Research into private schools

As our play Punk Rock is about sixth formers and set in an English private school I looked online for private schools in the south of England that we could set as our school. Whilst researching this I found this website (below) which helped me identify a few schools that'd be suitable to base our performance on.

Although I couldn't find any private schools around the area I live in, the private schools that looked suitable for our performance were all based in Berkshire and Surrey. Next lesson I'll voice this to my group and see what research they've done to come to a mutual decision about what school we use.

26th January 2016

In our first lesson we were put into our groups for our performance. The play I'm in is 'Punk Rock' and the character I'm playing is Nicholas Chatman, a posh teenager who has a secret relationship with the character who's new to the are they live in, Lilly Cahill. We started off the lesson by reading through the script and deciding what each character is like and how we'd play them. After spending all lesson getting through three quarters of the script we'll spend next lesson getting through the full script and then start to think about how we're going to set it all out, for example the staging and how/where we'll perform it.

One problem we'll face about our performance is that it's set in the north of England. To overcome this problem the company and I will change a few location mentioned in the script to places in the south so that we don't have to workshop accents and voices.

Humanity In Crisis Evaluation

On the 14th December 2015 we performed our devised piece 'Humanity In Crisis'. My groups piece was based on Womens Rights and how they've been treated unfairly over hundreds of years. Our performance was shown to year 10's, 11's and 12's in the main school hall and was performed using traverse staging.

During our performance we had many things go well and a few things that we could've changed to improve the final showing of it. What went well during the performance was our dialogue, the reason why this went so well was because in the rehearsal process my group and I worked on creating quality dialogue and how that having good dialogue will have an effect on the audience. This was especially shown in our Soldier scene as long sections of dialogue were exchanged between two characters.

Secondly, the movement went very well. Most of our scenes included movement and therefore we made sure that during the rehearsal process everyone would be spot on with timings and positioning. During the performance every cue was perfect. This meant that no one was left waiting around whilst other people got into position.

A main thing that was a problem during rehearsals but went well during the final performance was the lifts. During rehearsals the group and I had many problems with lifts as one of the members were dropped and got injured. This leads onto things that we could've done better as once this incident had occurred there were trust issues between members of the groups and this meant that for a long time we couldn't practice lifts in our rehearsals. To prevent this from happening next time the group need to decide on one person to count the lifts/timings and then there'll be no problems. Another way of preventing this from happening again could be to put down safety mats when undertaking potentially dangerous lifts.

Linking in with the loss of trust during the rehearsal process this meant that our rehearsal schedule broke down for a while as there was a divide in the group and there was no trust within each other. The problem with having no rehearsal schedule was that we'd go into each lesson not knowing how each person is feeling about each other and also not knowing what we could accomplish each lesson.

To make improvements to our final performance I think that we should've done more full run throughs before performing and done a full tech rehearsal as during the performance the person in charge of changing our powerpoint and sound effects hadn't seen our performance in full and had only been given a sheet with each cue line and what music to play.

Overall our performance went very well and was enjoyable to create. Although the rehearsals were sometimes stressful and challenging we managed to get through it all quite well and put our ideas together to create a really good and effective piece.