I have enjoyed working on the Little Peoples Day performance. Foe me personally I found it really fun to take our physical theatre skills to the next level but also become a child again. I never really thought about my dreams in such depth before, and when we had to take ourselves back to a place which for me was a long time ago, felt quite surreal as my dream was from when I was about 5 years old and even to this day I still remember it. Becoming a kid again was probably my highlight, like playing sleepy bunnies, which surprisingly was really enjoyable and something I think the whole class loved, in got us in the childish mood that was great for coming up with ideas, and over acting our pieces.
I struggled at first with trying to think of ways to perform which wasn't to complex for the children. Although children do understand emotion, we couldn't make things too complex or not PG as they are still children and they take everything very literally.
My view on physical theatre has changed dramatically, I see it differently now as though I understand it better. I think before I saw physical theatre as a dance of emotions that I found quite hard to do. But now I know its so much more, its feeling and everything you want to say put into actions, facial expressions, body movements. I now feel as though I could do a whole physical theatre piece now and I would be very comfortable with coming up with ideas, and putting them ideas to life.
Our final product for me I found confusing at first, I didn't really see how the children would like it as it was a bit on the creepy side, especially with the Tim Burton music! I also didn't know how the children were going to act, would they cry, scream I really wasn't sure. It wasn't until we performed it to the rest of our year until I realised what our piece had. Our piece was full of meanings and comedy and imagination, lots of imagination that I think the other performances didn't have. As soon as our class performed we understood it and therefore we even more eager to make this the best performance that hopefully the kids would love and remember forever.
I liked how our piece was made up of tiny dreams, that all meant something to us and maybe to the audience too. I enjoyed being able to work on our own, it felt good to have something all by myself which I had all control of. The Dinosaur at the end could probably of needed more time as not everyone was in time, and somethings went a bit wrong, like forgetting of lines, but what I love about my group is that we can recover from those situations quickly and work as a team. At the end of the day we all love theatre and try our best in it, so when we were about to go on stage and perform we all were so ready and in the mood, we can all pull it together at the last minute and that's why our class works so well.
Overall I liked our performance, it had so much imagination, it really was a dream world. I hope the children took something away from, even just being amazed at what they saw. Our piece was so different to the other strands and I'm glad it was. We were so creative and gave a new perspective to childrens theatre. We made everyone laugh and that's all that matters, we put on a good show that people enjoyed. I think as a class we need to remember who our target audience is, in this case it was children not our piers. I think that's why everyone at the start wasn't so keen, but we all wanted to prove ourselves, and I think we did. We over exaggerated everything, walked in neutral and worked all together to create a giant Dinosaur. So I think we did pretty good and I definitely learnt a lot from this experience. I will be sad to see my teacher Mr Crowther leave, as he has taught me a lot this year and believed in our class. I hope in the future we will have more experiences like this and perform to lots more types of audiences.
Friday, 17 July 2015
Thursday, 16 July 2015
Lesson 2
Today we started working on our dreams, taking a dream that we have had and transformed it into a physical theatre solo piece. We started by turning up our dreams, making them more extreme each time, we did this by increasing the sounds, exaggerating every part of our body so it was so over the top and crazy. This was good because it helped us to be able to see the full potential we had with our physicalised dreams. It was able to take us out of our comfort zones and make us feel completely stupid, which now I think as a class we can do things like that again and we wont be so embarrassed.
Our next task was to create a machine, we had to choose a movement from our piece and join the machine when we thought the time was right. Slowly everyone was part of the machine and it was so funny to hear all the sounds we were making it was very effective. As we went on Sir told us to bring up our movements to the next level. We all had to push ourselves to the extreme giving it our all, and by the end we were all sweating. This was a good excercise, as it showed us how what we can do we our pieces and how we can make them work all together. It also helped us to think about how our mini dream part could fit into the piece and how others can work around ours.
This lesson we also had a company called Frantic Assembly come in and give us a workshop. We started of with an exercise which we had to say someones name in a circle and you go into their space while they say someones name. We then made it harder and we didnt say someones name instead we made eye contact with someone. This helped us to pay closer attention to people and feel more comfortable with making eye contact with people.
We did other exercises like running an obstacle course with a partner next to you but doing it in sync, this helped us to be aware of others and the space we are in. We also did an exercise where we were in lines of 5 one behind the other and we each had to clap a pattern and each time we got to someone at the ends it would change. This improved our concentration and listening skills, so we could prepare for when to clap and actually do the pattern correctly. All these exercises can help us with our performance skills, like being aware of people and making connections with them without verbally speaking to them, having spacial awareness, and concentrating on everything that is happening around us.
We then had to get into partners and lead each other round the room, one with their eyes closed, this was to gain each others trust and become comfortable with them. Then we had to lead someone with a body and making a part of their body move in one direction until you stopped them. Finally we created a piece, me and Antonia started doing ours and realised that it told a story without us even planning it. Ours told a story of two people who are in a relationship, one of them loves the other as one does not. It shows how at the end the person who was in love with the other realises that she is not loved and is all alone. I find it very interesting how from just controlling someone by pushing parts of their body, you can create a whole story.
Overall I learnt a lot from Frantic Assemble. I developed many skills, and had a lot of fun doing it.
Our next task was to create a machine, we had to choose a movement from our piece and join the machine when we thought the time was right. Slowly everyone was part of the machine and it was so funny to hear all the sounds we were making it was very effective. As we went on Sir told us to bring up our movements to the next level. We all had to push ourselves to the extreme giving it our all, and by the end we were all sweating. This was a good excercise, as it showed us how what we can do we our pieces and how we can make them work all together. It also helped us to think about how our mini dream part could fit into the piece and how others can work around ours.
This lesson we also had a company called Frantic Assembly come in and give us a workshop. We started of with an exercise which we had to say someones name in a circle and you go into their space while they say someones name. We then made it harder and we didnt say someones name instead we made eye contact with someone. This helped us to pay closer attention to people and feel more comfortable with making eye contact with people.
We did other exercises like running an obstacle course with a partner next to you but doing it in sync, this helped us to be aware of others and the space we are in. We also did an exercise where we were in lines of 5 one behind the other and we each had to clap a pattern and each time we got to someone at the ends it would change. This improved our concentration and listening skills, so we could prepare for when to clap and actually do the pattern correctly. All these exercises can help us with our performance skills, like being aware of people and making connections with them without verbally speaking to them, having spacial awareness, and concentrating on everything that is happening around us.
We then had to get into partners and lead each other round the room, one with their eyes closed, this was to gain each others trust and become comfortable with them. Then we had to lead someone with a body and making a part of their body move in one direction until you stopped them. Finally we created a piece, me and Antonia started doing ours and realised that it told a story without us even planning it. Ours told a story of two people who are in a relationship, one of them loves the other as one does not. It shows how at the end the person who was in love with the other realises that she is not loved and is all alone. I find it very interesting how from just controlling someone by pushing parts of their body, you can create a whole story.
Overall I learnt a lot from Frantic Assemble. I developed many skills, and had a lot of fun doing it.
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