Skip to main content
BYU Theatre Education
Anne Bogart’s Viewpoints

Lesson 5: Gesture

August 30, 2024 01:08 PM

by Jess Plewe

Objective: Students will physically experiment with different qualities of movement and reflect on their progress by engaging in Anne Bogart’s Viewpoints of Space (Gesture) and completing a self-reflection assignment.

Standard L1.T.P.4: Use body to communicate meaning through space, shape, energy, and gesture.

Standard L1.T.R.8: Apply appropriate theatre terminology to describe and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of one's own or the group's work.

 

Essential Questions

  • How does the way we move convey meaning?
  • Where does meaning in performance come from?

Enduring Understanding(s)

  • Movement conveys meaning
  • Artistic differences between symbolic and didactic movement
  • The way we interact with time tells a story 

Materials: 

Spotlight 

  • Pull up the Student Spotlight Responses Sheet and choose a student who has not been spotlighted yet.
  • Without reading their name, go through all of their answers. After reading all their answers, have students guess which student is the spotlight for today. Once correctly guessed, give the guesser and the student spotlight one Hi-Chew each. 
  • Allow the class to ask a few questions of the student spotlight to get to know them better.

Warm-up: TRIANGULATE YOUR PLACE!

  • Purpose: to practice communicating and relying on each other

  • Everyone gets into a triangle, facing inwards. One person in the middle, randomly chooses to face a certain way. Instruct your team to remember exactly where they were in relation to the spinner.

    • who they were standing next to, and 
    • how they fit into the triangle shape based on where the spinner is facing.

  • The spinner should begin to slowly spin around. Without warning, the spinner should stop and stand still. At that point, the team has to reassemble into place so that the end result is a triangle situated correctly according to whatever direction the spinner chose to face. (TIME IT EACH TIME) 

    • First time talking. 
    • Second time WITHOUT TALKING. 
    • Third time, try to go faster! 

Discussion

  • What was effective? What was ineffective? 

  • How did you adapt once you couldn’t use your words anymore? 

    • GESTURE! 
    • We will be talking more about that today! 

Viewpoint #2: Gesture 

Instruction 

  • Introduce Gesture viewpoint: 

    • Write it on the board with simple definition: Gesture - Movements that communicate an emotion or idea
  • Ask: How does changing this change a story? 

Exploration 

  • Have students spread out across the room, standing up. 

  • Say various prompts and ask them to translate it into gestures

    • “Stop!” “Where are you?” “It stinks” “How could you do this to me?” “I love you” “I hate you” “come here” 

The What game

  • Explain that one person gets up and starts nonverbally miming an activity onstage/in the performance space area. The goal for the rest of the students is to figure out what the first student is doing, and the goal of the first student is to be clear and realistic in their miming, so everyone else can engage in the activity with them
  • Once you think you know what the activity is, you go up and join them.

Discussion

  • After each round of this, ask the following discussion questions

    • What were we doing? 
    • How did you know? 
    • What gestures were confusing?
    • If you didn’t get it, why not?

Group work

  • Explain that we will now focus on creating nonverbal performance using all gestures. 

  • Instruct students that, In pairs, they will create a performance showing a first date or job interview gone wrong through gesture.

    • RULES of the performance: All nonverbal, focus on gesture, no killing/injuring in your scene, 30 seconds to 1 minute
  • Give students 5-10 minutes to rehearse

Performance

  • Call the class back together to perform. For time purposes, you may want to have 2 to 3 partnerships perform at a time. 
  • After each set of performances, ask the viewing students to think of a gesture that stood out to them while watching, and instruct them to replicate the gesture, even if it’s one that they wouldn't normally use. 

Self-Reflection

  • Instruct students to pull up the Self Reflection on Movement on Canvas and show students where to find it.

  • Give students time to complete the Self-Reflection on Movement on canvas.

    • If students aren’t happy with the score they received on Viewpoints of Time Quiz, they can retake it!
Tags
movement acting skills