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.