I’m finding very helpful to remember the workshops we proposed in class basing on A Number, Top Girls and Cloud Nine. Taking some inspiration from here and from the videos of postdramatic performances I watched in Youtube these are the exercises I will propose as a director.

• Meisner based repetition exercises to solidify the text and find what’s behind it. This exercise makes the actors focus on the sound of a word instead of on the meaning of it.
• Meisner based calling on behavior exercise. In this exercise the actors stand in a circle, one would start naming what he/she sees of another actor. Like you are doing this… (smiling, touching your hear, looking nervous), and then that person would have to repeat it saying in first person what the other person said (‘I’m smiling’, ‘I’m touching my hair’). This is repeated until they or another actor does the same naming a´new behavior (‘You got tired of repeating’, ‘It annoyed you he said you look nervous’, etc.). In order for this exercise to work the actors have to be natural and show some behavior, at the same time they let themselves be affected by what they are being told.
• Improvisation exercises departing from each scene, to see how each scene could develop differently and what is what the characters want and mean with their sentences. As James Macdonald says, sometimes with Churchill’s plays we don’t really know what is happening between the characters from the dialogue, so it is very important so see what is the complete situation and conversation.
• Improvisation from objectives. How would the different characters get their objectives if they weren’t be limited by the text?
• Physicality and characterization: explore how each character would move in different circumstances and who he/she would be affected by the different behaviors of the other characters. What’s the relationships and power structure between characters. – this would be a movement exercise with imaginary circumstances done first individually and then in couple, so we could use the relationships as a source of behavior (action and reaction).
• Clown: exaggeration exercise. The characters have to run a couple of scenes without using the text, just exaggerating behavior and using sounds. This helps on focusing on the point we want to make (the essence of each character in each scene).