Week 19 ( Week 7 For Shakespeare )

Week 19, Monday 3rd - Thursday 6th Of March 2014

To start of the week of the 'Shakepspeare's House Party' Production performances, we continued to work through several rehearsal sessions, to give the best performance possible in front of a live audience for Wednesday 5th and Thursday 6th of March. We mainly worked on all the scenes in the production, to see if our teacher or the rest of the group could find ways to improve the performance given by the actors. The parts that were to be improved for me were to slow down certain bits of speech during my lines, since my teacher thinks that I am talking too fast and should slow down so the audience could catch the words I was saying to the other actors on stage. Our teacher then gave us all the guidelines to achieveing the highest grade possible for this production, she explains all the key techniques that we all need to pull off in the performance to achieve higher, and also told us that when typing up certain bits of work to do with Shakespeare and the Character Development process, we were to be as detailed as possible and to give examples along with our findings of the subject.

After the first performance of 'Shakespeare's House Party' on Wednesday 5th of March, our teacher had given all of us a positive review and has given notes to certain actors in the room so they can improve for the next performance later on the same day. I got no notes from my teacher after the first performance had finished, so I imagined that during my performance, I had performed to my best ability and didn't need any improvements, but during the break between the 2 performances, I had thought of a few things that could of gone better during the performance, for example, I remember messing up on the dance routines on a few bits, and I feel I could of added more life to it whilst doing so. Also after we had finished the first performance, which was done in front of the Level 3 Acting students, we had recieved positive comments from them about funny parts of our performance. They also went on to say that our group for Level 2 Acting was much better than the previous Level 2's, since we had much more personality when it came to performance, and told all of us that we have a great chance of entering Level 3 in the future.

After finishing our second performance later on the same day, our teacher said that each time we all performed, it seemed to get better and better. For this performance, I was acting in front of my parents, whom have supported me since the beginning of my acting career and have enspired me to carry on performing to the best of my ability. I feel that I had performed better in this performance over the last because I felt alot more comfortable performing in front of parents as opposed to students, since they don't judge you as much on your performance and I went home with my parents impressed with my performance in this production. Again, I feel even more comfortable with my performance because my parents were pointing out stuff I did on stage that they found funny and they could tell how much work I had put into my characters whilst at home.

For starting off on Thursday, we didn't do as much rehearsals for the main performances later on, since our teacher thought that we had nailed the last two performances on the previous day and she was confident enough to trust that we would still rehearse on a longer break away from the theatre.

After our third performance had finished, only this time performing in front of the Level 3 Musical Theatre students, we had once again given a grand smashing performance that was later on afterwards, positively complimented by all of the Musical Theatre students. All of the compliments that were given were, along the lines, the same as the previous performances, but it still shows that we had performed to our bestest ability and haven't given up on our focus for the performance. I then afterwards realised that we only had one more performance to give for tonight, so hopefully it will be the best performance saved until last.

After later on completing the final performance, which was alot more different than previous, I felt that it was our best performance. It was different because the other actors in the group had performed much differently than before both physically and mentally for their characters. One example of an actor creating a different performance, occured in the first scene of the performance after the Prologue and opening dance routine. The actor that was performing in the 'Actors Scene' as Snout with me being Puck from 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' had changed his characters personality completely, he performed with his voice being more high pitched and had acted more like his own interpretation of a 'Gay' person. This did make the audience laugh more at our performance, but it made the actors on stage come out of character, since none of us were expecting his performance to change. He did the same act later on in a completely different scene with a completely different character. I felt that this may have ruined his overall performance mark, since if you have several characters in a performance, they shouldn't act the same way. But overall, I thought that this performance was on of the best ones to be potrayed by every actor, since because it was our last performance, we gave it our all and strived to achieve the best performance until last.