Devised Evaluation

On Tuesday we performed our devised piece to an audience. I think our piece went really well and hardly any mistakes were made, also a huge amount of audience feedback was that they really enjoyed it, the piece flowed very well, the piece was interesting and engaging. This made us as a group very happy as these were targets we all had in the back our minds whilst creating this piece, we wanted to make sure our piece had a clear message that is very current but not bring it across in a boring manor, this is something we focused on doing as soon as we got out stimuli ‘Humanity in Crisis’ we knew this would be  difficult stimuli therefore we tried to make sure our piece had a more comical theme to it but keeping the same hard hitting message throughout.

Another thing we really didn’t want to happen was our piece almost become like a museum of school eras, we showed a modern day school, Victorian school and two future school scenarios. One thing we had to be really careful of was making sure it wasn’t going to be like a history lesson but actually almost like flash backs. I think we combated this with our scripted scenes, we made sure these were engaging and funny but also the scripted scenes did link into lour scripted scenes as it was a visual representation of what we were talking about.  We decided to make all our flash back or flash forward scenes movement based as we were worried we would have too much dialogue and not show enough skill, creativity or even engage the audience.

If I were to do this piece again I would perhaps have a little longer to work on it, it didn’t help that I was absent for two weeks having an operation. If we did have longer to work on this piece I would have liked to have a different ending, even though our ending was the scene that gave the most amount of comedy and probably entertainment I feel it left our piece in a cliff hanger, our idea was the crisis of behaviour in school classrooms and how we can stop behaviour from getting worse and improve learning but we never resolve this problem. Before I went off for two weeks I put forward the idea of finishing the piece by suggesting we change the curriculum to remove subjects like Citizenship and RE as these aren’t core subjects and replace them with subjects like business studies and other functional subjects that would benefit children’s lives as they grow up, everyone in the group took to this idea well but I think it got a bit lost amongst all the other ideas of having a comical and entertaining finale. Another benefit of having longer to work on this piece would have been everyone would be more familiar with their lines making it a more realistic piece, if we had longer to learn our scripts we may have also been able to improve the quality of the lines and perhaps add more to a few of the scenes as they were all roughly a page and a half long.

I feel as though even though everyone enjoyed watching this piece it was very basic compared to last years devised piece. I think we spent a lot more time and effort on our last years piece. Our story line was a lot more intricate and even things like our lighting plans, plotted lighting and set was a lot more complicated and professional. I was more proud of our last piece as it challenged me as a performer because it took me out of my comedy comfort zone and forced me into serious emotional acting which is something I hadn't really done before. I felt more relaxed performing this years piece and even though it wasn't as intricate or complicated it was still slick and professional because our basic set worked well for our piece and there wouldn't have needed to be anything to add to improve the quality of the piece set or lighting wise.

What I enjoyed most about this piece was being able to build a character and really portray this on stage, even though for some of the videoed performance my back is almost to the camera but I still use my arms and body language as well as my voice to really bring across my characters arrogance and age.  

Overall the piece went really well and I am so pleased with it, we had a few mistakes on the day but we all managed to cover them well which showed we all worked well as a team and we were able to rely on each other without even communicating the problem.