Lesson Questions - Week 2

We did several tasks in class this week in order to create our segment for the Children's Theatre show "The Tiger Who Came To Tea". My intentional reaction to this unit was that it would be really childish and silly but after doing more research a lot of complex work goes into creating good creative pieces of Theatre for younger audiences. I am going to be analysing and evaluating two different exercises we did to help along with the devising side of this project.

We found out about an American artist called Patty Smith.  She is a famous art maker, political singer, punk, poet and many other things. She took inspiration from a Poet named William Blake, who lived during the 18th and 19th century. He wrote out of the pain of the loss of his little brother who he adored. He was training him up to go into printing, He kept a sketch book he own and William wrote some of his most distinguished poems in there. He also wrote out of the inspiration from his religious views.  The poem Patty took as her own inspiration was the eminent "The Tyger" which was published in 1794. I have attached a link to the video. She adapted it from a spoken word poem into a instrument-less melody. Her voice was certainly unique as she completely gave new life into the poem. It gave me a sense of melancholy and irrefutable dread. The words that came to mind in the group discussion were things like "lament and dirge" and I felt that was fair!

Evaluation of source: It was useful in the way we could adapt it to fit in with our performance, as it was in it's pure version we found it would actually hinder the piece. We thought that the slow pace would lose the attention of the young audience so to fix this we amp it up a bit. I personally found slightly monotonous so we could change it by changing the expression in our voices. One of the positives is that it adds an extra performance medium to our segment. This means we have more levels and layers than just straight act. On stage Patty was stationary. We of course need to be active the entire time or again the children will lose focus so we must add something to the song. A final suggestion is to change the language as I highly doubt a 2 year is going to know what a sinews! If they feel as if they can not connect with the text.

The second task we did to help with the creation of the piece was our entrance and first section. Not technically an exercise but this did mean we now had concrete work to show! We worked on (using Lecoq's 7 states of tension) our energy levels as we travelled through the jungle. We were constantly hassled about not using enough different high level activities. This was because if everything was on the same low level it would become slow and boring to watch. We took a single line about our activity for example "By Jove! It's not extinct after all". Mr. Rennison then taught us how to say it with inclining sound to create to create excitement in our voice! I found this very useful as I could hear a difference from how it was said before to this knew way that is sure to create a funnier atmosphere for the young audience. We decided to experimented with creating a pyramid. We tried a method of just stacking one layer on another but after the third layer it became to heavy for the bottom layer. I suggest that we do some research on creation of pyramids correctly and safely.