Unit 9
Unit 9- Developing performance and production skills
To start the process of creating a Christmas play, we needed to start thinking of some ideas. To do this, we separated into four groups and started jotting down some ideas on some A3 paper. We had to consider what the main objective of the play should be. Should the ending be happy or sad? What style of production should we do? I suggested to my group that we should perhaps perform a pantomime style performance. My reasoning was that, typically, pantomimes are commonly related to Christmas and that would also determine our ending (happy) and would overall be enjoyable to perform. Collectively, the group agreed that this was a good idea and so we continued with our ideas with this in mind. As a group, we questioned how many 'main characters' there should. When writing a plot, you need to have a coherent number of central characters otherwise, if there are too many, the audience can lose focus easily. To figure this out, we had to deliberate on who and where these characters are. As it was a pantomime and we are young adults, we thought that having the main characters are teenagers/young adults would help us to write relatable material that we had insight on and furthermore, would highlight and heighten further any other characters that aren't teens as they would seem a lot more powerful/scary to the teens themselves. As they were around this age, we thought we could write them in as if they are in school/just about to leave school. After some deliberation, we decided that having five main kids would be a good idea as it would give more people a chance at a role without bringing too many characters in. At the end of the session, we shared these notes to the class and the idea was majoritively liked. We then expanded on them again in the next session. Before the session began, another student proposed a suggestion of using time travel as something that occurs during the play and that the conflict could be centred around 'saving Christmas'. Everybody agreed that this could work really well and, personally, I loved it as it was unique and added a lot of material that could engage the audience. In the same groups, we used this idea as inspiration and started to work out a coherent plot. Using our previous ideas as well, I came up with the proposition that the five children could be trying to save Christmas as it's been banned. Including my peer's suggestion of time travel, they could end up travelling to different periods in time to do so. My group agreed with my idea and it became our main plotline so we began shaping other ideas around this. To have some significance to the story, the era's the children visited had to be memorable moments in time or certain points that linked in with our story. As it was a Christmas play, a peer suggested that they should visit moments that have a link with Christmas. This was something we all agreed on and began to think about some settings in which the children could visit. At the end of the lesson, we fed back to the class with our plot. Some other groups ideas include a feud between Mr and Mrs Claus and a Black Mirror themed dystopian Christmas. I loved all of these as we had taken just one idea and turned it into three completely different creative plots.
As we now had our initial ideas, we started to use these plots and improvise scenes with them. In the same groups, we thought about what we had devised beforehand and began to improvise some ideas of how some scenes could play out. Our aim was to showcase the use of time travel and one era in which the children end up in. In our first improvisation, we decided through the natural flow of the piece that the children should end up at the birth of Jesus Christ. They encountered the three wise men, Mary and the child himself and end up, unknowingly, naming him themselves. We found this proposal a good starting point and started to develop more into this. We set ourselves a few questions to answer in the piece that would help the audience to understand our ideas more: How do the children end up at this place in time? How does this set up the rest of the play? What are the characters of the children like? We aimed to be able to answer all of these by the end of the lesson. First, we adapted on how the children arrived at the birthplace. As we previously discussed that the children could be 'saving Christmas' we put this into play. While my group discussed the reason behind 'saving Christmas', I suggested that we could come up with that detail later, after we had our initial plan sorted. Someone in my group suggested that Christmas could be banned in this reality and it is forbidden to be celebrated. I added onto this proposing that maybe this could be set in the future rather than our current time period. This would make it easier for us to play around with some of the settings and dialogue. For our time travel aspect, we discussed multiple ways in which it could be introduced and ultimately set on a book. We decided on a book as it could hold many symbolic connotations to time and settings, for example, the phrase 'open book' implies that wisdom and knowledge could be held within, perhaps educating the children on Christmas and how to save it. Furthermore, the turning of a new page usually signifies the start of something new- in this situation, a new time period/setting. The children could find the book somewhere and, in their curiosity, open it, transporting them to wherever is intended. We chose to have the children find the book in an abandoned school, to show to the audience that since Christmas has been banned, things have gone downhill and many buildings are now desolate. With these decisions in mind, we ran it through from the beginning, still improvising lines to get a feel of what the characters may say in this situation. We had originally decided on five children but as we didn't have enough people in our group we opted for three instead. Discussing the personalities of these three children came down to how we all personally portrayed them in the improvisations. Someone in my group portrayed their character as quite clueless and asking unhelpful questions. Another performed theirs as sarcastic and judgemental. Personally, I played my character as someone who tries to act like a leader but feels like they are shut out most of the time. We added these characterisations to our piece and performed it to the class at the end of the lesson. Everybody had taken their stories and turned them into really unique, story-telling pieces. After we performed ours, the feedback we received was very positive. We were told by one peer that we had gotten our objectives across well to the audience and they understood where the piece could possibly go in the future. One note we were given was to exaggerate some of our characters more as our plan was to perform a pantomime, having over the top characters would help get this across to an audience whilst also enhancing our story. After looking over everybody's ideas and deciding what could work best, it was decided that we would use a mixture of everybody's suggestions but featured together as one coherent story. We rewatched our improvised pieces back and took the best parts of all three ideas and created a short narrative using all. We performed different variations of the ideas until we decided on the best plot out of the three. Taking the Black Mirror, dystopian tone of one of the groups and pairing it with another group's Mr and Mrs Claus conflict storyline, we merged this with ours and it helped create the character of a villain. He would be our main cause of conflict for the children and be the pinnacle reason as to why Christmas has been banned. We could start developing his backstory with some, now, added subtext. It made us start to think about why he is evil. How did he end up this way? Does he have any family or friends? It gave us a lot more breathing space in terms of what we could do with the character.
