4^th December 2012

In today’s lesson we put all of the pieces of our performance together, the songs, the Blondie scenes and the people in power scenes, so that we could rehearse them all together and refine the performance. This was really essential for us as next week we are performing our theatre pieces to an audience, so as we have had limited time, it was really important that we worked hard and got our piece together.

 I think that in our piece there are sections that we need to work on to be ready for next week, things that we need to work on by ourselves and in groups. For me, there are two main sections that I need to work on to make presentable for the performance next week. One of the sections that we need to work on is our people in power scenes on Margret Thatcher. In general our scene needs to be made more solid as it can become quite unstructured and can loose its cause sometimes when we are performing. Consequently we need to reform and re-establish the structure of the scene so that it can become more fluid and natural to us and we don’t have to think about it, I also think that it will make more of a stronger image to the audience and more of an impact on them. Also in these scenes we need to act our scenes in more of a Brectian style. In the Blondie scene we are acting more naturalistically, so it is important that in this Margret Thatcher scenes we need to exercise the Brectian style of acting that we have been exploring. I also think that as in these scenes we are being people through history, who have committed crimes against humanity, and for someone to have to become that person, like Hitler, it would be very hard to get into their mental state, so performing it in a Brechtian style would be better as you don’t have to become the character. More over it is important that we act these scenes in a Brechtian style as we are trying to represent the people and the crimes that they have committed. To do this we are going exaggerate our characters and make them more stereotypes and grotesque, to show that we are not the character, just representations of them and to stop the audience from connecting with them.

The other part of the performance that I need to work on by myself is my speech as Blondie, when she gets elected in as Prime Minister. I think that I need to characterise the speech and Blondie a lot more, as right now I am just saying the speech in a typical politician way, where as with Blondie I need to make it a lot sexual and to make her more sensual so that it is clear to the audience why she is so appealing and why people are voted for her. I need to look a the speech and to work out more of a distinctive, sensual voice for Blondie to make the speech more representative of beauty and power coming together, more interesting and entertaining for the audience to watch.

 

What do we want the audience to take away from our performance?

At the end of the lesson we started to think about the message of our piece and what we want the audience to take away from it. Personally I think that our piece of theatre has more than one message to it and according to different parts of the play it says different things to the audience.

 At the start of the performance, with the polling cards with just faces and Blondie coming into power, I think the message we are trying to send to the audience is why do we vote for the people we vote for? We are making them think of the reason as to why they voted for the person they did vote for and if their appearance or personality had an impact on that more than their policies. We are making them consider how much we really know about the leaders of our countries and if they could be completely different people behind closed doors. Leading on from this, it also makes us wonder how much the politicians are telling us and if what they are telling us is really what they are planning or just what we want to hear.

Later on in our performance I think another message that we are sending our audience is one of what power does to people and is it right that they worst people get remembered? This is shown in our people in power scenes, such as the Bin Laden one or the Bush one. These scenes are demonstrating how horrible crimes against humanity have to be to get public acknowledgement and that those people, like Hitler, are so well known for something so horrific and even more well known than people that have done really good things in their life, and we are asking them if that is right?

Finally I think the last part of our piece of theatre sends out another message and personally I think this is the most important message of the performance. At the end of our piece Blondie revels that the reason for her mass murder was to make “England get a grip” to show the people of Britain how good they have their own life and to be grateful for what we have and for the people we love. It also puts our first world problems into perspective and to stop complaining and to realise how lucky we are. However it also makes the audience think about how much it takes to makes them be thankful of what they have and that it takes something as horrible as a genocide for England to realise what a good country we have because we can be with the people we love in safety.