Drama Workshop in Japanese

So recently I signed up for a five day drama workshop with a professional company in my area. Drama is something I absolutely love doing but I was very worried about it being all in Japanese. Not so much the understanding, but the performing part. Especially improvising which is hard enough in your first language!

The very first thing we did was listen to a lecture about...actually I don't know what it was meant to be about. The parts I did understand seemed to be disconnected rambling. I was thinking 'Oh, no. There's no way I can do this, maybe I won't come back tomorrow."

But afterwards I talked to some other members and they said they didn't understand a lot of what he was talking about either so that made me feel a lot better!

Then it was proper workshop time. I was fine with understanding and we improvised the folk tale of the Crab and the Monkey. Which I hadn't heard before and also had to translate for the American intern who only speaks a little Japanese. Anyway, we did it! It wasn't amazing but I did it!

The second day we were allowed in to watch a training session of the company's professional actors. It was really interesting to see them training their bodies and voices. I'm trying out a few ideas with my own students.

In the second day workshop we did more training activities ourselves and built a scene from them. Our group did a scene with the Gods but as real people. So I was the Goddess of Beauty as a kind of shallow high school girl "だってさ〜" It was nerve-wracking but fun!

Today is the third day and I'm on the train there. We'll start working on our final performance which will be next Sunday on the fifth day. Bit concerned about memorising lines in Japanese but hopefully people will help me!