Unit 7 - Theatre in education

Thursday 12^th October

In todays session we were focusing on revisiting the material that we devised last week and developing new material from the ideas that we have already put forward.

To start off the session, we recapped over the material that we devised last week. After a few run-throughs of the scenes, we were more secure with what was going on in the scenes and what our lines were. After this, we had a discussion as to where we thought the Sweetie Day song should come in the script. We brainstormed the lyrics for this song last week but didn’t decide on where to put this in the script. We decided that this should come after Fiona the Fruit Fairy has spoken to Annie Apple about teeth brushing. At the moment there isn’t a specific choreographed routine for the Sweetie Day song but we are thinking about choreographing a dance to this song. We will probably do this a bit later on in the rehearsal process. After this, we refined the order of the scenes and made sure that everything within the performance made sense. Here is a video of us during the rehearsal. It shows us going through the start of the performance and making some amendments as we go along:

This video is great to look back on as we can see what we have done in this session and if we are unable to remember what we have said previously, we can look back at the video. Something else which we worked on during this rehearsal and is evident within this video is the part of the scene just before the Sweetie Monster enters. I thought that there may be a few children in the audience who may feel a bit uncomfortable and anxious when the Sweetie Monster comes on. Therefore, if they see the other characters putting the Sweetie Monster down, this may make them feel a bit more ease during these scenes where the Sweetie Monster is on stage. I think that this will need work during the rehearsals in the future but we are just starting to consider it at this stage in the rehearsal process.

For the next part of the lesson we started talking about creating a small fitness routine which the children could follow if they stood up out of their seats. At the meeting with Sarah Watkins at Lord Scudamore Primary School, she told me that the children love the playing ‘GoNoodle’. I did some research and this is a programme which the children follow during a PE lesson. A dance routine is projected onto the screen on the children have to copy the moves. Therefore we thought that the children may like it if we carry out an easy fitness routine which they can follow and they may even remember it and do it at home. This is an idea which we had and we tried some different moves but didn’t choreograph anything specifically. I think this will be something that we will work on in a future session once we have a rough idea of how long the show is going to be due to the amount of material we have.

To finish off the lesson we went back to looking at the masks which we looked at a few weeks ago. The idea of using these masks would be for each one to represent a vegetable. Depending on the colour of the mask would then depend on what vegetable it would be. We could then create another song which includes all different types of vegetables.

I think this session went really well as we got a lot done and we are making really good progress so far. I think that something we need to work on as a cast is making sure that everyone is inputting into what is going into the performance. At the moment I feel like I am the only one is inputting and In feel like Molly and Kellyann could start to contribute to sessions more. I also think that they need to start to developing their characters a bit more and be a bit adventurous with their dialogue because at the moment they are only saying the exact words that they have been given. Hopefully we will be able to work on this next week during rehearsals.