Thursday 9th July

Final Performance Evaluation

Once we had started our class, everyone was sent down to the performance space were the whole year had a chance to run the piece through once more before we had performed the piece to our audience.

The run through went well. I feel that once we had our last run through the flow of the piece and the effort that everyone was putting in was put in as a collective so that the power and energy was equal throughout the whole piece. Many people from our other year didn’t understand all the parts to our piece of the story it followed. However many say that they found our piece amusing and that there were many characters in the piece which had quite comical parts that made sections funny.

We then only had a few minutes to spare until soon the performance started. It was very interesting to be able to see all the different paths each class took in order to present the motion of the story.

What went well?

·         The energy put in by the whole group as a collective

·         The colours within the costumes we brought in on the day

·         The use of physical theatre and intricate movements within the physical theatre

·         The monster being created with all three aspects of sound, movement and voice in order to make the animal seem as realistic as possible

Even better if

·         The piece had a clearer story line to follow

·         The whole class came together to make more movements as one (e.g. creating a sea ripple effect with our arms while dreams floated around)

·         Extended the piece a little longer

·         A bit more dialogue was added, although I enjoyed having our piece as mainly physical theatre I do still believe adding on small amount of more dialogue would make the piece more effective

Overall I am extremely proud of our piece and I am really happy that we chose to follow a main pathway of physical theatre as so many other groups mostly took on a performance pathway of a large amount of dialogue. Our director was able to help us realise how strong our piece was and that all it needed was for us to show that to the audience. When the effort of our class is put in by 110% you could feel the atmosphere of everyone without having to look. It helped us to continue that wave of energy even though we were already sweating by just emphasising on each part of our body structure for each movement precisely. I believe we reached our target audience in a positive way and that we chose the best way we could in order to tell this magical story to the children by making every word come to life.

2nd July Thursday – Rehearsal

During this lesson we had a chance to go to the new theatre where our piece was being performed and learn what time we were going to be coming on and off stage. We also had a chance to run through our piece in the theatre and watch the other Theatres class’ performance.

Before going into the new theatre, we had about an hour to run through our piece to sharpen up sections in our performance.

Once we got into the new theatre, each strand in the school was told when to come on and off stage and we ran through the staging during this time. This was helpful because it avoided having any confusion on the day as everyone would know when to come on and off of stage.

After all the other strands left, our theatre strand was given some time to run through and practice our piece in the actual performance space as well as being able to watch the other theatre class’ performance.

As a result, our performance run through was a bit rough. As our piece was being performed as a collective group, things such as people not being bothered to put all their energy and effort in when others did made the piece look silly.  As our piece is also very different to the other theatre class’ performance, many people compared our piece to theirs saying how theirs was better because it had more singing and dancing.

I personally believe it’s unfair to compare two pieces of theatre which are completely different in style as our approach was different to theirs. Even though I believe our overall piece could be stronger by having people put more effort in and maybe adding more sections to our piece, it’s important to remember our target audience isn’t teenagers, but young children. Our aim is to tell our audience a story, to get them to understand the message and enjoy it.

In this aspect I believe we have the perfect style of theatre; physical theatre. There is no better way of telling children a story than with the use of music and movement as well as colours. That is what our piece is and as long as all of our effort and energy is put in during the performance, it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks of it other than the children.

They are the target audience, so their opinion is what will matter.

25th Thursday June - Developing our final piece

Today’s lesson consisted of getting all of our different activities that we participated in the last few lessons and putting the piece together as one.

Structure of our piece

·         Whispers from everyone repeating the line “There are places in the world where dreams don’t exist” until music from Edward scissor hand soundtrack begins

·         In a planned order, groups of 2’s perform their start and stopping movement

·         About six people from either side come out one after the other discovering the new world and explore and finish on the other side of the room

·         Connor, in the centre of the room can’t manage to get any sleep and eventually everyone sinks down to the floor

·         We then individually stand up around the room and perform our shortened version of our dream (from the dream machine) using voice and physicality

·         Connor stamps his foot and everyone instantly goes into slow motion

·         Still in slow motion, we slowly lead into our “Dinosaur Structure” and each creates a body structure of the dinosaur in movement.

So far, I believe the strongest part of our piece is the beginning; all the different movements and people analysing and exploring the world around, make the piece more engaging. I say this because I believe that it will allow the target audience (children) to have a choice of what they want to see and then will have to guess what emotions in partners are feeling from just the physicality. I believe that using a bigger range of physicality rather than words will engage the audience more as children can sometimes lose concentration when listening to dialogue and they might not understand.

Areas I believe need more improvement would be trying to add some parts where the whole class isn’t involved. Sometimes having so many pieces going on at once can confuse the audience whereas having just a piece of physical movement between two people will allow the audience to strongly focus on one piece.

Thursday 18th June

Before our workshop we had about an hour of the lesson to start putting our work together for the performance for Little People’s day. We developed our sound and movement machine to create a dream machine which would be put into a section of our performance.

The following stages enabled us to clearly understand how important it is for the positioning of each of us in order to make this dream machine look together as one. The positioning was one of the things that we did face some problems with when creating the dream machine. As most of these short physical movements of the dreams were actions that varied from picking apples from trees to using super powers, clashing did occur many times. Some of us ended up interrupting other people’s physical movements as we were also in quite a tight space. By taking these problems into account, we were able to thoroughly analyse the spacing of the movements before joining the dream machine and overcame this problem by either tweaking the direction of our movement, or by changing the positioning of our movement.