Now that we had spent a few sessions improvising and deliberating possible ideas, we now seemed to have a stable and useable plot that we could make a play out of. Although some darker and more serious paths were debated, eventually, we agreed that a pantomime route would be better for the subject matter and our desired target audience, ages 11+. In our next lesson, we started to plan out what our play could look like from start to finish using our material. Our task was to go home and think about where the plot could go from there. My idea was that at some point the children could go back and visit the Victorian times where Charles Dickens is writing A Christmas Carol. This idea was liked and so we agreed we should work it into the play at some point. A peer of mine came up with an idea that, as it was a pantomime, there should be a dog alongside the five children used for comedic elements. We then added this into the plot as we thought it was interesting and could add a lot of humour. While we were in this process of finalising the ideas, the children and the dog were played by peers who volunteered to workshop some scenes. As a group, we decided that the places the children visit should be: the Victorian Era, World War One and the near future. Despite using the scenario in our original improvisation, ultimately, the visit to the birth of Christ was not included within our finalised details as we believed that there would be too many scenarios, now including our newest ideas and it didn't fit right with the rest of our play. One issue we found when finalising some details was that it was difficult to include everybody's ideas. As it was very open how our performance could go, many great suggestions were put forward, however, it was a problem trying to fit them all into one show when all of them were so different in tone. A way we dealt with this was by using compromise to pick ideas. If someone's idea wasn't included in one scene, they got to suggest first in the next. This method solved any conflict we had in class and made the picking of ideas a lot fairer. A way that I contributed artistically to the creative process was the devising of the World War One scene. This scene took a while to devise as it is a heavy subject matter and we wanted to get it right. The scene entails the children ending up in No Man's Land in WW1 on Christmas Day when the famous truce football game takes place. One problem we were having was how the game started and what triggered it. I put forward that the reason the ball gets brought out is that it is meant for the dog. We tried this out and it worked and was the last jigsaw piece that helped us finish the scene.
