Unit 7 - Theatre in education

Thursday 16^th November

To start off the session, we had a group discussion about how we think that this performance is going to end. We have already talked about this in previous sessions but this was a more in-depth conversation and planning what is going to happen. The main idea that we have is for the Sweetie Monster to turn from a baddy into a goody. We thought about doing this through a ‘Healthy Eating Club’ and tricking the him into eating some healthy foods. However, I said to the group that we have to be careful of what messages we are putting into this performance because the children will pick up on these and tricking someone isn’t a positive message which I want to be presented in the show. Therefore we decided that although we were still going to go with this storyline, we need to be careful in how we word the scene and how the scene flows when scripting. The other idea involves the other characters trying to persuade the Sweetie Monster to eat some vegetables. This will cleverly be done by using vegetables with either sweet or sugar in their name – for example sweetcorn and sugar snap peas. Therefore, the Sweetie Monster will think that they are unhealthy and will try them. This will then bring the performance to a close as the characters sing one final song together. Unfortunately we didn’t have enough time to improvise around these ideas today so we will have to do this next week instead. We will film these improvisations and then I can put a script together from there and will then add this to the rest of the script. We should then have or be close to having our final draft of the script.

For the next part of the lesson we were going over all of the movement and choreography which we have in the show as this still needs some work. We started by jumping through the script to the bits in the show which involve movement – starting at Nancy Narrator’s song. As I have had many years of dance experience and being the director of this performance, I assisted in improving the movement parts throughout. At the moment, Nancy Narrator’s song is quite still, so I got Nancy to sway a little from side to side. Cara then had the suggestion of adding a turn in, in between the 2 verses but this didn’t look right when she was running through it so we decided to take it out. The only gesture that is in this song is on the line ‘Come and follow me’ where Nancy holds her arms out in front of her and then pulls them in on the word ‘me’. We then moved on to work on the Sweetie Day song. This song has some specific choreography which I created a while ago and we are all familiar with this. However, there are parts to the routine which needed tightening up to make sure that we are all doing the same thing and that we’re all in time. Cara helped us with improving the look of this routine because I am in this number so I was unable to give my thoughts and ideas. Next was the Fruity Kingdom song. This song has already been choreographed so we didn’t need to make many improvements to this song. But this routine does need practicing. This was also the case for the next song – the Sweetie Monster song. However, we do need to work on the ending of this song because I need to drag the Sweetie Monster offstage without hurting him. The next song in the script which involves movement is Tanzie Tangerine’s song. This song is sung twice and there is no movement the first time but there is the second time. I have choreographed this routine already. Here is a video of the choreography:

These are all of the songs with movement in at the moment. There is a possibility of one or two more songs which will go in the final scene but we will look at the movement for these later on in the rehearsal process.

In the last hour of the session we had a run through of the whole show so far up until the final scene. This gave us a chance to practice all of the corrections we had just made by going through all of the movement pieces and also a chance to notice any other amendments which need to be made in the script which can be pencilled in and then made electronically.

Our main aim now is to get this full script written. Once the script is finished, we have time to work on learning the lines and making improvements to make the show the best that it can be.