Exploring the Taxi Driver

To further explore the character of the taxi driver we did a whole class hot seat which is an effective technique because in order to be 'hot seated' effectivley you have to make decisions about the character you are portraying, as we did this as a whole class the decisions people made were adopted by the rest of the class and we had a cohesive idea of who the taxi driver was. in the whole class hot seat we learned that though the taxi driver has a fairly mundane day job on the weekend he loves playing golf, his favourite club being the shiny one, and prefers Star Wars over Star Trek. i asked questions like where's the furthest yuve ever driven a passenger? and have you ever made friends in the cab?

After the hot seating we all became taxi drivers adding our own little quirks to the character. i made my taxi driver half asleep. he was fully hunched over the wheel and slurred all of his words together when he bothered to talk at all, mainly he would use his hands to communicate and stop the cab regularly to buy himself a coffee.

Other people in the class for example Benji, chose to be the polar opposite to what we'd imagine the cabbie as, he was a very camp taxi driver sat straight up in his chair with a very high dynamic voice. As an ensemble we all turned into certain poeples taxi drivers and it was amazing how in sync we were able to be while all having slightly different nuances in the same character. 

I think as a class we all work very well together because we are comfotable with each other and trust each other to take the scene to different places, i think that becoming our difeerent taxi drivers was really helpful because although we'd made some decisions about the character as a class its so interesting to see how many different ways the character can still be portrayed.