Grade 5 Knowledge: Movement versus Staging

How to avoid overlapping answers to these questions

Today I’ll be looking at Question 2 and 3 from the LAMDA Grade 5 Acting Knowledge section. Here’s a reminder of what your students will be asked:

Q2)  Give a rationale behind the physical characterisation in response to the text and the characters’ situations

Q3)   Describe the reasons for the choice of staging in the chosen scenes using the technical terminology of the working stage areas

Has anyone else enjoyed the blank or terrified look on your students’ faces when you read out Q2 for the first time? It is worded in such an impenetrable way! The wording has been changed in the current syllabus. It used to be (from 2014-2019):

Q2) Describe the characters’ movements in the chosen scenes and the rationale behind them.

which is slightly more straightforward. However, describing a character’s movements and describing your choices of physical characterisation are two very different things. And I think that this is where a lot of the confusion arises, both from teachers AND from students. How do we distinguish the two questions really clearly and make sure that we are not overlapping our answers?

For example, if our character collapses to the floor at one point in the scene, should the student mention this as part of “physical characterisation in response to the situation” or is this “staging”? I think it could be either, but the way you talk about it would be very different.