Lesson 2 15/9/15

Lesson 2 15/9/15

Unit 11 - Theatre for children 

Questions that ask someone to evaluate:

- what do you think went well? 

- what could have gone better?

- what improvements could be made? How?

Source material : stimulus, script

Artistic policy: what are you doing? Why are you doing it?

Children's theatre practitioners and company's :

- Long nosed puppet theatre company 

- Rainbow theatre - TIE ( theatre in education)

- Polka children's theatre 

- Unicorn Theatre

- Puppet barge

Normal theatre company's that include children's theatre:

- Glynebourne 

- Royal opera house 

- National Theatre 

With the National Theatre they have different opportunities which they use within colleges and schools such as NT connections, NT new views and NT streaming; this is good because it puts them out there for many people to see giving them great advertisement.

We were split into two groups and we were given two Dr Seuss books. I was happy about this because as a child i was really into these books and know how much they appeal to a young audience.We then got to choose poems within the books and make a performance out of them. Within my group there was four of us we decided to do three different poems so to do this we split into twos and do two of the poems and then come together for the last one. We all decided to include props and costumes as it is more interesting for the children. In Megan and my first poem we did a poem about a bird and a hat, this poem was quite hard to do at first as it had a story to it but at the same time it didn't as we had to make it from a monologue to a dualogue. I came up with the idea, which we then went with, that it should be a kind of argument between two people as there is a lot of repetition. For the poem with all of us in we did one about these animals that grow one hair on there head and have to get it cut everyday for this we decided that we needed to use more of the stage so we spread out, I thought that this worked well as it made it more visual for the audience. It was quite a long poem so we decided that one person should narrate and the others act it out. I was chosen to be the narrator, I then gave the idea that we should incorporate some choral speaking to making more interesting than just me speaking. After we had finished our piece we then showed it to the rest of the group and it was filmed on the mac the other group did the same thing, personally I felt that our performance went well even though we rushed the last section and as a result the transitions were messy. We then did video analysis by watching the videos and saying what went well and even better if, we also discussed how we could make those improvements. For our group our pace, positioning and use of props was good but we needed to improve the transitions. A personal target for myself was to not look down to much when reciting lines, to improve this I could practice looking in a mirror when reciting lines. 

After break we then sat around the board and started to create our own little town that could have whatever we wanted but the target audience for the town was 5-12 year olds. We called out town Crabapple.

This is Crabapple.

We then had to think of our own characters and how they fit in within the town.

My character was called Emma Charming she is 16 and an orphan, she lives at rose cottages, in the week she works at the wizard school and then at the weekends she works at the bouncy castle. She is trying to save up for a car so she can leave Crabapple , she doesn't really have any friends as she likes to be alone.