Evaluation Essay

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.

In our final term of Year 10 Theatre, the majority of strands came together to produce a performance of The Tiger Who Came To Tea for Little People’s Day. Our theatre class had one of the opening scenes to the performance.

In the first few lessons in Theatre, we learnt about what qualities a children’s theatre performer has to possess; they will need to be able to embarrass themselves so that the audience are more entertained as children typically are amused by slapstick comedy. We also learnt that children’s theatre performers would need to create over the top characters, which are larger than life, so that they are easier for the viewers to understand. As well as learning about the performers, we learnt how to tailor an ‘issue’ to a specific audience so we learnt how we could adapt an ‘issue’ to then transform into a children’s theatre piece.

Throughout the rehearsal process, we learn how to create the atmosphere by producing sounds from our mouths to create animate and inanimate objects. In week 2, we laid on the floor and were told to mimic particular noises (e.g. babies crying, door creaks, etc.); this helped us produce The Tiger Who Came To Tea as we begin by creating a soundscape of snoring and birdsong as we mimic the sound of morning. We also created scary stories through sound and minimal dialogue; this also helped us create The Tiger Who Came to Tea as it taught us that we could easily tell a story through sound without the constant need of dialogue. In our piece, we also created songs with our voices, which were age-appropriate for the audience as the majority were nursery-rhyme-related however I do not think that all of the audience could have been aware of the Rocky Theme Song or the Blue Danube so there was a slight risk in the song choices.

We explored creating physical theatre, which involved us using our bodies to create objects when we created our ‘breakfast machines’; as our performance was a physical theatre based performance, it was good to begin to explore creating objects with our bodies. We used our potential energy as we were waiting to be introduced into the performance, so that we were constantly in character and showing our potential; we then sprung into life using our highest attention level to make sure that the objects that we were portraying were larger than life, as we embarrassed ourselves, so that they would be more enjoyable to watch.

The majority of material we created in our rehearsal lessons was suitable for the audience of young children as it was all lighthearted and upbeat with nothing that was in danger of being inappropriate. I think it is also suitable for the audience as each segment of the performance is short so it won't challenge the young children's attention span as their attention span is often very short at that age so if the segment's were longer, we could be in danger of losing the majority of the audience's attention.

In our ‘Who’s At The Door’ performances, they were all very engaging and humorous. There was a wide variety of short performances so that there was something for everybody. They differed from the Old McDonald rhyme to Beyoncé with her backing dancers; the Beyoncé idea was a brilliant idea as it was fun and it was something for the adults in the audience to also enjoy as it was a slightly more mature and grown-up idea to put in instead of having constant childish themes that the audience may not have enjoyed throughout. The only problem with having a wide variety of performances is that there were 10+ short performances so by the end the audience was beginning to get restless and irritated.

When all the strands rehearsed for the first time together, it was very useful as we could all finally watch what everyone had been doing and rehearsing in their strand time, and it was also useful as we could see the finished order of the performances so we could see how the each of our performances fitted together. It was helpful as we could see the reactions from the audiences for each segment, which meant we could decide what parts we would need to improve to make the performance be to the highest standard. We all could see how our transitions between each section had improved dramatically than how they were when we performed to the other theatre class. Although our levels of energy were high, we could have increased them intensely. We also learnt that we have to make sure that all of our technology and props were working because a few things, like the Beyoncé, did not work in the rehearsal.

When I was given feedback by either Mr Hughes or one of my fellow performers, I took it all into consideration to help to improve my acting skills in order to benefit the performance. If I did not agree with the feedback, I would discuss it with the people who gave me the feedback to agree with something different improve it.

Since we had learnt what we had to improve, we went back to the classroom and rehearsed our songs in more detail and rehearsed everything to make the performance even better.

Last Friday, we went to the Ashcroft Theatre to see The Stories Left Behind, which was directed by Mr. Crowther and performed by the Post 16s. It taught me a lot about how energy is crucial in creating children’s theatre because it became so much more entertaining when they had high energy levels. Personally, I think the acting was amazing and the performance as a whole was flawless, because even when the head of the teddy bear fell off, they acted as if it was part of the performance. It was a very professional piece that had a lot of high points. An example of a high point was when Peter Pan came on stage and the actors acted as if they didn’t know he was there but the audience was completely aware of his presence, which reminded me of a pantomime. A low point was at the beginning when there was a long recording while there was an empty stage and the audience was becoming restless but the rest of the performance was phenomenal.

Throughout the rehearsal process, I had researched children’s theatres. An example of a children’s theatre is the Oily Cart Theatre. Since 1981, Oily Cart has been performing children’s plays across the UK. Example’s of their past performance’s include Mr and Mrs Moon, Tube, In a Pickle and Mole in a Hole. They specialize in highly interactive shows for the very young and for young people with profound and multiple learning disabilities. I did more research into the Oily Cart and I took note into their ‘highly interactive’ performances so that I could improve my children’s theatre performer skills to be the best that they could be.

On Thursday, we took all the things we had learnt in the past few weeks in rehearsal and watching the performance in the Ashcroft Theatre into consideration to perform our finished piece for Little People’s Day. We had two audiences come to see our two showings of The Tiger Who Came To Tea. On our first performance, although we were nervous, we gave it our all and tried our best. A few minor mistakes were made but that taught us what we would have to improve in our final performance in the afternoon. While there were a few slight mistakes made, we tried, as an ensemble, to make sure that they were unnoticeable so that the audience didn’t notice them so the performance seemed a lot more professional. The audience reacted well to our performance but they reacted in two different ways because the first audience laughed and reacted to most things whereas the second audience laughed a bit less but they reacted very well to the performance as a whole.

By Becky Rahman-Gonzalez.