EVALUATION & REFLECTION – History boys

PART 2 (at least 1,000 words)

On this page you need to evaluate and reflect on the total production from beginning to end based on YOUR experience and engagement with it. Use your blogs to help you   consider each stage of the production process and be constructively critical. Pay particular attention to your own roles, contributions and responsibilities throughout this whole process and how you have worked with others (collaboration):

• Production stage 1: Research,  Blocking or Choreographing / learning chorography and Rehearsing the show
• Production stage 2: Rehearsing and Refining the show
• Production stage 3: Polishing the show (including production elements – costume, props, set, lighting, sound & visuals etc.)
• Production stage 4: Actual performance

Provide an overall summary of the learning you have taken from doing this production and an identification of the areas you will need to develop going forwards.

Evaluation and Reflection

Blocking and script
Looking back on my process the script work was something that struggled with and found that the language used throughout didn’t come naturally to me, meaning I had to put a lot of work into the understanding of the script. Nevertheless I feel I identified this problem early on and managed to work round it by researching and analysing what I didn’t understand. I researched and studied the plot line this made it easy for me to become attached to the play and enjoy performing something I understood and could follow with. This also meant I was able to develop my understanding of my character (Posner) and his participation throughout the play.

From performing in this show I feel I have learned a lot; it has provided me with a lot of confidence witch I thought before this show wasn’t as strong as it could be. I gave everything a shot and didn’t wait to be told what to do I just got on with the work. I also feel in this process I have learnt a lot about myself and to embraced that I shouldn’t be afraid to go wrong, that I should just do what feels natural. I feel my rehearsal time was used very productively as we didn’t have the most amount of time on this show. Every day in seasons i would rehearse and be working on something; weather this was the French, pronunciations or scenes. Even if our director Han was unable to attend the rehearsal we would all still meet and work on scenes, for example on the 18th of January (see in blog) Han was unable to attend so the cast worked on costume and I ended up sorting everything out so this was no longer a problem. That day ended up being really productive for me as I no longer had to worry about this . Although I had rehearsal time 5 days a week from 3-5 I did work outside of class with the musical director for my song “bewitched”. I did this because i didn’t have much time to go over it in seasons, so I took this upon myself to work in my own time to make sure I was prepared to perform in front of the audience. However there were 2 other songs in the play one of the being “bye bye black bird” unfortunately this had to be shortened as the day before the show we was unable to hold harmony’s and remember all of it. I feel that if the hole cast would have arranged a rehearsal in our own time we would have been able to do the original non cut version.

I feel I was prepared going toing rehearsal I always went in with a positive attitude, on time and a good understanding of my part in the scene we was going to run. I did try and be off book in rehearsal and I feel I learned my lines fairly quickly, However sometimes for example in the Drummer Hoge scene the poem took a bit more time learning so I would try and do as much off book as possible. I also feel I was very mature and sensible in this time for instance I would mark my script with any blocking movement and wright in my entrance and exits. I feel I always participated during rehearsals and was enthusiastic in what I was doing; I stayed on task for the majority of the time endless we was having a brake. Over all although I had never worked with some of these girls and the director before I loved working with them and I personally got along with everyone and found it was a really good environment, we all took on each other ideas and incorporated a bit of everything.

costume; All costumes for the students were the same and it was essentially a uniform, (a blue blazer, tie, back shoes and back boys school trousers). I required no costume changes for this show only the gild playing Erwin had 2 costume changes. Four more whilst in rehearsal we were all requested to stay out of dresses and skirts and where any old school uniform we had. I feel this helped me a lot as I had gotten used to wherering similar cloths this then meant I could add little details to my acting, for example I kept my pen and pencil in my blazer pocket. I also found this costume got rid of our feministic tratse and made us more masculine.

props; My props where very simple and was always in one place (my school bag). This mainly revolved round works books and pencil case. However there was one prop I always I had to remember this was my dictionary as I had to pretend to read out of it.

set and lighting; I thought our set was made very well and looked very authentic exactly like a school class room. we actually had a problem occur a day before opening night, this revolved of the set being possitiond too far back; meaning then meant we had to move all the wooden floor decks and panels closer to the audience. This took up a lot of time and was something the hole cast had to get involved with. Continuing from this problem on the  Wednesday morning (first show day) we had to re-set all the lights as all the spot lights was set too far back also the school lights was being blocked by the panels so they had to move. As a performer this meant i had to move some of my positions of some scene to work with the lights. However in the end this worked out a lot better as you could hear everyone and it made better effect when barking fourth wall to the audience.

sound; There was many times in the play that music was used for scene changes, however there was times when we would re-enact plays. During this time music would be played over the top sounding like it was coming from the vinal player, this therefor gave sounded like a record. However on my second night there was a technical problem and the speaker blue while i was speaking however luckily we all just kept going and fixed it in the interval.

• Another sound was in my song witch involved someone playing the piano. This was fine as we ran over everything lodes and worked on timing however on the first show the peddle broke while she was playing. This did through my key off however i ended up singing it acapella for the rest of the song. The peddle did end up getting fixed so it turned out really well in the end.

visuals; We had french translations projected on a top black panel this took a lot out work from the tec crew as they had to keep in time with all of the actors speaking in that scene. For me this was quite hard as i had a lot of french so we had to run this scene a lot to get the right timing.

• we also had protections of photos in between scenes this work ever well as it was still telling parts of the story. There wasn’t many problems with this as it worked very smoothly and gave grate effect.