Now we had to take our improvised scenes and put them into a physical script. Something I found difficult during this part of the process was the collaborative aspect of it. With so many ideas for dialogue and humourous lines, it was quite hard to have a functioning script. To tackle this problem, I suggested that we use a collaborative document to type all ideas down and then have some scribes to turn these ideas in dialogue. We could then show the script to the class and any adjustments could be made if necessary. To start off with we created a character list. Initially, the children were named Child 1-5 to make distinguishing between them easier but now we needed to come up with some names. As we still weren't 100% sure on the casting, we kept the names gender-neutral so that any role could be played by anyone. As a group, we created a list of possible names and deliberated on which ones we should use via the lists. Finally, we decided on Sam, Alex, Charlie, Jordan and Jamie. Each child had a unique personality to create conflict between them all and to also give them recognisable separate motives that the audience could pick out. Jordan was stubborn, Jamie was clueless and Charlie was sarcastic. To build a relationship already that the audience can see straight away, we made Sam and Alex siblings. This meant they could already have some conflict between them making their characters a lot more interesting to work with. To write the scenes in which the children travel back in time, I had to do some research on both World War One and the Victorian Era. For the latter, we wanted the children to meet Charles Dickens and subsequently give him ideas for A Christmas Carol (without their knowledge that they are doing so). To help write this scene, I researched who Charles Dickens was as a person and specific dates that would help with the historical accuracy of the scene. A Christmas Carol was published in December 1843 and the writing process is debated to have started in around 1842. We made sure to include these dates in the script as so to simultaneously inform the audience and also stay factually accurate. Dickens was a major humanitarian and started his life as a poor factory worker. Through his writing, he worked his way up to a position where he could showcase his work and go on to become one of the most prolific writers of all time. To show this in his character, he is empathetic and understanding with the children when they tell him they are lost and responds with comments such as: 'Shouldn't you be in a workhouse somewhere? Or have you escaped? I'd be careful, they may be looking for you!'. This not only is true to his personality but also informs the audience of what kind of man he is if they are unaware. When researching World War One, I wanted to find out how the football game started and the realities of it. The iconic 'Christmas truce' football game occurred on Christmas Day as British and German troops came together for one day to celebrate the time of year. I found out that the truce started via the German troops signing hymns and decorating their trenches with decorations, getting the British's attention. In response, they sang hymns back and subsequently a football match started, a loved common denominator of the two sides. I really wanted to get across to the audience the impact of the truce and how despite their differences, two countries united even if it was just for one day. To bring the harshness of the war back into the scene, however, we decided to end the match with a loud explosion, showing that although there was a brief moment of peace, the war continued after for almost another four years. This research helped us as a group find the motivations of the characters involved and gave an insight into the minds of them also.
For the casting of our now named characters, we workshopped multiple people as the children in rehearsals and the cast was chosen via this method. As we were performing four shows (two matinees and two evenings), one actor, playing Sam, couldn't make one of the shows so we double cast this role and I played Sam for one of the days.
Final performance evaluation
Looking over the performance as a whole, one thing I believe I did well was that I reacted well against my fellow actors. When on stage, it is, of course, important to say your lines of dialogue, however, arguably, what is even more important is that you listen and react to what other actors are saying in the stage space. Without this, lines sound scripted instead of natural and the audience may become less connected to the piece. So when I was performing I made sure that I was bouncing off the other actor well via realistic reactions. A way I prepared to do this in rehearsals was that I would highlight whatever my cue line was and think about how my character would react to each line. For example, in the second scene of the show where my character, Sam, calls up his friends to make them aware that his parents had been taken. In one specific moment, Sam calls upon 'Operation Redhawk', a failsafe plan in case something went wrong. Although Sam has made the whole group aware of this Charlie claims he has no idea what that is. When Charlie says, 'What? What is Redhawk?' and I say 'Charlie, I've told you so many times- I'll just call you once I tell the others.', I thought about a similar situation in real life that could help me make the delivery realistic. This helped to relate more to the situation and make my reaction seem more true to life so that the audience would be drawn in more. Another way that helped my reacting was that I thought a lot about my character's backstory. Sam is the shyest and most outcast member of her group of friends. She's also the oldest but never actually feels as if she's in charge. I wanted to make sure I got this frustration across in certain moments by reacting negatively and defensively whenever Sam is teased by the others. In one moment in the modern market scene, Charlie says 'You seriously need to get a life' and the whole group laugh. I made sure to show Sam's frustration and sadness before delivering the line 'Well, you're adopted!', Sam's desperate attempt to cash in a laugh from the group to make her feel more confident but, ultimately, it fails. I reacted to the silence awkwardly to show that Sam feels uncomfortable in social situations and finds it difficult to react. I think this got across to the audience well as they were engaged with my character throughout the show. It also made it easier for my fellow actors to bounce off of one another as their silent reactions to Sam's joke genuine, awkward and real. Another thing I believe I did well in our final performance is that I projected well. When I received my notes from the first show, I was told that my projection was clear and reached the back of the room. Leading up to the performances, I ended up falling ill which meant I was put onto vocal rest for a week. When the performances came around, I had mostly recovered, however, my voice was still quite weak. To ensure my projection, while being clear, was also safe, I used vocal techniques and methods such as projecting from the stomach and not the throat to avoid strain, doing a vocal warmup before each show and staying on vocal rest when not on stage. This helped my performance because I didn't worry about my voice as it was protected via these methods. Also, I discovered new techniques to keep my voice safe which I can use in the future even when my voice is completely healthy. My projection meant that the audience stayed in the action and weren't distracted or confused by quiet dialogue. I also ensured that my diction was used well and made my words much clearer and more understandable. This is a note I was given in rehearsals and I made sure I took it up for the final performance and in future productions too. I believe I overcame the obstacle of my illness well and did what was necessary to ensure my performance was clear and engaging. During our final performance, I felt as if my confidence whilst performing was high. At the start of the year, I mentioned in my skills audit that I felt as if my confidence was improving with each week. I still wholeheartedly agree with this as I can feel myself getting stronger with each performance. Confidence within a performance as an actor is crucial as the energy can feed off to other actors and lift the whole tone of the show. Also, it ensures that the audience has an enjoyable experience and confident actors make them feel as if they can be promised an entertaining performance. I think my confidence in this certain performance stemmed from my personal growth as an actor and the overall tone coming from my fellow actors. Even just this year, I have improved on my conviction when performing and I now feel a lot more trust in myself that I can successfully evolve in a character and perform it in front of a large number of people. When playing the character of Sam, although she is quite socially anxious and yearning for validation from others, I still needed to make sure that I played Sam with confidence in myself to get across these tropes to the audience. I believe I did this successfully by trusting myself in my dialogue and my skills.
