The show

Before the show we did a dress run for the national diploma drama students, we manager to get through it succesfully , but i personally felt disatisfied with my scene as i missed out some lines and did not feel 100 percent confident with the way i was moving on stage, thankfully though when the audience came in for our big final performance I felt that after my scene with Aaron i was alot happier and we managed to get through it without any blips. I enjoyed it and the adrenaline spured me on to show the emotion that my character 'Abigail' would have been feeling in scene 1. Our largest scene as a group was scene 3. I also felt scene 3 went quite well and the energy level through out varied in intensity making it effective, as The scene went from being quiet and slow to fast and full of action. I think that everyone managed to stay in character ( i should hope so anyway as our teacher was zooming in whilst filming catching every single facial expression) i personally felt very much in character as one of the girls and managed to finally get in my zone on the night and remeber not to break the fourth wall with the audience, which was something siobhaun had noticed i was doing in the rehearsals. All in all i think we just about pulled it together as a team, but i think that next time we have a show we will definitly be more organised and pace ourselves better, because as a group the stress we all went through in the last week could have been helped if we had been more on the ball. Since it was our first show i think it taught us a very valuable lesson about how we have to all support eachother.

rehearsing for the show

During the 6 weeks preparation time for the show we worked on blocking our scenes in order to make them as effective as possible. We worked on our character buliding and worked using the magic if to help us learn why our character would move or speak a certain way. This was one of the exercises we used to create naturalistic acting. We thought about our costumes. The majority of us were purtians in the performance so we would be dressed in simple and plain clothes and be very demurely dressed and covered up. We though about how we could use the lighting to be more effective in certain scenes and we thought about the props we could use to help reinforce the time era we were showing.

For the Brecht poem we worked on a completely opposite style of acting. Non naturalistic acting invovled outbursts of songs , instruments , breaking the fourth wall with the audience and interacting with them. We rehearsed some tablos of life in Brechtian times and rehearsed it with me playing the piano alongside Sammy and Dan playing the drums. We recited the poem of Marie Sanders. The style we performed it in was almost like slapstick drama and was exxagerated and comical. We wanted the contrast of the naturalistic acting in the crucible and the Brechtian poem.