Performance evaluation

The final performance could have been better from my point of view, I believe that the structure of the piece was very good, but the more actor orientated things like pronunciation and projection of voice had been better in some of the rehearsals. 

In terms of my own personal performance, I believe that I rectified the problem that I ran into in rehearsals, I managed to stay in role and keep acting even when I wasn’t the main person on stage, I think that the ‘Baby Boy Band’ song went very well and we all got the synchronisation of the dance moves perfect.  But I felt that using baby voices could have given it that extra touch that would have alienated the audience to an even greater extent, but we would have needed more rehearsal time to create a baby voice that can still be understood in terms of pronunciation.

The lack of specific lighting added to the Brechtian feel of the play, and the very fact customer announcements happened on stage helped to alienate the audience this is because in a normal play at the theatre, sound effects (the xylophone) and god-like speech occurs off stage, but in this performance the audience could actually see the person who was speaking and playing the instrument in this manner.

 As we were all in the same room there was no trouble with the cues, however I felt that some of the lines in the performance were rushed and could have been slowed down a bit, this could have been just to do with nerves.

For the bit of the performance when the song (Price Tag) begins, in all the rehearsals I had got to the front of the stage differently, I felt that this was effective as it allowed me to not look robotic when getting to the front.

Overall I believe that although the final performance was a bit shaky at some points, it was still a success, and I have thoroughly enjoyed working on this text and applying Bertolt Brecht’s theatre techniques to it. 

Lesson 6

This was the last lesson before the performance and the first time we were rehearsing in the room of the actual performance, this meant we had a lot of technical issues to overcome, the staging was one, but we managed to sort that out fairly quickly as the room was shaped perfectly for what we wanted.

We were just fine-tuning the smaller parts of the play, for instance the changeovers from pairs of ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’.  We decided that the easiest way for this to become unnoticeable would be to divert the audience’s eyes, so we thought that having a ‘customer announcement’ at every changeover would help the play run more smoothly.  However the changing of the characters was still occurring on stage, which alienated the audience in a effective manner.

I spent some of the time in this lesson simply walking around the space and dodging the stage objects so I could gain a simple understanding of the space around me and were I could move freely.

The performance to the other Theatre classes was the smoothest performance that we had, I believe this was because they had been studying the same topic as us, so the understood what our performance was about.  There were little to no faults in this performance, one of which I noticed was that my fellow actors and I found it difficult to keep acing even when we weren’t the main ones on stage at the time, but as I recognised this, I managed to rectify it before the real performance. 

Political Protest Evaluation

 I felt that the final performance went very well, and I believe that the setting for the scene was perfect as it allowed us to move around and the audience could follow, I felt this was very effective because it kept the audience interested as they wanted to see what would happen.  We started our performance sitting on the reception desk in the canteen, the audience naturally stood directly in front of us, which is what we expected, as it allowed us to speak to them as we walked through them for the next part of the scene, I found that this was very effective in the final performance, because we did take into consideration that all the movement could put audience members off, but just speaking directly to them kept them interested.

The interview at the end of the scene could have looked too naturalistic and the audience would not have known if the performance had ended or not, and therefore we devised a non-naturalistic method that allowed us to shout while we were performing the interview, and that way the audience would not lose interest. 

Lesson 5

In this lesson we carried on choreographing for the ‘Baby Boy Band’ scene, this is because boy bands are always very well synchronised and we felt we needed to be like this for the performance to effectively alienate the audience.   The one change that took place was that previously to this lesson we had been using baby voices while singing the song, however as these had a negative effect on the pronunciation of words we decided that we would be better off just using normal voices.

The staging was fully decided in this lesson; the audience would sit in traverse around five tables that were the cash registers for the actresses that played the ‘Checkout girls.’  The isles would be in-between these tables.  It was also decided that the babies would start their performance under the tables, while pretending to be asleep, in the foetal position.  

Lesson 4

I spent most of this lesson with the other boys who were part of the baby boy band.  We were choreographing synchronised dance moves to the tune of ‘Price tag’ by Jessie J, we chose this song as although it is upbeat and happy, it has a lot to do with money and could be used to illustrate economic issues and help portray the subplots of the play.

Quite a few of the lyrics had bee changed to really show the plays plot, in a Brechtian way.

It seems like everybody's got a price
I wonder how they sleep at night
When the money comes first
And the baby comes second

The two lines that are highlighted blatantly show the ideas that the play is attempting to show as well.  They also illustrate that modern society has come to believe that babies are just another expense rather than a blessing.

We understood that Boy bands were always very synchronised, and that to achieve this we would have to put a lot of time and effort into our rehearsals.  We wanted each dance move to have a purpose or show something about the topic of the play.  We did think that the use of song and dance in the final performance would be a powerful way of showing the alienation effect, as the audience are not expecting to see Boys dressed as babies dancing around on stage.

Political Protest Research

I was in a group with Olaya, Marian and Chanelle.  We collectively decided that University fees would be our political topic, as it will definitely affect all of us in the next few years.

We all decided that a way we could illustrate the amount it affects people could be in the form of an improvisation, however we also knew that we would have to capture that audiences attention somehow. So we began thinking of ways to grab a person’s attention in a few seconds.  From what we tried we actually found that the easiest way to achieve this, was also the simplest, by just shouting we could gain attention, then we could move on to the improvisation that contained the information.   

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12880840

http://www.ucas.ac.uk/students/studentfinance/

Lesson 3

Rehearsal process

I found ‘The Price’ very interesting to work on, and even more fascinating to try and apply Brechtian techniques to.  This is because the play has very blatant subplots, and this by itself breaks the 4^th wall, which makes it even easier to use Brechts own techniques. 

One idea that came into practise that lesson was the reading out of stage directions, we thought that this would help to alienate the audience.  We also had the whole cast visible at all times which helped to reinforce the alienation technique.  We also briefly discussed Lighting techniques and decided that a useful way to perform it would be without any specific lighting.

In this lesson I was placed in a group that would be researching child benefit laws, we read through some articles to gain a greater understanding of the topic, before attempting to write a short scene with dialogue, illustrating the difficulties with the laws at the moment.  Other groups were completing different tasks, one of the groups were finding songs that had anything to do with money, and changing the lyrics so they could be used in the play.  Songs would also be used to alienate the audience.

In this lesson we were also placed into groups for casting, I was placed with four other males, and it was decided that we would become a Baby boy band.

Epic Theatre

http://www.usq.edu.au/artsworx/schoolresources/mothercourage/Brechtian%20Techniques#Epic_Theatre

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_theatre

Both these links effectively helped my understanding of 'Epic Theatre' as a whole, the first one even outlines the difference between 'Dramatic Theatre' and 'Epic Theatre'.