Overall in our final performance, I believe we worked well as an ensemble. In performance, every person must work harmoniously otherwise a show can be thrown off its course and morale can become lower. Despite having a few problems in rehearsals with this, we took all the notes on board and listened to each other well. For example, in ensemble heavy scenes such as the two market scenes and the final scene, with lots of dialogue and cues to hit, we needed to get it perfect. During one of the dress rehearsals, the final scene seemed a little out of place which we discovered was due to the pacing. We were taking too long to say our lines and so it inevitably slowed the scene down. To stop this from happening, we made sure to always be listening and aware of cues even when offstage. Those who were onstage should also be alert and when speaking dialogue, be quicker with cues (unless a pause is necessary). We ran it through again and it worked perfectly. In the final performance, we kept it like this and the scene bounced off of the audience well and got lots of laughs. Our work together on resolving issues and reacting off of each other on stage as an ensemble was one of the main aspects as to why our performance worked so well. Another reason our final performance worked well was that our characterisations were exaggerated and high and, as we were had devised a pantomime, this worked well as it suited the genre of our piece. In a typical pantomime, characterisation is heavy as to entertain the audience and keep them engaged in the action. It is also used to enhance comedic segments of the show and often adds fun elements to any serious scenes to keep the tone light-hearted. I believe that, overall, we kept this tone alive and it could be seen throughout the performance. For example, during the Evil One's scenes, we made sure to play off of his antagonism whilst still getting across the comedy that makes the play flow. I believe we got many more important moments of the show across to the audience via our exaggeration and, therefore, they connected with this more. Another aspect that I believe went well in our final performance was that our spatial awareness improved as a whole. In the dress rehearsals, from an audience perspective, scenes were not performed in centre stage and therefore the action was difficult to follow and you could become distracted by some of the misplacements. So, we got somebody to watch the scene that caused the most trouble, the Victorian market scene, and, afterwards, inform us when and where our spacing was off. We ran this a couple of times until we got it to be perfect. In the final performance, this paid off as not only had our spatial awareness improved in that specific scene but all the scenes. We became a lot more aware of our blocking on stage and the overall aesthetic of the show became less crowded and a lot easier to watch for an audience.
Although I believe our final performance went very well, there was still some room for improvement. For example, personally, something I could've done better was made sure to lift my head to the audience when speaking. When watching back my footage, one thing I noticed was that there where certain times in the performance in which my head was positioned down to the floor. An example of this was during the Redhawk scene in which Sam calls up all of her friends. There were certain moments in this scene in which I was not looking up which meant that some of my facial expressions were missed, even if it was just for a split second. Keeping an eye line up is so important as you want an audience to feel included and spoken to. If your gaze drops, so does the action and the audience could lose focus. To improve on this in the future I will have somebody watch a scene I'm in and let me know if I ever drop my eye line. Overall in our final performance, again, I felt as if there could've been areas of improvement. One of these was that our scene transitions could've been faster. As the transferral from the rehearsal room to a stage space changed our perspectives on how scenes could be done, a lot of our entrance and exit points changed last minute, subsequently causing some last-minute decisions. Although we did handle these issues swiftly, I felt as if we didn't consult the pace of the transitions enough. Some changes of scene took too long and left empty space on stage at times. Next time, as an ensemble we should do a transition run of the show, solely based on when we come on and off to practice for the performance. This would speed up the changes from scene to scene and keep the action flowing faster. We can use these weaknesses as positives in our future work to improve our productions.
