Unit 6 - Performance workshop

Tuesday 23^rd May

Today, Dinos who works for UCAN came into the session to look at all of the material that we have for the performance. He also brought along Meg who also works for UCAN. She also helped us throughout the session as she gave us some feedback and suggested some ideas for material which we can use for the performance.

To start with, we carried out a warmup to make sure that we were warm and ready to perform. The warmup today consisted of singing through ‘bungalow’ and playing the bean game.

After the warmup we went straight into running the scenes from the beginning to the end. We asked Dinos to specifically look at the order and the fluidity of the piece as we are currently unsure if this works and flows well. At the moment we are reading most the lines from scripts as we have only had the scripted scenes for a couple of weeks. I have been unable to learn any lines yet as I have had exams in other subjects within college. However, over half term I will be able to spend some time looking over the script and learning my lines so that when we come back to college I am able to work on characterisation more.

We firstly performed the grid scene which comes at the beginning of the show, then moving into ‘Our day (part 1)’, then into the phone calls and them into the smaller scenes. We decided to put one phone call and then one smaller scene and keep changing in between the 2 because this would mix it up a bit, However, we were finding it difficult to remember which scene was next so Dinos suggested that at the end of ‘Our day (part 1)’, we have 5 different sound effects for the character’s phones ringing and then it goes into the phone conversations, one after another. Then once these have finished it will then go into the smaller scenes.

We then performed all of the smaller scenes in the order that we had them before. This order seemed to work well so there were no changes here.

After a short break we carried on performing the material. We ran through the monologues. Another idea that Dinos gave us was to have the word ‘broken’ in everyone’s monologue because this is the title of the performance which would then add some dynamic to the piece.

After the monologues come the lift scenes. We had only been sent these scenes a few days ago so nobody had had time to learn their lines in time for today’s session. Some of us were able to read our lines and follow the script and others were fed their lines as they were unable to read the script.

Overall, Dinos was very impressed with all of the material that we have come up with. Once we have learnt the lines, we will be able to start working more on characterisation and building the performance more.

When we return after half term, we will be working hard to make sure that we are ready for the performance in time. Alys is going to email us the full script in the next few days so that it is easier to learn the lines because at the moment we have all the scripted scenes as different documents and they are not in the correct order. Our target for over half term is to learn our lines so that when we come back to college we are able to start working more on characterisation and pulling the piece together. We will only have 2 more timetabled sessions after half term before the show, however we will be working outside of lecture time to ensure that we are fully prepared and ready to perform on the 15^th of June.