Side Note

Hello I just want to put a little side note that I have recently added a few things into this post, even though I did this with every post I am still unsure why lesson 1 is still at the top of the blog. I hope this doesn't effect anything. Thank you.

Lesson 1

Devising Skills

What devising skills did we discuss today?

The devising skills we looked at today were the different ways of attracting the attention of a certain audience, in this case it would be children between 2 to 5. We also explored how we used improvisation and physical theatre to make everything bold and interesting to an audience.

Which of these skills are you most confident in using?

I am very confident with physical theatre and working in groups devising pieces which would be very interesting for an audience to watch. However, I feel a bit restricted by the task of coming up with a piece for kids who find it hard to understand and stay interested in what is happening in the scene. On the other hand, I know it would somehow be easier during the process knowing that I will get the help of others.


Children's Theatre

Why is theatre for children so valuable?

Theatre for children is very valuable because it is first of all one of the most influential things that children can witness. Secondly, it encourages kids of the world to be better people and helps them understand the world from a much more positive perspective.

The Unicorn theatre

'The Unicorn Theatre is the UK's leading professional theatre for young audiences, dedicated to inspiring and invigorating young people of all ages, perspectives and abilities, and empowering them to explore the world- on their own terms- through theatre.' 

Events on

-The beauty of decay

-One little word

-The polar bears go up

The Polka Theatre 

The Polka Theatre is a theatre that is dedicated to producing and presenting work for young audiences. 

Events on

-Dot, Squiggle and Rest

-Gorilla 

-What To Do When You Find A Dinosaur

Since their performances are free/ cheap we can attend a show and gain knowledge or ideas of how to devise a piece of theatre directed to a certain age group.

Log Questions

What activities did we do today?

We read through the book by Dallas Clayton 'An Awesome Book'. This book is the basis of the whole performance/ pieces for all strands. Each class/ strand were allocated a set of pages from the book. Then we discussed the possible messages the book was trying to tell us. This helped a lot because during the time we are creating our piece it will reflect our interpretation of the book and show the message Clayton is trying to portray in his writing. Later we went into groups and came up with short performances which is going to be developed and turned into our piece of the show.

What ideas did you/ your group come up with?

In my group, we thought it would be interesting if we based our performance on dreamer ( who we portrayed as childish superheroes) verses non dreamers ( who were normal, boring  worksmen) the dreamers challenged the people who couldn't dream into imagining they were something crazy and exciting, therefore embracing their inner childhood.

Why have you chosen some of these ideas to develop further?

We decided to use physical theatre to hypobolically show a boring businessman's routine on repeat to create an effect on the audience and show the contrast between a stereotypical adult life to a child's image of life and the world. Just to put out there as well, with the physical theatre it will make it bold, exciting and easier for children at a young age to understand. Of course with the help of the whole class.

Why did you reject some ideas?

We were discussing the concept of our short performance and at first thought it would be good to have the non dreamers  turn into monsters, but later decided it would not be age appropriate so changed it to a lighter outcome.

What performance skills are you using? Why are these suitable for your audience?

We put in physical theatre, rhyming and music to make it more engaging to the audience and fun. Children generally have a low attention span so it was good idea to put that in so they have something they can draw their full attention to. With the ryming and music it allows us to entertain the children and help them remember simple things that can later influence them (positively) in life.

Evaluation

What did you think about the overall performance? 

I thought it was amazing! Having all the other strands and their energy build up throughout the performance, for it to get to our class and for us to end it off with a grand ending that the little one’s will never forget, gave me the impression that we performed to the best we could and showed off all our theatre skills without fail. The excitement and commitment we showed when playing our characters showed the audience that no matter how old you are you will always have your inner child inside your heart. 

Was it suitable for the target audience? 

I believe it was definitely suitable for the target audience because not only did everyone clap along to the songs and join in with the chorography of the physical theatre they also understood the story and the message we were trying to tell them. This was obviously the selection of pages we were given in the first place. 

The message we tried to put across: ‘No matter how old you are you can always have an imagination and dream of things that seem impossible to reach. And if there are times where you can’t do that, there is always something or someone out there who would always help you remember.’

Which piece of our show worked the best and why?

I think the starting section of our piece really worked because it showed what everyone could possibly dream about and despite the fact that the majority of us are 15 playing younger characters it showed that our imaginations stayed with us even though we are preparing for a duller and mature lifestyle. I especially thought that the pirate song was effective because it encouraged kids and even our peers to join in our piece of theatre. It drew them in and you instantly knew that they were paying attention because they immediately responded to what Eric was saying and doing the actions as well.

Which devising skills were used to make the piece?

Ways of make the audience stay focused on our piece:

• Physical Theatre, this really helped make the piece interesting because according to the feedback I got about the play people found the movements of the boring-office-people very intriguing to watch and how they suddenly got effected when the super heroes came into the space and gave them new opportunities to dream again. 