To start the process of creating a Christmas play, we needed to start thinking of some ideas. To do this, we separated into four groups and started jotting down some ideas on some A3 paper. We had to consider what the main objective of the play should be. Should the ending be happy or sad? What style of production should we do? I suggested to my group that we should perhaps perform a pantomime style performance. My reasoning was that, typically, pantomimes are commonly related to Christmas and that would also determine our ending (happy) and would overall be enjoyable to perform. Collectively, the group agreed that this was a good idea and so we continued with our ideas with this in mind. As a group, we questioned how many 'main characters' there should. When writing a plot, you need to have a coherent number of central characters otherwise, if there are too many, the audience can lose focus easily. To figure this out, we had to deliberate on who and where these characters are. As it was a pantomime and we are young adults, we thought that having the main characters are teenagers/young adults would help us to write relatable material that we had insight on and furthermore, would highlight and heighten further any other characters that aren't teens as they would seem a lot more powerful/scary to the teens themselves. As they were around this age, we thought we could write them in as if they are in school/just about to leave school. After some deliberation, we decided that having five main kids would be a good idea as it would give more people a chance at a role without bringing too many characters in. At the end of the session, we shared these notes to the class and the idea was majoritively liked. We then expanded on them again in the next session. Before the session began, another student proposed a suggestion of using time travel as something that occurs during the play and that the conflict could be centred around 'saving Christmas'. Everybody agreed that this could work really well and, personally, I loved it as it was unique and added a lot of material that could engage the audience. In the same groups, we used this idea as inspiration and started to work out a coherent plot. Using our previous ideas as well, I came up with the proposition that the five children could be trying to save Christmas as it's been banned. Including my peer's suggestion of time travel, they could end up travelling to different periods in time to do so. My group agreed with my idea and it became our main plotline so we began shaping other ideas around this. To have some significance to the story, the era's the children visited had to be memorable moments in time or certain points that linked in with our story. As it was a Christmas play, a peer suggested that they should visit moments that have a link with Christmas. This was something we all agreed on and began to think about some settings in which the children could visit. At the end of the lesson, we fed back to the class with our plot. Some other groups ideas include a feud between Mr and Mrs Claus and a Black Mirror themed dystopian Christmas. I loved all of these as we had taken just one idea and turned it into three completely different creative plots.
As we now had our initial ideas, we started to use these plots and improvise scenes with them. In the same groups, we thought about what we had devised beforehand and began to improvise some ideas of how some scenes could play out. Our aim was to showcase the use of time travel and one era in which the children end up in. In our first improvisation, we decided through the natural flow of the piece that the children should end up at the birth of Jesus Christ. They encountered the three wise men, Mary and the child himself and end up, unknowingly, naming him themselves. We found this proposal a good starting point and started to develop more into this. We set ourselves a few questions to answer in the piece that would help the audience to understand our ideas more: How do the children end up at this place in time? How does this set up the rest of the play? What are the characters of the children like? We aimed to be able to answer all of these by the end of the lesson. First, we adapted on how the children arrived at the birthplace. As we previously discussed that the children could be 'saving Christmas' we put this into play. While my group discussed the reason behind 'saving Christmas', I suggested that we could come up with that detail later, after we had our initial plan sorted. Someone in my group suggested that Christmas could be banned in this reality and it is forbidden to be celebrated. I added onto this proposing that maybe this could be set in the future rather than our current time period. This would make it easier for us to play around with some of the settings and dialogue. For our time travel aspect, we discussed multiple ways in which it could be introduced and ultimately set on a book. We decided on a book as it could hold many symbolic connotations to time and settings, for example, the phrase 'open book' implies that wisdom and knowledge could be held within, perhaps educating the children on Christmas and how to save it. Furthermore, the turning of a new page usually signifies the start of something new- in this situation, a new time period/setting. The children could find the book somewhere and, in their curiosity, open it, transporting them to wherever is intended. We chose to have the children find the book in an abandoned school, to show to the audience that since Christmas has been banned, things have gone downhill and many buildings are now desolate. With these decisions in mind, we ran it through from the beginning, still improvising lines to get a feel of what the characters may say in this situation. We had originally decided on five children but as we didn't have enough people in our group we opted for three instead. Discussing the personalities of these three children came down to how we all personally portrayed them in the improvisations. Someone in my group portrayed their character as quite clueless and asking unhelpful questions. Another performed theirs as sarcastic and judgemental. Personally, I played my character as someone who tries to act like a leader but feels like they are shut out most of the time. We added these characterisations to our piece and performed it to the class at the end of the lesson. Everybody had taken their stories and turned them into really unique, story-telling pieces. After we performed ours, the feedback we received was very positive. We were told by one peer that we had gotten our objectives across well to the audience and they understood where the piece could possibly go in the future. One note we were given was to exaggerate some of our characters more as our plan was to perform a pantomime, having over the top characters would help get this across to an audience whilst also enhancing our story. After looking over everybody's ideas and deciding what could work best, it was decided that we would use a mixture of everybody's suggestions but featured together as one coherent story. We rewatched our improvised pieces back and took the best parts of all three ideas and created a short narrative using all. We performed different variations of the ideas until we decided on the best plot out of the three. Taking the Black Mirror, dystopian tone of one of the groups and pairing it with another group's Mr and Mrs Claus conflict storyline, we merged this with ours and it helped create the character of a villain. He would be our main cause of conflict for the children and be the pinnacle reason as to why Christmas has been banned. We could start developing his backstory with some, now, added subtext. It made us start to think about why he is evil. How did he end up this way? Does he have any family or friends? It gave us a lot more breathing space in terms of what we could do with the character.
