? If not, what could be done to demonstrate this further through the walk?