Improvisation Theatre end-of-year performance
This Tuesday, the 29th of November, members of the Solar Improvisation Theater made a presentation to mark the end of the school year. Students from the 6th primary school year to the 3rd high school year, who make up the group, put on quite a show!
Teacher Vinicius Messias split them into two teams to compete against each other: It’s Complicated and The Steal the Shows. The presentation was also split into five modules and each group won points, measured by the audience’s applause, according to each team’s performance and wit.
In the first module, the audience provided the title and they had to create a story, with a beginning, middle and end, always sticking to the theme. In the second module, each team presented an improvised story; “The Haunted House” and “The Happy Forest”, respectively. It’s Complicated won and earned the first points in the competition.
In the third module, the audience went wild with “Gromelô”, a language made up by the actors during the performance.
In this stage, a member from each group left the theater so that the audience, the teacher and the other team could invent a profession and a personal characteristic for the character the actor would play when he returned to the stage. “The coolest thing about this moment is seeing if the actor can find out, guess who he is during the performance”, teacher Vinicius explained. “And when I clap, the actors can speak in Portuguese, but they can’t say the name of the profession or the chosen characteristic. A lot of attention is needed,” he added. Nobody scored points.
In the fourth module, each team chose a genre to play. It’s Complicated chose a Mexican soap opera and The Steal the Shows chose a cop movie. This time, It’s Complicated, who were winning by two points to zero, made things complicated for themselves! The high school students, who were in the majority at the theater workshops and had more experience, helped their younger colleagues who joined this year, and everything became easier and more fun to watch!
At the end, Vinicius Messias chose the most difficult improvisation practice for the actors to perform. With audience participation again, a theme was chosen for each team, but this time the sentences had to begin with a letter of the alphabet. “If the first sentence begins with the letter C, the next will have to start with the letter D, and then E, and so on,” the teacher explained.
The teams did this until they were back at the initial letter, taking care not to lose rhythm or meaning.
Tons of fun and joy! The audience didn’t want it to end! After a lot of applause and cries of “one more”, Vinicius Messias asked the general director, Isabella Maltaroli, for the 3rd year high school students to continue doing improvisation theater classes next year, after graduation. Isabella said yes! And she thinks it’s great they’ll be staying on at Solar!
To see the photos, click here.