Now that we had spent a few sessions improvising and deliberating possible ideas, we now seemed to have a stable and useable plot that we could make a play out of. Although some darker and more serious paths were debated, eventually, we agreed that a pantomime route would be better for the subject matter and our desired target audience, ages 11+. In our next lesson, we started to plan out what our play could look like from start to finish using our material. Our task was to go home and think about where the plot could go from there. My idea was that at some point the children could go back and visit the Victorian times where Charles Dickens is writing A Christmas Carol. This idea was liked and so we agreed we should work it into the play at some point. A peer of mine came up with an idea that, as it was a pantomime, there should be a dog alongside the five children used for comedic elements. We then added this into the plot as we thought it was interesting and could add a lot of humour. While we were in this process of finalising the ideas, the children and the dog were played by peers who volunteered to workshop some scenes. As a group, we decided that the places the children visit should be: the Victorian Era, World War One and the near future. Despite using the scenario in our original improvisation, ultimately, the visit to the birth of Christ was not included within our finalised details as we believed that there would be too many scenarios, now including our newest ideas and it didn't fit right with the rest of our play. One issue we found when finalising some details was that it was difficult to include everybody's ideas. As it was very open how our performance could go, many great suggestions were put forward, however, it was a problem trying to fit them all into one show when all of them were so different in tone. A way we dealt with this was by using compromise to pick ideas. If someone's idea wasn't included in one scene, they got to suggest first in the next. This method solved any conflict we had in class and made the picking of ideas a lot fairer. A way that I contributed artistically to the creative process was the devising of the World War One scene. This scene took a while to devise as it is a heavy subject matter and we wanted to get it right. The scene entails the children ending up in No Man's Land in WW1 on Christmas Day when the famous truce football game takes place. One problem we were having was how the game started and what triggered it. I put forward that the reason the ball gets brought out is that it is meant for the dog. We tried this out and it worked and was the last jigsaw piece that helped us finish the scene.