• Call and Response, this helped because not only did we get a good interaction with the audience they felt more encouraged to work with our piece and felt as if they are part of the children finding different ways of dreaming/ imagining.

• The Songs and Rhymes, I knew was a strong skill to make this piece because a lot of the children are not as familiar with the developed grammar as we are and it was going to be a challenge for them to understand what was going on within the dialogue. Therefore the easiest way to overcome that issue was to shorten the dialogue and make it easy to remember and catchy at the same time.  

What character(s) did you play and how had these been developed? 

My character was a superhero and I didn’t have a lot change or development to it. But if I had to think about it, I would say that there was a bit of a change between the three superheroes. To be honest they were not that noticeable, however, it helped a lot with the costumes and the heights of the scooters and the tone we spoke in. My character was the youngest superhero of all three. She had a high pitched voice and she wore a lot of pink. In contrast to the other two heroes, they would have big, green watering cans and bigger scooters and she would have a small pink watering can and a small scooter.

What have you learnt about devising? 

I have learnt that when you are devising a piece of theatre it is always good to:

1. Find something to craft your piece around

2. Do some research and find out more ways to develop your ideas and it is good to have confirmed your age group and theme.

3. Ask the opinion of others because there is always something you could changes and/ develop in your piece.

What could have been developed further and why?

From looking at all the other strands and what they did we pretty much incorporated a bit of each of their abilities into our own performance. But I think we could of added more interesting ways of showing the transition between adults back into children. Maybe by turning into excited children and in small groups we could do cannon of movements showing the transition of a boring person into a child that loves to play football, or loves to dance etc.

Evaluated by

Sherene Jordan

Lesson 3

What activities did we do today?

Today we finalised our pieces and combined them together into our big performance. We we went through each piece and identified the areas that could link each group together.

What ideas did you/ your group come up with?

We didn't come up with anything that made a big impact on the scene because we were focusing on joining each group together to make the show. But we did add in props ( watering cans, scooters, colliders, stools etc.) and instruments such as guitars and the triangle. 

Why have you chosen some of these ideas to develop further?

We decided to develop the business routine and divide the class in equal sections so it's easier to:

1. Learn the actions in the specific order you got them in.

2. Do it in cannon to look effective.

 

Towards the end of the lesson we decided on costumes and thought it would be good to wear bright and colourful clothing or something that could show who your character was.

Why did you reject some ideas?

We didn't reject any ideas because we were fitting everything together and rehearsing it. The only thing I would consider rejecting would be the choice for what I wear in the play. 

What performance skills are you using? Why are these suitable to your audience?

We are using a variety of skills such as: 

Physical theatre - using our bodies to create a story.

Call and response- where someone will ask a question or say something and we all respond.

Sing and ryming- something that can stay in someone's head and causes a glow and rhythm.

Audience interaction- where we get the audience involved with the piece and ask them questions, get them to sing along etc. 

These skills are suited to our audience because it gets them involved with the piece and makes it very exciting for them.  Considering that they are very young, yes it may scare them, but having a group of people encourage them to do stuff shows them that this performance is all for them and they can do whatever they like. 

Lesson 2

What activities did we do today?

We mainly concentrated on developing and our bits of the show in individual groups and somehow work out how to incorporate 20 other students in our part of the piece. Of course it took time and we had to come up with a short and basic story line for ours, however, it had its difficulties. 

What ideas did you/ your group come up with?

My group decided that it would be interesting if we put a physical theatre routine in our piece. It was a great idea because we can show our story and focus more on the characterisation and physical aspects and we could keep the dialogue to a minimum. We came up with  3 simple movements that shows the audience that the characters are working in an office, followed by more movements  showing the children turning from people who can dream to people who couldn't.

Why have you chosen to develop some of these ideas further?

Again the physical theatre was the thing we developed further because we need to make sure the actions were simple enough for children to understand and easy for more people to get involved in.  We also had to sort out the space and how to fit 27 students in the space at the same time. We also changed the speech in it and made it very simple and they were full of rymes like in the book 'An Awesome Book'. 

What ideas did you reject? 

We had a bit of a debate to instantly go into the formation of having lines on the floor whilst the non-dreamers are doing the routine they are repeating the commands of Jake the leader of the non-dreamers. But we thought it wasn't interesting enough and didn't show the change between childhood to adulthood.

In conclusion, we didn't really reject the idea but we added an extra bit in to show the children ageing and getting more boring and dull as they become an adult.

What performance skills are you using? Why are they suitable for your audience?

The skills we are using are the same from the previous week, but we mostly focused more on the physicalisation, characterisation and spacial awareness. 

When thinking about the ryming we managed to make it a bit more interesting and later decided to combine the ryming with the music into a little song- well more like a poem with a beat . Then afterwards added music to the physical theatre.

These videos that are on my blog I found from this website www.youtube.com