Evaluation

After contemplation over the performance on Wednesday I can confidently say that I was proud of the work we showed to the audience. During the show its self I will admit that there where minor hiccups, such as noisy chairs and some people entering the lit stage at the wrong moment. All of these issues went in unnoticed and overall the show ran smoothly. The most difficult part of the performance was moving the chairs in complete silence, as it brought up issues such as wrong placement, hitting people with chairs and difficulty finding the black chairs in the dark, I think we managed this problem well through moving slowly and precisely and it wasn’t too much if an issue for the show. My favourite work in the show was the gorilla scene as it was very comical and evoked a strong laugh from the audience. I think through adding the banana and vocal sound effects like the whistle and creeping noise the piece was improved as it became more engaging for the audience and removed awkward silences. I thought the audience where fantastic during the show as they laughed a lot, and sat with complete concentration in more serious sections of the work. After the show my dad said “it was weird, and I didn’t get some of it… but I liked it.” This shows me that the work got the audience thinking and trying to work out what some of it was supposed to represent, it always shows that the performance was interesting and enjoyable which was my overall ain for this work. If I was to redo the performance I wouldn’t change a lot but I would try to elongate to motifs and make the transitions more interesting through changing the proxemics of the piece, I would do this because it would tidy up the work and remove unnecessary blackouts during the performance.

Show time

Today has been a great day we spent the day rehersing for our performance at 7 o'clock. We did a full run through to find little errors which needed to be fixed, it went well and we discovered lots of little issues such as timing issues and setting stage in darkness. Today we bought props such as bananas and plums. We made small changes such as changing the word peach to plum as we couldn't get peaches and adding a banana for comical effect. Overall I think the show went smashingly and highlights the amount of hard work which went into the work. The work showed how much we had improved since the last rehearsal the day before, and how much slicker the work was. I was very proud of our work after we performed it and I think it was at a great standard. 

Nuances

During today lesson we started with our usual warm up regime with Justine, we do this to improve flexibility and maintain fitness to aid out physical and challenging work we do in our performances. Today we had Justine for a longer period of time than usual, this was to gain tips on how to improve our motifs for the piece. During this session we extended our motifs and added little nuances for extra interesting detail. We added things such as hip movements and arm gesture we had done with both Daniel and Justine in our physical warm ups. We did this to vary the movement we used and to differenctiate our motif from others. I think that through extending our motif we have improved it a lot, this Is because it makes the piece more interesting for an audience member to watch and the little extra nuances such as controlled arm movements befor the faster more striking movements create contrast making the piece more engaging to watch. Today we also did a lot of work on the mimes we had created in small groups. My groups mime was originally rough to start off with and I didn't realy like it as I found it sloppy and not at a standard I was happy with. Over today's lessons my opinion of the mime has changed a lot, because it became a lot more rehearsed and we had fixed little errors such as synthesising rope from thin air, now we pick it up off the ground, this makes for a more realistic and thought through mime. Mime is all about precision and control without these two aspects the work will look sloppy and bad, today through practice I believe our piece has become more precise and now I think it is at a better standard, and more engaging for so,Rome to each and understand fully. Nearing the end of the session Daniel decided to try some comedy in the second tree motif. The idea is to have the dancers notice the clob footed walkers in confusion and then Amy would say "What you doing" and another would say "I don't like it" ect... I don't like or dislike this idea, but I would have to see it in context with an audience before I made my judgment, I think it has potential to be comical but the timing of it needs to be precise, and I don't think we have the timing yet. I do like to concept that the comedy cuts through the dramatic and theatrical serious work and connects with the audience placing them in an awkward position and making them feel uncomfortable. But I feel in needs more work to be effective and not look like a bad mistake which gets pity laughs and not real ones. 

Focus

In today's lesson we focused on looking at the work we have compiled over the previous weeks, and ordering them and working on them to create our devised piece "Moments." I found today's lessons very useful as it removed my confusion and stress over the pressure of creating a good and usable piece of work. Previous to today's lessons I have been worried that we weren't going to achieve work that I was happy with performing to other people, but now I have realised that we had devised more usable work than I thought we had, and that we have lots of strong pieces to display. Today we focused on Justine's motif and the opening to the piece. We decided that in groups of three we where going to perform our interpretations of Justine's dance and use the same piece of music for each. I originally thought that it would become repetitive and boring to use the same piece of music multiple times, but after talking to Daniell I now realise that it'd okay to use the music three times as it would follow the rule of three. The word of the week is focus, and today we realised as a group that showing focus on our face improves the standard of work enormously. I discovered that if an audience see that you are focused it would interest them and be seen as a more professional piece of work. The main issues we discover today were making sure we are on the correct side of the light circle to start the next section of work, this was discovered in the short run through and now we can work on planning where we finish our sections of drama and finding out where we need to be for the next. We also need to work on polishing our work through practice, the main problem in the dance sections is timing and fluidity, but with practice we can improve this to a higher standard. 

Piecing together

Today we worked on organising our work to get a start on finishing our devised piece moments. To tell you the truth today has been a stressful day and a lot of hard work has been put into place. The whole class experienced the group dynamic today and it was difficult to gain full concentration during the first 40 mins of the session. Once the work started to flow we devised and fixed some work we had created with Jill, I thought this work was very effective and set a dark tone through the music and movement. We have decided now that we need to fit a more comical aspect into the piece therefore cutting the tension and juxtaposing the dance like work with a contrast. 5/11/13 The work we devised with JIll comsisted of using grotesque images on chair with a couple dancing around us, we did this to create an interesting dynamic and visual which would come across well to an audience. Overall we didn't end up using this work exactly but it did act as a foundation on which we devised our grotesque couples dance for our piece. I believe that the work has metamorphosised into something the whole class is proud of, now we have made the grotesque movements more prominent to create a larger impact and we have added a motif taken from Justine's work to tie all the work together. The motif does need sharpening up but this will come with practice, but in general I think this secon of work has come along greatly and improved so much to a more interesting and detailed piece of work.

Detail

During today's lessons we focused on the word of the week (grotesque.) We interpreted characters from our lives and portrayed them in an extremely theatrical form, exploring the gestures which could be performed in an over the top fashion. I think this exercise was very effective as it allowed us to learn that we should focus on a characters unique physicality and emphasise these qualities, this would create an very interesting piece which would engage and audience. During the lesson we also used mime to explore details in simple everyday objects, we learnt that the more detail you introduce into mime the more realistic it is.

An EXPLOSION of inspiration

Today we created organic work; this was devised from work created in past weeks based around piano and doll music. We showed the work we devised with Jill to Daniel and this sparked inspiration in the whole class. As we were working we noticed that there were connections with previous work we had devised, we knitted both pieces of work together to create an organic piece. Today I could feel how energetic the whole class was and how proud of the work we produced they all were. We discovered that a section of the piece didn’t really work so we need to work on it, but by the end of the class we had a solid 4 minute piece of work.