Devising Skills
What devising skills did we discuss today? Which of these skills are you most confident in using?
We talked about a lot of different devising skills such as improvisation. This seems to be a
key skill in devising as its extremely difficult to plan right down to every movement you will make during that scene, so instead of that we get up on your feet and try things out. Sometimes scenes take unexpected turns and go down different routes and often the new ideas develop as you try it out through improvisation. We also talked about soundscapes, movement skills and being open minded while devising. I find that improvisation is the area I'm most confident in terms of devising as I do enjoy just getting up on my feet and doing the scene. It is hard work but when you get into it I find the ideas start to flow and your able to bounce of other people during the scene to develop more ideas. I also think i feel confident in improvisation as you don't have to put loads of thought into it. I mean most times you do need a basic structure the scene to work around, but while in that scene you aren't thinking about how you interact or act you just play it out and see what works. Its a very free method of devising because you don't fully know what will happen during your scene.
Children's Theatre
Why is theatre for children so valuable?
Watching theatre at a young age can be extremely inspiring and eye opening. As a young kid it opens your mind up to a whole new world that didn't exist before that show. I think one of the most important things about seeing theatre as a children is the creativity your exposed to, children brought up in a purely academic family and who aren't exposed to creative things like theatre are going to find it difficult to run with their creative thoughts. I feel that although academic things are great, its a balance as with academic subjects for most of the time theres only one right answer. In theatre anything is correct as your free to run with your thoughts and follow them where ever they may go. Some of these children may even be inspired to think creatively and may even grow up to want to be an actor/actress.
Unicorn Theatre -
The Unicorn Theatre is the UK's leading theatre for audiences aged 2–21 (younger audiences). Their work is designed to push the 'boundaries of imagination' and present this to children. A lot of their work explores cutting edge issues that are very relevant to the world we live in. At the moment the Unicorn Theatre is showing 'One Little World'. This is a show for children that revolves around dressing up and changing characters. From what I can gather from the website it also revoles around pirates and what happens when only one person only wants to be one thing, in the case of the play the leader. This company will help us with our devising as it can give us ideas for different ways in how we can devise our piece. It also gives us ideas on how we can preform children's theatre while still pushing the 'boundaries of imagination' and exploring the emotional depth, something which seems quite hard to do as children's theatre is often associated with mind numbing stupid and boring plays for older people.
Polka Theatre -
The Polka Theatre is a space completely dedicated to putting on shows and events for children. Not only do they do theatre shows but they also organise workshops where children can come and produces some art work, read and take place in creative activities. Their theatre shows/workshops focus on children from the ages from 0 - 14. At the moment, among other shows, they are putting on a show called 'Puss In Boots'. This play features a range of puppets and is done for children aged from 4 - 8. This theatre company seems to focus a lot more on children that The Unicorn Theatre. It seems that its soul purpose is to entertain children and there isn't much of the pushing of boundaries that the Unicorn Theatre tries to do. Nevertheless its still helpful as it shows exactly how to get children engaged and what feature,like puppets, you can use to help make it more interesting for a younger audience.
Log -
As a group we came up with the idea to make our scene fairly relistic. The children who dream creativley beame 'The Dream Team'. The Dream Team was a group of people who went around attacking anyone who refused to dream creativley and turned them into creative dreamers. In our scene an evil mastermind had caputured a group of helpless dreams and had taken their dreams away from them. We created a physicalised routine for the 3 captured dreamers to preform on a loop to show how misurable and boring they are without their creative dreams. The evil masterming then entered and stated that it was 'Your houraly misery hour.' This was where all 3 captured dreams repeated the phrases said by the evil mastermind, this was stuff like 'I can't dream.' Throught the scene the dream team had be edging ever near to the theme tune of mision impossible, at this point they burst in and projected creative dreams into everyones head, turning them all into dreamers.
http://www.polkatheatre.com/whats-on/puss-in-boots
What devising skills did we discuss today? Which of these skills are you most confident in using?
We talked about a lot of different devising skills such as improvisation. This seems to be a
Children's Theatre
Why is theatre for children so valuable?
Watching theatre at a young age can be extremely inspiring and eye opening. As a young kid it opens your mind up to a whole new world that didn't exist before that show. I think one of the most important things about seeing theatre as a children is the creativity your exposed to, children brought up in a purely academic family and who aren't exposed to creative things like theatre are going to find it difficult to run with their creative thoughts. I feel that although academic things are great, its a balance as with academic subjects for most of the time theres only one right answer. In theatre anything is correct as your free to run with your thoughts and follow them where ever they may go. Some of these children may even be inspired to think creatively and may even grow up to want to be an actor/actress.
