Week 21 Blog ( Week 1 For Junk )

Week 21 Blog, Monday 31st - Wednesday 2nd Of March/April 2014

For the start of this week, our teacher has presented to the whole class what our third and final production is for Btec Level 2 Performing Arts. The name of the production that we are going to perform in early June is called 'Junk'. 'Junk' is the story about Tar and Gemma, two teenagers that run away from their homes in Minely-On-Sea and travel by bus to Bristol, to begin a new life for themselves which later on results in drug taking and prostitution. After achieveing 2 Merits and 2 Distinctions from the 'Shakespeare's House Party' production, I feel confident that I will achieve the same for this final assignment and achieve a high grade for completing Btec Level 2 Performing Arts.

To start off the final production, we had fully read the script of 'Junk' with our teacher having already decided the roles we are to perform in this production. My role for 'Junk' is Tar, which is one of the main characters that runs away from his home town, Minely-On-Sea, and travels to Bristol to escape the child abuse/domestic violance that his parents are causing onto him. But for the first time on this course, I'm going to be included as a 'Dual Cast' member. This means that me and someone else in my group will be performing as Tar for the whole of the performance. Originally, the plan was that we were going to perform on four nights with my 'Dual Cast' partner performing two nights and I would perform the other two. But this idea was later changed the following lesson the next day, and I was only going to perform as Tar for the second act of 'Junk' after the Interval. The way we were going to present the cast change to the audience is by having both me and my dual cast partner come on stage doing the same actions and dialogue, and later on in the scene, my dual cast partner will exit the stage, hopefully making the audience understand that I was now going to be Tar for the rest of the performance. I felt glad to be performing as Tar for the second act since later on, the production gets a lot more serious, and I would like to be part of the action to show how I would respond to it whilst performing as Tar, whom has a complete personality change compared to me.

Since we have limited time to rehearse this final production, our teacher has cut out of the script scenes that aren't really benitficial to the story, which has lowered the timespan of the production. Having already performed 2 productions that lasted at least an hour, having the last one exceed that time would be good to accomplish. But our teacher has also instructed the whole group to not be absent for the rest of the term after easter since because we have limited time, people being absent from college without good reason aren't going to get any rehearsal time and any cherographs that our teacher will come up with. So if people are constantly absent, then we have no choice but to also cut their scenes from the production entirely. We were also instructed by our teacher to learn all of our lines in the easter holidays, which lasts 2 weeks. This should be an easy task for me to achieve since I've had no problem learning a huge amount of lines in the past since I'm always focused and have a good memory for things like line learning.

Our teacher also told the group that she has arranged for our Physical Theatre lessons to be rehearsal sessions for 'Junk' since, again, we have limited time to learn the whole production, and we can't afford to slack off and waste time. Having already completed 2 rehearsal sessions, I feel confident that the whole group will be on their best behaviour for this production, since it is the final performance for Btec Level 2 Performing Arts and being focused in this production inparticular will improve their overall final grade.