Group Scene Performance

The day of the performance was nerve-wracking for me. I was incredibly nervous about something going wrong or messing up. While we prepared out set, I was hyper-aware of everyone watching us and kept going over everything that could go wrong. It would probably have helped my nerves to do a more thorough warm-up before hand, and if we'd had a longer rehearsal before the performance. 

My group performance went very well, considering that there were a few bumps in it here and there with some of us forgetting lines and issues with props and costumes etcetera. We were all supposed to wear black ballet flats or jazz shoes, but I lost mine and therefore had to wear different shoes. While this wasn’t a big issue I feel it may have made my performance a little more clunky and clumsy than I should have been. I think if we had had more time and/or money, our set and costumes could have been better, but realistically, these things are not what we’re being marked on. I was incredibly nervous to begin with and was quite worried about forgetting lines. I even found my hands shaking half way through, although this may have actually contributed to one scene where I had to hold a ‘gun’ up to Katherine’s character, and the shaking made it look a little more believable. The was an incident where I accidentally cut through one of Imogen’s lines, but it wouldn’t have been obvious to the audience. Apart from those hiccups, I think I did fairly well, and managed to portray my character Olga to the best of my abilities. At the end I felt that we had managed to display the severity of the Romonovs’ situation as well as we could, especially in the more serious scenes. I understand it ran a little over the time limit, but to begin with we were told five minutes per person, so we only really went a over by a couple of minutes.

These are the notes I took about the other performances:

1; Jack and Ben

what was he searching for at the start?

use of silence, body language, eye contact

pace changes work very well

ben- use of flustering and frustration in voice

jack- use of condescension and authoritative tones

long silences for effect

2; My Group (Tracey, Katherine, Imogen, Me)

3; Saiorse, Yasmin, Verity

interesting set

nice use of props

perfect characterisation

funny and touching, great body language

4; Cynthia, Annie, Lydia

nice set, very clean looking

funny, realistic

well-performed with serious moments

5; Abbey, Lydie

nice set, very pretty arrangements

good use of accents

physical actions were tactful

ups and downs, loud and quiet

well-projected voices

fast paced moments still well pronounced

What did I gain from this?

I feel that after our performance was over, I was able to fully appreciate all of the hard work we had put into it, and felt happy with how it went. The teamwork put into the project made me realise how I can fit into a team to pull something together. We all worked really well together and were all on the same page about how we wanted the play to look and feel for the audience. I think this was something really important to learn from the group performances, since I'd never really done anything like this before.