Evaluation Essay Question

Discuss your exploration and development of TTWCTT taking into consideration key factors and relevant ideas and input you to the process.

Evaluate the skills and techniques in used in rehearsal and discuss how you responded to direction and feedback to develop work.

I was introduced to the project the tiger that came to tea on Thursday 5^th June 2014. The piece of theatre we had to create was aimed at 2-5 year olds for a joint performance with all the other strands. This gave us only 7 weeks to explore, devise and rehearse our final performance piece which we performed on Thursday 17^th July, in my opinion this was not enough time to create a strong theatre piece, especially as we spent most of our time devising rather than rehearsing , which essentially left me as an actor feeling slightly lost on the final day of performance with a lot of uncertainties about what I was doing, I do not think I was alone in feeling this and it therefore affected the overall performance as one of the traits a good children’s theatre performer needs is to  commit to the performance fully, difficult to do if you are in situation where you are uncertain about where other people are on stage and even yourself, this could have been change if we had had more rehearsal time.

Our initial lesson on The Tiger Who Came to Tea (TTWCT) focused on what skills an excellent children’s theatre performer need to possess and what children’s theatre is I found that children’s theatre is teaching and educating children through engaging and entertaining them in performance. I learnt You must cater to the specific needs of the young audience and keep content appropriate whilst keeping the audience interested in what you are doing and that The themes must be light-hearted and simple rather than hard hitting and harsh. In my opinion the best way to engage them is through interacting with them and using fun light-hearted themes with underlying meaning. This exploration of what children’s theatre is and what children’s performers need gave me a basis on which I needed to work on, I looked back at this throughout the entire time we were devising and rehearing to evaluate whether I was meeting this criteria and if the piece we were creating was suitable; at times I asked myself weather children would understand some of the technicalities of the performance however i often trusted the opinions of mr rennison and my peers on that it would be suitable as many of them had very accurate different perceptions of the piece.

Our performance piece incorporated a song written by Patti smith. As an ensemble the class sung the piece, originally the song was monotone and slow however as this rhythm did not match the pace and excitement of children’s theatre we had to edit the song to make it more upbeat and happy, however I do not thing we completely achieved this due to the sort amount of time we had and the fact not m any of us had musical background on which we could rely on making the task all the more difficult. The song in our final piece i felt lowered the atmosphere of the piece and didn’t blend well enough into the performance. To have incorporated the song better I could have been more confident with the singing. Other sound effects in our performance included jungle noises as we were entering the stage, i believe this was effective as it built up atmosphere and set the scene well, to keep this atmosphere up when we entered the stage my energy level had to be high. Originally in rehearsals although i had high energy levels i often hid behind other people near the back, after i realized i was doing this i made a\ conscious effort to put myself in positions other then the back, during our first performance  in the beginning scene there was space left at the front and we were not using the entire space, to try and resolve this issue i tried moving forward hoping other people would also realize we needed to use the whole space.

We then each had our individual lines to say, during early rehearsal a lot of people including myself were not delivering the lines with enough energy or to all three sides therefore lowering energy levels. Mr rennison mentioned this to our whole class and i evaluated whether i was one of the people and decided that even if i wasn’t that i would make my line bigger and deliver it with more energy  on this we started to use our whole body’s to speak our lines rather than just verbally, i jumped up and said my lines whilst others did other actions, i think that jumping up and using a high to end voice to deliver my line was effective as it allowed the audience to draw there attention to me and therefore my line wasn’t lost.

This response to direction improved the performance as a whole and allowed us to throughally explore children’s theatre through TWCTT and develop my skills as an actress.