Now we had to take our improvised scenes and put them into a physical script. Something I found difficult during this part of the process was the collaborative aspect of it. With so many ideas for dialogue and humourous lines, it was quite hard to have a functioning script. To tackle this problem, I suggested that we use a collaborative document to type all ideas down and then have some scribes to turn these ideas in dialogue. We could then show the script to the class and any adjustments could be made if necessary. To start off with we created a character list. Initially, the children were named Child 1-5 to make distinguishing between them easier but now we needed to come up with some names. As we still weren't 100% sure on the casting, we kept the names gender-neutral so that any role could be played by anyone. As a group, we created a list of possible names and deliberated on which ones we should use via the lists. Finally, we decided on Sam, Alex, Charlie, Jordan and Jamie. Each child had a unique personality to create conflict between them all and to also give them recognisable separate motives that the audience could pick out. Jordan was stubborn, Jamie was clueless and Charlie was sarcastic. To build a relationship already that the audience can see straight away, we made Sam and Alex siblings. This meant they could already have some conflict between them making their characters a lot more interesting to work with. To write the scenes in which the children travel back in time, I had to do some research on both World War One and the Victorian Era. For the latter, we wanted the children to meet Charles Dickens and subsequently give him ideas for A Christmas Carol (without their knowledge that they are doing so). To help write this scene, I researched who Charles Dickens was as a person and specific dates that would help with the historical accuracy of the scene. A Christmas Carol was published in December 1843 and the writing process is debated to have started in around 1842. We made sure to include these dates in the script as so to simultaneously inform the audience and also stay factually accurate. Dickens was a major humanitarian and started his life as a poor factory worker. Through his writing, he worked his way up to a position where he could showcase his work and go on to become one of the most prolific writers of all time. To show this in his character, he is empathetic and understanding with the children when they tell him they are lost and responds with comments such as: 'Shouldn't you be in a workhouse somewhere? Or have you escaped? I'd be careful, they may be looking for you!'. This not only is true to his personality but also informs the audience of what kind of man he is if they are unaware. When researching World War One, I wanted to find out how the football game started and the realities of it. The iconic 'Christmas truce' football game occurred on Christmas Day as British and German troops came together for one day to celebrate the time of year. I found out that the truce started via the German troops signing hymns and decorating their trenches with decorations, getting the British's attention. In response, they sang hymns back and subsequently a football match started, a loved common denominator of the two sides. I really wanted to get across to the audience the impact of the truce and how despite their differences, two countries united even if it was just for one day. To bring the harshness of the war back into the scene, however, we decided to end the match with a loud explosion, showing that although there was a brief moment of peace, the war continued after for almost another four years. This research helped us as a group find the motivations of the characters involved and gave an insight into the minds of them also.
For the casting of our now named characters, we workshopped multiple people as the children in rehearsals and the cast was chosen via this method. As we were performing four shows (two matinees and two evenings), one actor, playing Sam, couldn't make one of the shows so we double cast this role and I played Sam for one of the days.
Final performance evaluation
Looking over the performance as a whole, one thing I believe I did well was that I reacted well against my fellow actors. When on stage, it is, of course, important to say your lines of dialogue, however, arguably, what is even more important is that you listen and react to what other actors are saying in the stage space. Without this, lines sound scripted instead of natural and the audience may become less connected to the piece. So when I was performing I made sure that I was bouncing off the other actor well via realistic reactions. A way I prepared to do this in rehearsals was that I would highlight whatever my cue line was and think about how my character would react to each line. For example, in the second scene of the show where my character, Sam, calls up his friends to make them aware that his parents had been taken. In one specific moment, Sam calls upon 'Operation Redhawk', a failsafe plan in case something went wrong. Although Sam has made the whole group aware of this Charlie claims he has no idea what that is. When Charlie says, 'What? What is Redhawk?' and I say 'Charlie, I've told you so many times- I'll just call you once I tell the others.', I thought about a similar situation in real life that could help me make the delivery realistic. This helped to relate more to the situation and make my reaction seem more true to life so that the audience would be drawn in more. Another way that helped my reacting was that I thought a lot about my character's backstory. Sam is the shyest and most outcast member of her group of friends. She's also the oldest but never actually feels as if she's in charge. I wanted to make sure I got this frustration across in certain moments by reacting negatively and defensively whenever Sam is teased by the others. In one moment in the modern market scene, Charlie says 'You seriously need to get a life' and the whole group laugh. I made sure to show Sam's frustration and sadness before delivering the line 'Well, you're adopted!', Sam's desperate attempt to cash in a laugh from the group to make her feel more confident but, ultimately, it fails. I reacted to the silence awkwardly to show that Sam feels uncomfortable in social situations and finds it difficult to react. I think this got across to the audience well as they were engaged with my character throughout the show. It also made it easier for my fellow actors to bounce off of one another as their silent reactions to Sam's joke genuine, awkward and real. Another thing I believe I did well in our final performance is that I projected well. When I received my notes from the first show, I was told that my projection was clear and reached the back of the room. Leading up to the performances, I ended up falling ill which meant I was put onto vocal rest for a week. When the performances came around, I had mostly recovered, however, my voice was still quite weak. To ensure my projection, while being clear, was also safe, I used vocal techniques and methods such as projecting from the stomach and not the throat to avoid strain, doing a vocal warmup before each show and staying on vocal rest when not on stage. This helped my performance because I didn't worry about my voice as it was protected via these methods. Also, I discovered new techniques to keep my voice safe which I can use in the future even when my voice is completely healthy. My projection meant that the audience stayed in the action and weren't distracted or confused by quiet dialogue. I also ensured that my diction was used well and made my words much clearer and more understandable. This is a note I was given in rehearsals and I made sure I took it up for the final performance and in future productions too. I believe I overcame the obstacle of my illness well and did what was necessary to ensure my performance was clear and engaging. During our final performance, I felt as if my confidence whilst performing was high. At the start of the year, I mentioned in my skills audit that I felt as if my confidence was improving with each week. I still wholeheartedly agree with this as I can feel myself getting stronger with each performance. Confidence within a performance as an actor is crucial as the energy can feed off to other actors and lift the whole tone of the show. Also, it ensures that the audience has an enjoyable experience and confident actors make them feel as if they can be promised an entertaining performance. I think my confidence in this certain performance stemmed from my personal growth as an actor and the overall tone coming from my fellow actors. Even just this year, I have improved on my conviction when performing and I now feel a lot more trust in myself that I can successfully evolve in a character and perform it in front of a large number of people. When playing the character of Sam, although she is quite socially anxious and yearning for validation from others, I still needed to make sure that I played Sam with confidence in myself to get across these tropes to the audience. I believe I did this successfully by trusting myself in my dialogue and my skills.
