UNIT 6 Performance workshop

12/10/15
This session we weolked on stage directions, and also the status of the character. I could understand the stage directions, and I could also understand jhe difference between statuses. Within my own acting, however, this could improve.  We also learnt how to stage afavourite book or play. I had lots of ideas on how to stage the piece in the best way for the genre and story.

20/10/15
After a few games to start us off, we all had to listen to a piece of music.  We had to consider how the music made us feel. As a group, we considered how to make this music fit in to a scene at the beginning or end. We created a piece based on someone coming to their senses. I performed this part. The rest of the group played senses that joined me and locked themselves in to position. This piece was cleverly made, fully included the music, and was made of everyone's iddividual ideas.

04/11/15
After many warm up games, we began to look at our monologues.  Some people wrote powerfully whereas others wrote as if they were penning a book. Each, however, was unique and sjrong. We moved on to examining creating a plot using a newspaper article. We heard the story of a boy who drowned in a river at scouts. His grave was tended to, but no one knew who did it. We had to create truths, rumours, and lies about the article to try and piece together the story. It became very complex and, in my oppinion, would have made a great play. Everyone shared ideas and worked well as a team of storytellers.

08/11/15
We played a few games as a warm up. FOLLOWING this, we began listening to 4 different pieces of music and we decided what the music was was trying to portray. In 2 teams, we picked a piece of music and created a scene with it. WE used the titanium music, and I played a cyber-bullied girl who managed to stay strong  after verbal abuse.  It was a powerful scene, everyone played strong  parts, however the scene  could have been longer.

19/11/15
After a few warm up games we began to look at creating a theatre company and a play in small groups. We began with looking at doing a play about drugs and alcohol awareness for young people. This idea did not work out as the ideas weren't quite right. We then joined the other group who were creating Jack the Ripper. We began planning it and assigning roles like director. I am playing the first girl to die at the hands of Jack the Ripper. It was a very scary piece and we'll continue with it later. It was very effective, we had a good team and were very productive.

27/11/15
We warmed up with some games and then moved on to look at improvisation circles. We were given a scenario and had to cross the circle to meet our pair, and acted out  the scenarios. It was a fun activity and we all managed to create  successful improvs. We then turned back to our Jack the Ripper piece. We altered the first scene so that instead  of 3 freeze frames we had a busy pub scene  with  10 different moves.  Callum then helped choriograph  a slow, eerie dance  with the girls on blocks  as I passed  slowly between them, as the first  to die.  It was a very productive  session and we all used strong divising techniques.

30/11/15
After some warm up sessions, we turned back to our jack the ripper piece.  We had 2 new ucan staff with us. They found us some music to carry out our 10 moves sequence before we continued the choreography sequence for the puppeteers dance. We then began examining our characters, and designing our monologues.

03/05/16
In our last session, we built on our ideas for our end of year performance. We were advised by Dinos, another Ucan practitioner, to make a scene timeline in order to work out the best way to lay out the key scenes. Each person worked on their own character's back stories and how our characters would finish the story. We were also all allowed to give ideas towards other people's storylines. This gave us ideas to work with, which we could either discard if not necessary, deliver if the idea is at a stage where it can be performed, or developed if it needs more work. This is a technique Dinos gave us, called the three Ds, allowing us to work on and create new ideas. For example, throughout the piece I have created my character name, and backstory. I have also helped work on other people's storylines, the design of the town with no name, the order of scenes, and the type of theatre we are aiming for. I also helped give ideas towards our company name, and our aim. We also worked On contrasted scenes, and were able to order the scenes in a varied way.  We did identify a few problems, for example, one group member left the group. We reassigned her part, so now another member is running the coffee shop. Also, there was a solo in the song mashup which we tried but decided that we would cut out as the person had left. We were able to be creative by reassigning parts, and interweaving  in new storylines which work just as well. For example, we removed Maisy's drug dealing scene and entered a love story between two characters which fits just as well. Songs and dances have also been added to fit in with each character. Some people have written monologues.

