Evaluation of School Tour Performance

I know it wasn`t that good so I was thinking about the mistakes we made, why and where could we improve.

What styles we used for theatre of children?

• I think it was too much of naturalistic. We should have put more physical theatre in it to make it more alive as physical theatre adds some energy to the piece. 
• We used humour to make the piece more funny and adaptable to young audience as we not supposed to forget that the reason we were building this show is to perform it at secondary schools. 
• We have chosen to add miming into my and Carlos scene where I pretend to be shouting at Carlos but with no voice and a little bit exaggerated. 
• Accents. Matthew could do a very nice and funny Jamaican accent which suited perfectly for bus driver. 

Some people said that they were expecting Divina to sing and was actually waiting for it but somehow we didn`t actually plan that Divina is going to sing but that was a good hint where we could use it after Christmas.

Toya behind me and I during the technical rehearsal 

There were some sound and lighting mistakes which affected our performance. For example there was no knock on my and Carlos scene where I was playing his mother and he pretended to be my son who doesn`t want to do athletics any more he would rather become a mathematician. Also the spotlight went off just after Carlos paused me and he supposed to have his monologue so we panicked a bit on stage and quietly tried to think of change the text so he would have a chance to say his monologue.

I believe that we`ve been put into groups with people who has similar attitude. And our groups people attitude was poor punctuality and attendance. The consequences we got from it that we had enough time to rehearse but we did not use it properly. People (between them and I) thought that we still have enough time to get ready for it but the time flew so fast I did not realize the performance is already tomorrow which meant we not going to get good grades for it which was really disappointing. Some people were very pessimistic about it and said that we should not perform tomorrow as the piece we have wouldnt get us a distinction. I agree but why is that? I learnt that attendance and punctuality is very important as not being in at least in one class you miss the whole 2 hours of work. The whole 2 hours!! You can make so much in 2 hours... We nearly did our 10 minutes piece in 2 hours on the first days of rehearsals so what about the whole day of rehearsal which is 6 hours... So I got the point that the group is based on a team work and if the team work doesn`t work the results not going to be very impressive. Group number 1 and 3 grounded that point as nearly all of the members attended all classes. Also some people may say that I had to leave early due to work but the lesson starts at 2 so we had around 1 hour of rehearsing time but some of the people used to listen to music or dance which is one of the reasons we didn`t do well on the performance day.

I have never gotten anything lower that pass so I can`t imagine having big fat FAIL on the final paper. I always reach for the best results and now I know where my problem was. I believe this was a good lesson for me and other group members and I hope we can still improve on our performance after Christmas.

In addition, other group performances were really great. I really enjoyed watching them!!

Getting ready for school tours part 3

Toya and me on stage and Carlos
telling Jack all the cues

So as the performance getting closer we are all stressing out as we have only 10 minutes which is not enough, In my opinion, a good performance should be at least 25 minutes in order to develop a clear story line, reach the climax and make a conclusion. Our 10 minutes piece was just the beginning of a story so that meant the whole story should be around 30 minutes long plus the games so the workshop should be around 45 minutes long.

So the technical rehearsal couldn`t go very well as it was only me, Carlos and Toya. Carlos was giving cues to Jack so he knows where he should play sound effects or music. Toya and I were on stage giving Jack an opinion of how it supposed to look like but we couldnt do much as it was only two of us.

So the last day of rehearsal which was on Wednesday only Katy was missing. We tried to rehearse without her and everything was going pretty much well but then Divina mentioned something about new script Katy was writing and we should be using that one. I was a bit confused as this is the last day of our rehearsal time and we shouldnt be changing anything but other group members didnt want to rehearse with the old scripts so the lesson ended up being wasted. I think some of the people just didnt want to go for the ideas and that`s what was holding our group back. Also people should put their relationships outside of classroom and concentrate on work we have to do.


Because of Divina and Sam relationship we came up with idea of using Toya and Carlos as main character and have some flirting between them two. And it actually came out very nicely becaus ethe relationship between them two was really nice. It was like a pure, innocent, not brave first fondness of love.