Unicorn Theatre -
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| One Little World |
Polka Theatre -
The Polka Theatre is a space completely dedicated to putting on shows and events for children. Not only do they do theatre shows but they also organise workshops where children can come and produces some art work, read and take place in creative activities. Their theatre shows/workshops focus on children from the ages from 0 - 14. At the moment, among other shows, they are putting on a show called 'Puss In Boots'. This play features a range of puppets and is done for children aged from 4 - 8. This theatre company seems to focus a lot more on children that The Unicorn Theatre. It seems that its soul purpose is to entertain children and there isn't much of the pushing of boundaries that the Unicorn Theatre tries to do. Nevertheless its still helpful as it shows exactly how to get children engaged and what feature,like puppets, you can use to help make it more interesting for a younger audience. Log -
What activities did we do today?
In today's lesson focused on devising a short scene for our 10 pages. The lesson revolved
around coming up with ideas and bouncing of each other. Before we devised our scene we did some short exercises that helps us with the devising, visualising and producing ideas. One of the exercises was to produce a image in your head of what the future play look like, we then went round the room say out loud what we saw. This helped to vocalise your ideas and get a glimpse at everyone elses ideas, some of these ideas even influenced your own ideas.
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| Ideas sheet |
What ideas did you/your group come up with?
As a group we came up with the idea to make our scene fairly relistic. The children who dream creativley beame 'The Dream Team'. The Dream Team was a group of people who went around attacking anyone who refused to dream creativley and turned them into creative dreamers. In our scene an evil mastermind had caputured a group of helpless dreams and had taken their dreams away from them. We created a physicalised routine for the 3 captured dreamers to preform on a loop to show how misurable and boring they are without their creative dreams. The evil masterming then entered and stated that it was 'Your houraly misery hour.' This was where all 3 captured dreams repeated the phrases said by the evil mastermind, this was stuff like 'I can't dream.' Throught the scene the dream team had be edging ever near to the theme tune of mision impossible, at this point they burst in and projected creative dreams into everyones head, turning them all into dreamers.
Why have you chosen some of these ideas to develop further? You need to explain why?
I really liked the idea of the Dream Team against the non-dreamer evil genius. By using this dynamic you can make the piece very physical as spys (dream team) are very physical and use a lot of movemnt. It also seemed to provide a lot of comedy as we made the evil genius become quite silly. Ie - he had a very silly voice. For a younger audience this would probably be quite funny meaning they will engage and enjoy the preformance a lot more. The physicalisation and the clear divide between the dreamers and the non-dreamers makes the play a lot easier to understand for a young audience. It means that the context isn't all in the text and instead the concpets are shows in a visuale way, the clear divide also makes it easier to understand as its very obvious who is the badie and who is the goodie.
Why did you reject some of the ideas? You need to explain why?
One of our original ideas was to pull the non-dreamers out of the circle instead of blasting them wih dreams as we did in our preformance. We chose not to do this as it became very chaotic an the definining line between the dreamers and non-dreamers became very blurrer as all of a sudden everyone was just grabbing and puling onto each other. I think we could develop some choreographed momvemt that we could do for each non-dreamer we blast with dreams but this would have to be very controlled and clear. The idea of jut grabbing and pulling people around and off stage is confusing and a younger audience wont get the concept of filling them with dreams and the happiness that follows. Also yanking someone out of their position is quite violent and this then loses the impression of the dreamers being good and gentle.
What acting skills/performance skills are you using? Explain why these are suitable for the piece and the target audience.
One of the acting skills were using is the ability to exagerate every movement, facial expression and voice. This is sutiable for a younger audience as it makes the cncpets easier to understand. If we were to act everything out in a very subtle and natural way the young children woudnt pick up on these emotions and characters. It also wouoldnt very very interesting for them to watch, so we exaggerate everything we do. However, we must do this while still matintaining the line between exaggerating and just being stupid. It an be difficult to stay within the bounday of just exaggerating and not letting yourself get carried away and just start being stupid. It is also difficult as we are so much older than our target audience, therefore we must get past the point where we feel silly and shy from our characters.
References -
https://www.unicorntheatre.com/whatson/79/one-little-wordhttp://www.polkatheatre.com/whats-on/puss-in-boots
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