Monday 10th March 2025
Evaluation for normalised
My main goals when approaching normalised and playing the role of Rosa was to nail the character journey, as Rosa's main role within the show is to join the groups together and push the moral justice. Because of this I knew it was important that the audience warmed to Rosa as a character and found comfort in her decisions throughout the play. I feel personally that I met these objectives well by adding in light moments of humour throughout the story, whilst also keeping the queer joy alive through the relationship of Rosa and Sam. I actively decided to make Rosa someone who is relaxed and chill, whilst also being a person that is up for a fight as it felt right to build on the point that she wants to always push for justice- which I think helps let the audience warm to her more. Rosa as a person is quite different to me- although there are moments that Rosa goes through and experiences that I can relate to that helped me emotional engage with her as a character. I feel some of the main ones are with Rosa and Bo, and Reema an Rosa as it shows the difficulty Rosa faces when trying to make her friends understand how the homophobic undertone throughout the play effects her. There's points were I can personally apply some of these moments to myself and by doing so actually allowed me to fined a clearer understanding when it came to Rosas intentions and the importance of the play. After assessing my performance technically I am aware of some clear areas of improvement both physically and vocally. Throughout the performance there were points were I dropped my volume, one of the main moments being the beginning football scene- as I struggled to push my projection and vocally support myself whilst running with the imaginary football. Throughout rehearsals I did improve this slightly by using the note of imagining that me and my scene parter were playing across a very long football field, which was very helpful and allowed me to imagine the setting a lot more which as a result did help my volume within that scene. I still know my volume could have improved in general throughout the show along with my diction clarity and pronunciation, as there were moments that I found myself garbling words slightly and getting court within sentences slightly. This Is something I can improve with tongue twisters and diction exercise, and have been using them recently to help me try to iron out this issue within my performances.
Normalised was a very collaborative peice, wether that be group collaborations or collaborating in just a pair or trio, and I personally found collaboration and ensemble dynamic to be particularly important in the being opening scene of Normalised, were Rose, Bo and Keiran play football together across a field. I would personally pick this scene out when it comes to ensemble, because without a strong ensemble dynamic the scene just wouldn't of worked at all- especially when it came to the imaginary football as we had to use each other as a way to figure out the movements and the speed of the ball itself. This scene also felt like a nightmare when it came to the spacing and to make sure that we weren't blocking/upstaging one another we had to constantly be in tuned and aware of each others movements so not to do so.
Originally when we first performed the show for the home performance, we were all in school uniform- which did partly feel fitting as their all teenagers in school/collage- but at the same time we felt as a company that we were loosing some of the personality of the individual characters by doing so and that to change the costumes up for the Newcastle performance would be a good idea. I had already figured out what I thought Rosa would wear casually before we changed the costumes around, so used that as an influence to pick out my costume for her. Rosa is quite a chill person, and she's not really big on fashion or clothing trends. She more the type that finds something she likes and sticks with it. For me this was slimmer fit jeans and a sports jumper, rolling up the sleeves in certain scenes and cuffing the bottom of the jeans to show how she fits her clothes around her and her life and what's more practical for her in that moment. I also used my jean pockets quite a lot when performing- more specifically when she was a bit more nervous or felt a bit more awkward within scenes, she's not really a fidgeter so for her this was the equivalent. When it came to props in the show we didn't particularly have loads, instead it was mainly bigger pies of set but when we did use props they tended to lend to the smaller details of the show- for example the small electric candles in one of the memorial scenes that were placed on the shrine to then light up in a blackout. For me the use of these props were really clever and didn't just visually look good, but also held a very sentimental sort of peaceful tone with them when used. I even used a singular candle when singing and went and placed it on the shrine as a way to show the personal loss that my character was a feeling but not showing, whilst also using it as a crutch for that scene and place to push some of my emotion onto.
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