lesson 2

What tasks did you do in the lesson today towards creating TTWCTT? 

We started off by listening to a poem performed by Patti smith, but written by William Blake. William Blake is a very talented artist who inspired Patti smith. we are now using Patti smith as inspiration to create our piece. the poem is called 'the tiger' and William Blake wrote it after his brother, who he was very close to, died. 

after listening and familiarizing our self with Patti smith's performance of the poem, we performed it as a whole class. We performed it in a the same way that Patti Smith performed it.The poem is like a lament or hymn.  it was effective, but i don't think it was suitable for the age group we are performing to. It is a very serious poem and talks about the presence of god, which is quite a dark subject for such a young audience. The tone is very haunting and dark and the pace is very slow,  so would quickly loose the attention of the children. we could fix this by adding a performance alongside the poem, because contextually we can make it fit, as long as there is something else happening on the stage. 

The next exercise we did was ' becoming explorers', which was where we started to think about the opening of our piece. we decided on the movements our characters would do as we travel through the space at the beginning. we listened to the music that we will be moving to and worked out the pace and rhythm at which we wanted to move to. Then we started to experiment with what we will say, to go with our characters. We had to think about what was suitable for the audience and how we could make the things we were saying exciting. We did this by practicing our projection, adding words like ' golly gosh' or 'hazarr' and thinking about how interesting the context of our dialog was. 

Then we began to devise the human pyramid. This involved a lot of team work and communication. In order for the exercise to be safe and work well, it was important that we worked as an ensemble and everyone needed to be clear about what everyone else was doing. I feel that our communication skills need to be improved, in order for the human pyramid to be successful and work within our piece. This can be fixed by practicing the pyramid at every opportunity we get and making sure we discuss everything as a group, before we start. 

How do you think it contributes/will contribute towards making TTWCTT?

The poem was useful because it started to get us thinking about how we need to adapt the piece for a younger audience. It gave us something to work round and started to give a structure to the performance. Listening to Patti smith gave us inspiration for how we can use our voice and sound to add to the piece and make it better. When we performed the poem we began to think about how we project and modulate our voice. an important thing to remember, if you dint feel confident singing, is that singing is just talking with extended vowels. 

Creating our character was an important exercise because if you don't believe 100%   in the character your playing, then the audience wont be able to believe in them. creating the character is one of the first and most important things to do when devising a piece of theatre. If you know your role and who your playing, the piece will able to fit around your character. 

The devising of the human pyramid builds strength in the group, because the more we have to work and negotiate with each other, the easier the devising process will become. For us to be working as an ensemble at a professional level, we need to be able to handle any task we are given and work together to do it.