Unit 7 - Theatre in education

Thursday 9^th November

We are now beginning to make really good progress with our Theatre in Education piece. The aim of today’s session was to work on the scenes that I have recently transcribed and made some alterations to.

To start off the session, we ran through the lines for scene 3. This is because it is newly scripted and people need to start learning their lines because this will then queue other cast members to say their lines. Learning lines is noticeably harder for Molly and Robert because they do not have enough sight to be able to read a script whilst running through the scene. Therefore, their lines have to be repeated over again so that they are able to memorise them. Also, the quicker that everyone knows their lines, the more time we have to spend on making improvements to the performance ready for the final performance in January. Something to note about scene 3 is that this is where the Fruity Kingdom song has been added which Cara and I wrote together last week. After running this scene through a few times, we found some things in which we need to improve on and possibly make a few amendments to. The thing which we decided to focus on in this session was the dance routine in the Fruity Kingdom song. We thought, as a cast, that there needs to be some interaction between the Sweetie Monster and Fiona the Fruit Fairy. Therefore, in the instrumental part of the song there will be some interaction between these 2 characters after Fiona has done a small solo dance around the stage. The small bit of interaction between the 2 characters through movement will bring a pantomime element to the performance. Although we didn’t have time to work on anything else in this scene today, I have made a mental note that we need to work on the Sweetie Monster’s entrance to the scene as it is currently too slow and I fear that the children will lose focus.

For the next part of the session we focused on the newly transcribed scene 4. In this scene a new character is introduced. This character is Tanzie Tangerine and she is played by Danielle. Although Danielle is part of the cast, she is unable to make some of the other rehearsals due to having other lessons at these times. Thursday afternoons are the time where Danielle gets to join in the rehearsal. Due to an external workshop last week, we were unable to have our rehearsal. We did some improvising around the idea of Tanzie Tangerine a few weeks ago. Here is the link to the blog post about this session:

http://charlottes16blog.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/unit-7-theatre-in-education_6.html

From the footage in this blog post, I have transcribed and added some dialogue to make the scene flow and seem more interesting. The scene will continue to develop as we go through rehearsals as pieces of text may change slightly and pieces may be added in or taken out. A lot of this scene is going to be improvised because it is mostly reacting to how the children react to the dialogue. So, although this scene has been scripted, it may be quite different when we come to perform it. This may have an effect on the sound and lighting team but I will make sure to let them know as soon as possible that this may occur. An idea was put forward to the group for this scene that we could include hula hooping during Tanzie’s Tropical Fruit song. After some discussion, I thought that this wouldn’t be suitable for the performance because the hoops may make too much noise and distraction whilst the song is going on. We then opted for an alternative of hula dancing instead which I will work into the next draft of the script.

Towards the end of the session we had some discussion about what we think could happen next in the story. After some discussion and some ideas put forward, we decided that the next scene would be of the Sweetie Monster driving around in s car. This way we are incorporating another educational message into the performance. In the scene, the Sweetie Monster will almost run Annie Apple over. These characters need to do some improvisation of this idea in a session next week and then we will have something to work from.

I think that rehearsals are going really well at the moment. We are getting a lot done especially on a Thursday afternoon when we have all the cast members. Next week will we carry on with the devising process and I will carry on making any amendments to the script in pencil and then typing these up onto a new draft of the script.