Emotion and Language

Emotion:

In drama class, we discussed and learned about the 7 main emotions. These were:
Joy :)
Grief :(
Fear o.o
Anger >:O
Surprise :o
Love <3
Laughter :D

As a quick exercise, we had to choose an emotion. And portray it. However, we had to use a scale, and go up or down on it. The scale was from one to ten. Ten being the most intense portrayal of the emotion and one being that you could hardly tell. I chose to show grief. I went from a ten to a one and I think that was quite obvious. I don't know if it would be considered cheating, but I actually went through this before in real life, when my aunt passed away. I visualized how I felt at that time, and remembered how it faded over time. Then I made that go very fast, and I had portrayed my emotion. I think it is very important to exaggerate the emotions because otherwise the audience won't understand what is happening. Especially in our performances, where there will be no actual language, we will need to be able to show this clearly. When we are different characters we will need to show their relating emotions on a very large scale so this exercise helped improve that skill.

Language:

In commedia, Gromalot was made. Gromalot is basically sounds that seem familiar and when you hear them are like words, however it does not make any sense of mean anything. From my understanding, it is babble that comes together to allow commedia actors to work with the audience and show them the emotions they are trying to get across. Even though it does not mean anything, most people will understand exactly what is going on, because of the actions, gromalot, expressions, etc. in the scene. I think gromalot would be very helpful to have as a tool in the final performance. For a little practice, I was partnered up with Ahnaf. Although it was very short, I was quite sure that everyone understood what had happened. because we were able to use gromalot. Even though there was no meaning to the sounds, the audience understood what was going on. Gromalot can sometimes sound similar to other languages, but it never is.