09/05/15
In this week's lesson, we focussed on a few main scenes, the songs, Mikey's monologue, Lorren's dance, Zizi and Ellie's movement piece. We also looked at the piece opening and scene order. We also started interpreting ideas about the ending for certain characters. We looked at why or why not the person would leave the town with no name.  We did come across a couple of issues. Due to there being a lot of scenes, it was difficult to fit in  everyone's scene that needed practising. My scenes weren't looked at, which is understandable,  due to the amount of material. We dealt with this using staggered breaks, working on certain bits while others had a break. Lorren's entire dance was developed doing this method.  The other main probl"am was that there was a lot of conflict about the final piece of music. Many people thought it didn't quite fit, and others countered that. I was on the fence, sawing both viewpoints. We dealt with this by having a discussion, and agreeing to continue with the piece for now.  14 June  Our theatre company was called Tangents Theatre, and it was devised by our performing Arts class. Our mission statement was  creating thought provoking theatre addressing issues faced by young people of today.  I felt I was able to interpret ideas for performance material. I responded to our source materials, by taking workshops with UCAN and researching my own character background. Our performance was devised by using a number of stimulases. We had a look at pre existing pieces such as Undermilk Wood. A lot of our work actually resembled the style of Under Milkwood. We also worked on creating monologues and were practicing turning it in to a storyline and performing it. We used newspaper articles  to create our own storylines. WE listened to music and interpreted it to perform to it. We looked at emotions in that piece, and moved around like cogs in a machine. The song was sound by Lamb. This influenced the actors moving  across the stage, portraying emotions linked to our music, played by Ellie. In Sicily, I took a workshop in character stance, behaviour, and using silent theatre to help feel like my character. On the stage, I felt like my character, moved like her and understood how she would choose to move during certain circumstances. We used props in certain scenes, like a skipping rope used as a shower, for a motive and to represent other more complex props. For our  Jack the Ripper piece, I researched my character, Mary Anne Nichols, and found out enough information to make a character profile. With Dinos, we worked on trying to characterise a lot of different roles, like a child or a queen or a policeman. This helped us choose a lot of different characters for the final performance.  We also looked at trying a name, think, feel, like, fact. This helped us build personalities and ideas for our piece. We used fairytale stimulus. This helped us  to portray a story with varied roles and responsibilities,  which helped in the coffee shop scene. For our final performances  we created character profiles. Mine was Maria Lemming, 21, been to University, has a literary degree. Father ran off, mother dead, leaving Maria with the B and B. She has mental denial that hermother is dead, and portrays many emotions from happy to sad or angry. She loves literature and boosting tourism when she can. We found materials to develop in term 2. With the help of DINOS,  we took material to develop, discard or deliver.  We had a hand movement piece which worked very well, however we could not fit it in so it had to be discarded.  We had many strengths and weaknesses to our group for example, our group at first did not have the strength and teamwork to pull off certain scenes or types of theatre that a team with a good work ethic could achieve.  A strength is that after months of trying to pull a piece together we took a lot of material from term 2 to build on our ideas. Another weakness was lack of time, with only 3 hours per week and what with other work to do, it was difficult to manage. Another strength is we could  include a variety of types of theatre, including comedy, musical, and serious tradegic scenes. For example the post office scene was comedy, and Maria's monologue was more serious and disturbing theatre.
Here is a link to one of our final dress rehearsals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UBfg13gOvw
20 June On 9 June, we had our final performance. I think it was successful and our prop use was fantastic. EVERYONE was very pleased with our success, and gave great feedback. Although the rehearsals were stressful as we had to perfect things, we deffinately managed. As a group we worked well, making sure each prop and scene change was in the right place. I'd never had such a big amount of lines to learn so this was a big achievement. I also did enjoy writing the script with the rest of the group. I'm very proud of the achievement and feel as if we have used a lot of techniques from workshops.  Our characters felt realistic and our audiences' reactions helped the pace move. I wish I could perform it again.   21 June  M1  From term two, we picked certain aspects to take forward for our final performance. For example, we looked at characterisation and creating monologues in term two based on identity. As some of us are very good creative writers, we wrote some monologues based on the idea of identity, which helped us to become more confident with monologue writing. For our final performance I created a monologue for my character, Maria.  Having practised this before I felt comfortable in characterising through monologues. We also looked at overlapping sentences, building in to a loud peak for atmosphere. This is something we practised in term 2 which we used in the coffee shop scene and my monologue.  In my monologue, Maria was on the verge of a mental breakdown, and she heard voices in her head. People spoke overlapping sentences, as rumour spreaders, and as Maria's mother. As it got louder, Maria became more distressed and shouted over the top of them. We also worked on name think like feel fact. We made sure that in our final show, each character had a storyline that included each of those criterias to form a backstory.   Amendment for 19 November 2015  First of all we tried to create a piece about alcohol and drugs to educate young people. This was during term 1, and we soon realised how our idea was not going to work. Firstly, not everyone had the focus, or was sensible enough to perform such a piece. Also, not many us had experienced being drunk, none of us had ever understood disorderly behaviour due to drink, and although only one person had seen a person dealing with the effects of drugs, we could not properly perform it as we could not visualise and understand it enough to perform it. We then merged with the other group to devise our Jack the Ripper piece.