Week 23

 Monday 18th March 2024

Warm up

We started Monday off by participating in a football themed warm up activity being run by one of our other acting students. This was part of their assignment as its further character development, so it wasn't set out like a normal warm up as it was themed based around what their character would do. In this instance the character was a popular jock style character, so football was fitting. Although there was quite a bit of football passing, we did a an activity were two people were stood either side of  a football- going head to head to grab the football when prompted. Although this was playful and fun it was actually a really good activity for working on instinct, reaction time and listening as you were being given multiple imposter prompt words to throw you off throughout the duration of the activity. I found this really helpful as it instinctively made me more awake and ready whilst building on initiative skills- something that really helpful when working under pressure.

Rehearsals    

Todays "shout" rehearsals were very messy, as transitions were coursing some difficulty- struggling to execute the transitions style that we have selected for this play, we also lost some of the people doing the transitions, meaning there were gaps and pieces of set not being moved. Because of this we decided to fully focus on a transition rehearsal, re doing all the transitions from scratch and executing them so they were crisp and fresh in our brains. After running this all the way through a few times we agreed that we were satisfied with it, agreeing that we all collectively need to strongly memorise our positions and movement sequences otherwise the transitions will fall apart.

Wednesday 20th March 2024

Today was our tech run, but also our first time moving into the theatre space fully, and although we've had some of our rehearsals in there we've never actually fully used the wing space or run the lights, costume and music meaning that the transition made our tech run slightly clunky. Are notes included blocking, timing, theatre etiquette and volume- this is something that we will take on into our runs tomorrow before the show so we can make it even more polished.

Thursday 21st March 2024

Show Day

At first I wasn't feeling the pressure of show day, as we started off with some nice warm ups whilst set was getting touched up and props getting organised. But as the day continued I started to feel the pressure. We ran through the show without costume just to make sure everything was okay, there was a few minor issues with transitions again so we went back over and very quickly altered a few things, meaning we could move onto a costume run- it went really smoothly and we all started to feel very proud of the show we had created. I felt the most apprehensive and nervous right before the show was about to begin, and even though It wasn't quite as bad as when I played Peter Pan I still felt the immense panic. I think I get so panicked before shows as I fear forgetting my lines, and even though I know I know them I start to feel as if I've forgotten them all- so it's not so much performing in front of an audience, and I don't actually think performing in front of an audience makes me nervous at all- it's just the sheer thought of blanking on stage that makes me so stressed. I've learned how to counter act this a bit better, especially after Peter Pan- by closing my eyes, sitting down and taking in deep breaths. I feel that when I separate myself slightly from the waiting and the other actors I can calm down a little bit and let myself settle ever so slightly so I used this trick. We did the show and it went brilliant, very proud of everyone and there hard work- we also stayed back after the show to have a chat with a National Theatre director who was extremely kind and only had nice things to say about the performance. Overall I'm very happy with how everything went, and I cant wait to perform it at York.