Overall in our final performance, I believe we worked well as an ensemble. In performance, every person must work harmoniously otherwise a show can be thrown off its course and morale can become lower. Despite having a few problems in rehearsals with this, we took all the notes on board and listened to each other well. For example, in ensemble heavy scenes such as the two market scenes and the final scene, with lots of dialogue and cues to hit, we needed to get it perfect. During one of the dress rehearsals, the final scene seemed a little out of place which we discovered was due to the pacing. We were taking too long to say our lines and so it inevitably slowed the scene down. To stop this from happening, we made sure to always be listening and aware of cues even when offstage. Those who were onstage should also be alert and when speaking dialogue, be quicker with cues (unless a pause is necessary). We ran it through again and it worked perfectly. In the final performance, we kept it like this and the scene bounced off of the audience well and got lots of laughs. Our work together on resolving issues and reacting off of each other on stage as an ensemble was one of the main aspects as to why our performance worked so well. Another reason our final performance worked well was that our characterisations were exaggerated and high and, as we were had devised a pantomime, this worked well as it suited the genre of our piece. In a typical pantomime, characterisation is heavy as to entertain the audience and keep them engaged in the action. It is also used to enhance comedic segments of the show and often adds fun elements to any serious scenes to keep the tone light-hearted. I believe that, overall, we kept this tone alive and it could be seen throughout the performance. For example, during the Evil One's scenes, we made sure to play off of his antagonism whilst still getting across the comedy that makes the play flow. I believe we got many more important moments of the show across to the audience via our exaggeration and, therefore, they connected with this more. Another aspect that I believe went well in our final performance was that our spatial awareness improved as a whole. In the dress rehearsals, from an audience perspective, scenes were not performed in centre stage and therefore the action was difficult to follow and you could become distracted by some of the misplacements. So, we got somebody to watch the scene that caused the most trouble, the Victorian market scene, and, afterwards, inform us when and where our spacing was off. We ran this a couple of times until we got it to be perfect. In the final performance, this paid off as not only had our spatial awareness improved in that specific scene but all the scenes. We became a lot more aware of our blocking on stage and the overall aesthetic of the show became less crowded and a lot easier to watch for an audience.
Although I believe our final performance went very well, there was still some room for improvement. For example, personally, something I could've done better was made sure to lift my head to the audience when speaking. When watching back my footage, one thing I noticed was that there where certain times in the performance in which my head was positioned down to the floor. An example of this was during the Redhawk scene in which Sam calls up all of her friends. There were certain moments in this scene in which I was not looking up which meant that some of my facial expressions were missed, even if it was just for a split second. Keeping an eye line up is so important as you want an audience to feel included and spoken to. If your gaze drops, so does the action and the audience could lose focus. To improve on this in the future I will have somebody watch a scene I'm in and let me know if I ever drop my eye line. Overall in our final performance, again, I felt as if there could've been areas of improvement. One of these was that our scene transitions could've been faster. As the transferral from the rehearsal room to a stage space changed our perspectives on how scenes could be done, a lot of our entrance and exit points changed last minute, subsequently causing some last-minute decisions. Although we did handle these issues swiftly, I felt as if we didn't consult the pace of the transitions enough. Some changes of scene took too long and left empty space on stage at times. Next time, as an ensemble we should do a transition run of the show, solely based on when we come on and off to practice for the performance. This would speed up the changes from scene to scene and keep the action flowing faster. We can use these weaknesses as positives in our future work to improve our productions.
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