1. Lysistrata
Chorus
Movement and Speech

2. Movement warm up
• Beans
• Physical Theatre – touch and move
• (in pairs a and b – a taps a part of b’s body and
b reacts like a puppet, taking the movement
as far as naturally possible but keeping the
same floor position, not travelling.) encourage
freedom of expression

3. Objective
• – to encourage a number of individuals to
start thinking and working as a coherent
group and to establish equality within that
group.

4. Exercise – group stop and start
• - Walk around the room, balancing the space, at a fairly
brisk pace, being very aware of one an-other. Without
giving any signals, and with no single person taking the
lead, find a common impulse to stop. Try to come to a
complete stop, rather than gradually slowing.
Then, once stationary, find a common impulse to begin
walking again. This may happen after a few seconds or
several minutes, that does not matter. The important
thing is that the group responds as one and makes
choices together without communication or
leadership. This exercise can also be done in a circle.
• Do this a number of times, start in a circle and progress
to random spacing around the room.

5. Extension Exercise
• Include other actions as well as starting and
stopping, e.g. Raise one arm, bend
forwards, lean to the left etc. To make it really
tricky, include a jump when stationary.

6. • Moving as a chorus (shoaling)
• Objective – to encourage a group to make
collective decisions and to improve their non
verbal communi-cation, to introduce the
concept of Greek Chorus, and to encourage
the group to be open to accepting offers from
one another.

7. Exercise -
• Assemble as a group. Set off together (as with common
impulse) and move as one, at the same speed as one
another and keeping the spacing between you
constant.
• When you approach an obstacle, turn as one to face a
new direction. Whoever finds themselves at the front
of the group becomes the leader, and they set the
speed and direction of movement until another
obstacle is reached.
• The chorus then turns again, and finds a new leader at
the front of the group. The aim is for the chorus to
move as fluidly as possible, like shoal of fish.

8. Extension exercise
• - Broaden the scope of the movement.
• Who is leading if you face one way but travel
in another direction (sideways, backwards)?
Move between different levels. Include arm
movements, upper body movements etc. Ask
their group to make their chorus convey a
mood or an atmosphere.

9. Plateau
• Objective – To develop the concept of Greek
Chorus and explore communal
movement, and to reinforce the idea of
offering and accepting offers.

10. Exercise - Plateau
• - Imagine that the floor is a large flat platform balanced on a
tennis ball at the centre. Begin with one person at each end. They
must work together to keep the tipping platform balanced on the
ball, remaining equidistant from it. They must not mirror one an-
other, or the platform will tip, but rather counter balance one
another, keeping moving at all times, remaining silent and
collaborating equally to balance the platform.
• Neither should “lead”. Other participants find a moment to join
one party. More and more participants gradually join each team
until the whole group is included.
• Ask the group whether they have made one chorus or two.
Although they are not standing as a single group, they are still
working as a single entity to keep the platform balanced.

11. Note taking time
• You now have 15 minutes to make notes on
the exercises we have just done, and how they
could help a director instruct a group in the
movement aspects of the chorus.

12. Vocal work
• Objective – to encourage a number of
individuals to start thinking and working as a
coherent group and to establish equality
within that group.

13. Exercise –
• Stand in a circle facing one another. Ask the
group to inhale and exhale as one. Find a
common impulse for the in and out
breath, without signalling or allowing any one
individual to lead. Breathe normally. Repeat.
Then vocalize the out breath with an “ah”. Begin
and end together, again without signalling or
leading. Work towards turning the vocalized out
breath into a word, “us”. Make sure the separate
sounds are articulated cleanly as a group – all
moving from the vowel to the sibilant sound
together, and stopping as one.

14. Extension Exercise –
• Change the formation and repeat, standing
still all facing one direction, then all facing
different directions, then walking around,
then still with eyes closed. (increasingly
difficult).
• Alternative – ask the group to hum any note,
and then to find a common impulse to open
their mouths, changing the sound from
“mmmmmm” to “aaaaaah” together.

15. Story Telling
Objective –
to encourage a group to make collective
decisions and to be open to making offers
and accepting offers from one another.
To introduce the idea of collective
responsibility for carrying a narrative, and
to explore the possibility of a group being
a single narrator for a story.

16. • Exercise – Pick a story everyone in the group
knows well, either a text that you are working
on, or a fairy story or similar. Sit in a circle and
tell the story by allowing each member of the
group to speak one word in turn around the
circle. Ask one person to record what is said.
Read it back and identify and problems, either
grammatical errors or gaps in the story telling.
Repeat the exercise until you have a version that
everybody in the group feels satisfied with.

17. • Extension exercise - Tell the story in this way
for different imagined audiences, ie. A
bedtime story, a news report, a piece of
gossip. How can the group find a common
narrative voice when speaking sepa-rately?

18. Choric Speaking
• Objective – To develop the concept of Greek Chorus and explore
communal speech.
• Take one sentence from the story as told above. Ask one member
of the group to perform the sentence, as they might on stage.
Ideally, record their performance. Ask the rest of the group to copy
the way the sentence was spoken, practicing individually, matching
the speed, pronunciation and inflection exactly. Then, when they
think they have learned it perfectly, ask them all to speak the
sentence together.
• Record this and play it back so they can hear themselves. It should
sound like one person with many voices, rather than a group.
• Ask them if they think they have achieved this. It should also sound
full of life, rather than having the automaton sound that a group
speaking together can adopt.

19. • When they are happy that they have achieved
this, play the two versions for comparison – the
original lone speaker and the group. How do they
compare? Return to the common impulse task
and ask them to begin the sentence together in
this way.
• Try the exercise on several connecting sentences,
one at a time, then add the sentences together.
Keep comparing them to the lone speaker’s
version. Do they sound as alive and as engaging?

20. Speaking and Moving!
• Objective – To assimilate the other exercises
to create a lively and coherent Chorus

21. Exercise –
• Identify a chorus speech with some good, juicy, interesting words in
it, and create a choric version in the method outlined in exercise
three. Then ask the chorus members to each choose a different
word from the text which appeals to them and to create a gesture
or physical action to accompany that word.
• Stand in a circle and practice each other’s actions in turn.
• Each action is offered by its creator, then repeated one by one
around the circle, then performed together.
• Do this for every word that has an action. Then stand as a
chorus, and speak the text as before, incorporating these actions.
• No one member of the group should pull focus, and the spoken
version of the text should sound no different to how it did before
the actions were added. Compare recorded versions to make sure.

22. Extension Exercise –
• perform the speech, with actions, while
shoaling. There should be no pre prescribed
pattern or trajectory for the chorus to follow,
they should be responding in the moment to
the offers made by the group, while
maintaining what they have created
previously in terms of speech and action in a
disciplined way.