1. DISCUSS your role in the development process: What did you contribute? How did you collaborate with your ensemble? What were some successes of that collaboration?
- I contributed by giving many ideas to my team. Since we were going to present our piece to elementary school kids, we had to make our actions bigger and more straightforward. We had to think of different ways we could present it. All of us equally would come up with many ideas for each scene. We all would listen to each other’s ideas, try them all out, and finally pick which one we thought worked the best. Sometimes we joined two ideas together to make a better one. We also thought about what props all of us could bring to make our performance even more enjoyable. People who had good props would bring them and show them to the rest of our group to see if we all approved of it. One success of our good collaboration was knowing what to do for every line/scene. Overall, our working process was very collaborative as we all contributed equally.
2. DISCUSS your experience as a performer in this piece: What do you think and feel about your performance and performing for an audience? What new insights did you gain (yourself, theatre, audiences, performances, etc.) through this experience?
- I think that if our group had been given more time, we would have done better. Our performance went well, but there were many pauses as we were confused because we did not know what to do next. Performing in front of a young audience felt different from performing our individual monologues in front of our class. Since they are younger, they would exaggerate their reaction. For example, in our performance, a line said, “take a deep breath”. Our action was to take a deep breath, so when we did it during the performance, the kids giggled and took a deep breath with us. This made me feel more confident and happy that they were enjoying our performance. Sometimes the audience would not react at all. This made me understand that all audiences are different from each other. Some might be more expressive while some can be quieter, but it does not necessarily mean that the more silent audience did not enjoy the performance.
3. DISCUSS what new learning or understanding about theatre or the process of creating this piece you gained. What do you now KNOW or UNDERSTAND that you didn’t before?
- After knowing that this assessment was meant to be done quickly and performed on an unusual stage, I realised that we should adapt to any environment. I now know that I should always keep in mind that we should act in any location while creating and practising our performance. I also understand that we should always use the time given to us and make it productive. Being productive and finishing our performance earlier would earn us some time to do full dress rehearsals, which would help us feel more comfortable performing. This experience has helped me learn new points about theatre, which will help me in my future performances.