What were we able to take from the Frantic Assembly production?

After our first hour, we then were privileged enough to participate in a workshop led by the Frantic Assembly.

Exercises we participated in...

·Testing awareness- all standing in a wide circle while one person made eye contact and walked towards the other person until they noticed and then continued the cycle by picking another member.

·Testing Timing- Creating a path in which you follow a partner around a circuit making sure that you are travelling at the same speed and motion

·Awareness of energies – Choosing a partner as one of the two keep their eyes closed and place their hands on the other persons hand while the person who had their eyes open, led them around the room with just the pressure on the hands leading.

·Start & Stop – with the same partner creating a cycle of ten different movements including lifts to make your partner start (running, walking twisting etc.) and then finding a way of stopping them

· Testing timing – The whole class got into a grid shaped figure and jumped to the beat of the music and then turned at certain moments while the next line followed. (certain counts included lifting arms, body movements within the jumps)

The Frantic Assembly workshop gave us an opportunity to find more ways of incorporating physical theatre into our final pieces, as a majority of our performance is based around physical theatre.

By adding emotions to the “start and stop” exercise it gives us an opportunity to link this into our  dreams as a whole group at the same time.

First Lesson - Thursday 11th June

Devising skills

During this lesson we connected with our inner child like minds. We participated in exercises such as the recreation of a dream with our physical body, in order to help us connect to the creative side we were more in tune with as children.

I was most confident in using my physical body to tell the story of my dream as I was able to also use my facial expressions to link the emotions towards certain objects with my physicality.

Children’s Theatre

Theatre for children is so vulnerable because it gives children an opportunity to embrace their creativity and find even more ways to enlarge their creative thoughts. As we grow older many of us seem to engage ourselves with only the realistic side of life however by having theatre performances for children, it helps them keep hold of their creativity and keeps their imagination from fading away as they grow older.

http://www.polkatheatre.com/

The Polka Theatre

· Theatre for children from babies to young children

· Also produce workshops to express art and creativity

· Currently showing at the theatre is “Puss In Boots”

· Polka theatre can help us with our performance as we are able to take certain skills that they use with their performances. “polka is all about fun, laughter and creativity” by using this motto we can incorporate our performance by always making sure that these three emotions is what the children always feel when watching the performance.

https://www.unicorntheatre.com/

Unicorn theatre

· The unicorn theatre is a theatre company that creates performances for the younger generation

· Currently on at the Unicorn theatre is “sometimes that’s all you need”

· The unicorn theatre can help us when creating our own performance as we can analyse the way in which the use physical theatre in order to create scenery.

During today’s lesson we firstly started off by warming up to a game of “sleeping bunnies”. It enabled us to open up our minds into getting into the creative and imaginative world. We then had to remember a dream and create that dream by moving around the room increasing and decreasing how much we expressed the movements at certain moments. We then used that dream to describe to a partner who stood directly opposite us and we had to describe the dream to them with our physicality. This was effective because it meant that we had to put a lot of concentration and effort in order to get our partners to understand exactly what was going on in our dream without verbally saying it.

We then led on to creating a sound and movement machine which consisted of having one person begin in the centre of the room making a machine styled action within four beats. The action could be the movement of a machine dropping and moving something on to the next stage. We also included vocal sounds to go with the action that we were creating. Since it was a machine, it was very important to analyse the piece as a whole and pick the right moment to enter the machine piece to incorporate your own movement. As I started the first movement, I didn’t necessarily have to think about making my movement blend with the other pieces as they were not there yet however another member of my class Robyn, incorporated her piece with mine very well. By visualising my movement of picking up a certain object and then moving that object to the other side of me she then chose to incorporate her movement by picking up what I had to move along.

For the last part of the lesson we got into groups of 5/6 and had to create a short piece of theatre based on a life without dreams. Since we had been so deeply connected with the idea of trying to create something very expressive with our imaginations I found it challenging to then instantly change the mood into a dull scenery. This exercise was interesting as initially when I personally think of “a world without dreams” I simply picture an empty dark room. So then trying to create movement and characters within this image of an empty dark room, I found quite challenging.

My group decided to have a space with random animals feeling down because they were out of their element. We thought that by taking certain animals for example a fish out of the sea, would make it impossible for them to live and so we tried to use and play around with this idea in order to create a scene.

We chose to not use certain ideas such as having animals from the same species as it would mean that even though they were out of their natural habitat, that they were still surrounded by other animals like them which would give the audience a sensation of a homely atmosphere. As we wanted to make sure that the message being given off wasn’t very warming, we decided to not include this into our piece.

Response to “An Awesome Book”

I believe that the book we are studying for little people’s day is every creative and helps children to express their imagination. I believe that the book is even more heart touching as it was written by a father for his son so it shares a real love between its audiences.

The book has been selected for little people’s day as it lets us as performers express these ideas in many ways. As the book explains so many different scenarios for ideas of dreams, it gives us as performers an opportunity to adapt our performance in so many ways through physical theatre as well as vocally.