final evaluation essay

Theatre final essay

Evaluation Essay Question

Discuss your exploration and development of TTWCTT taking into consideration key factors and relevant ideas and your input to the process.

Evaluate the skills and techniques used in rehearsal and discuss how you responded to direction and feedback to develop work.

Children's theatre is theatre adapted to be performed to very young people, making sure it's easy to understand, but also engaging and appropriate. It needs to be vibrant but simple and well-staged. The themes can't be hard hitting, but instead uplifting and fun for the children, sometimes with a moral message or an aspect of learning. Children’s theatre can often come across as simple and basic, but sophisticated children's theatre is able to engage both the children and their parents with comedic value and deeper meanings.

We began the topic by starting to develop the technique of using the voice and body as one. We did this because this is a key factor of children's theatre and it is a vital skill that a children's performer needs to possess. The exercise we used to practice this technique was called 'slimy frog', where we repeated those two words, modulating our voice and experimenting with how we could change the words. Whilst we did this, we practiced joining our voice with our bodies, so that when we said the words, we were saying them with our bodies as well. I found this exercise very effective because it helped me realise that whilst performing, it is vital that I forget about how I might look or how silly people may think I am, because if I am constantly thinking about that, then I won't be able to give a good performance. The exercise was helpful because it allowed me to practice living in the moment in front of people who I can laugh about how I may look with, and start to feel freer about what I am doing.

As J Clifford Turner writes in Voice and Speech in The Theatre “..it is necessary to cultivate the ability to relax. Nothing is so destructive of one’s ease of tone as the tensing of those muscles which are not essential for a specific movement……Speech is movement.”

We continued to develop the piece with another exercise called ‘becoming explorers’. I decided on the movements my characters would do as we travel through the space at the beginning of the piece. I listened to the jungle sounds that I would be moving to and worked out the pace and rhythm at which I wanted to move. Then I started to experiment with what I would say, to go with my character.  I had to think about what was suitable for the audience and how we could make the things we were saying exciting. Creating our character was an important exercise because if you don't believe 100% in the character you’re playing, then the audience won’t be able to believe in them either. 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 you’re playing, the piece will able to fit around your character.

Devising the human pyramid was the next stage in the rehearsal process. 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 felt that our communication skills needed to be improved, in order for the human pyramid to be successful and work within our piece. This was fixed by practicing the pyramid at every opportunity we got and making sure we discussed everything as a group, before we started.  The devising of the human pyramid built strength in the group, because the more we had to work and negotiate with each other, the easier the devising process became. For us to be working as an ensemble at a professional level, we would need to be able to handle any task we were given and work together to do it.

A key factor of the piece is the use of song. The development of our song, ‘Tiger, Tiger’, took place over several rehearsals and was developed every week. ‘Tiger, Tiger’ was originally written as a poem by William Blake and we watched it being performed by an artist called Patti Smith. William Blake was a very talented artist who inspired Patti Smith make her art and I used Patti Smith as inspiration to create my art. When the ensemble first performed it in rehearsal, I didn’t think it was suitable for a young age group. It is a very serious poem and talked about the presence of god, which is quite a complex subject for children. The tone is very haunting and dark and the pace is very slow, so would have quickly lost the attention of the children. After responding to the direction of our teacher and the other actors, we improved the piece, so that it was more age appropriate.  The poem worked contextually, as long as it had movement to go with it, so we added a movement sequence, where the butterfly nets become the tiger, which happened during the poem. The tone, when the ensemble sung the poem, was very slow and dull, so by changing the tune to be more upbeat, it made it much more suitable for the audience and improved it hugely.

Another key factor of the piece was that we were performing to three sides. This meant that when I was performing, I had to constantly be aware that I was including the whole audience, instead of just one part of it. To practice working on three sides, we went into the space where we would be performing and familiarised ourselves with it.  We began with an exercise which helped us work on performing to all three sides of the theatre; it involved trying to keep our head facing one side of the audience and our body facing the other. It was very difficult, but helped me come to the realisation that it is a vital skill that a stage performer needs to possess. It was helpful because it made me practice something that doesn't come naturally to me on stage and for me to become a brilliant actor,  I need to practice it so much that I don't even have to think about it. The reason for balancing the space is because if our body is only facing one side the other sides of the audience will immediately become disinterested and bored, especially if they are young children. The actors on stage need to fill every part of the space with energy using their bodies.

We did our dress rehearsal without the lighting and props. It contributed to the development of the piece because it helped me to see what needed to be improved and altered before the real performance. It helped the ensemble come to the decision of what would happen at the end of our piece, because we were able to watch the next groups performance and try and make the transition smooth between our ending and their beginning. On the other hand, not doing a technical run through meant that I was less confident with the lighting when it came to the real performance. One of my props was a butterfly net, which I planned to carry with me, throughout the whole performance. If I had done the dress rehearsal with my butterfly net, I could have had feedback on how I looked and then responded to that, to improve my performance.

On the day of our real performance we didn’t have enough time to run through the piece before. I feel that it would have improved the performance if we had done a run through, because it would have made it cleaner and it would have warmed us up and given us energy. In our first performance, in the morning, I felt like I lacked energy and I could have fixed this by doing a physical warmup and taking a moment before I went on stage to centre myself. Whilst I was waiting to go on stage, I did some vocal warm ups and woke up the muscles in my face; I think this improved my execution of the song. I only got my butterfly net about twenty minutes before I went on stage, which meant that I had no time to practice with it. The net was hard to control and I found it difficult to move around with it. We practiced different ways to hold the net, in order for it to look most effective and after responding to direction we decided to hold them above our heads, although it was difficult. In order to fix this it would have been useful to practice with them during our rehearsals, so I could have got used to handling it. Half way through the piece there was supposed to be a blackout on stage, so we could turn our torches on, but it didn’t happen, so our torch scene became less dramatic and exciting, and it became disengaging for the children watching.

In our second performance, the energy level was much higher and the transitions were smoother. I was more used to using my prop and could work with it more easily, which improved my performance. When I sang the song I engaged with the audience and made sure I used my voice and body together. The lighting worked for our second performance, but the blackout happened too early, so it pulled my focus away from performing.

I feel that in our final performance I put into practice the techniques I had learned from the three sided workshop, but I need to work on projecting my voice out to all three sides. The detailed work we did on the song helped to engage the audience, because if we had sung it in the way that we had sung it at the beginning of the rehearsal process, which was like a lament or hymn, the young audience wouldn’t have been able to enjoy it. 

If I could do the performance again, I would have made sure there had been a technical rehearsal and a rehearsal with all the props. I would also have made sure that the ensemble did a group warm up, to prepare before going on stage. However not being able to do these things was good practice, because often in professional theatre, there are tight time constraints and technical difficulties which actors have to be able to overcome and adapt to.