Workshop Plan + Evaluation

Workshop Planning:

 

During the week after our performance we will be travelling in small groups to local primary schools to lead a workshop. The children we will be working with would've been to see 'Hamelin'.

My group consists of myself, Louie, Dan, Rebecca and Chloe. There's two from dance, one from CAP, one from Musical Theatre and then me, from Theatre.
 

Our groups will have one person from each strand and we have 5 minutes each to create a short workshop based around our particular skill set, for example, I'll run an acting exercise, someone from Musical theatre might teach a song to the children and someone from dance, can help teach them one of the 'rat dances' from 'Hamelin'.

Introduction
 Firstly, we plan to introduce ourselves, and what parts we played in the performance, and create a friendly atmosphere for the kids to feel comfortable to ask questions and participate.

 

 

First Exercise
 Firstly, we're going to act out different emotions, for example different ways of showing how a happy character might behave, a sad, or angry character. As a group we've talked about how we're going to get the kids to walk around the room, 'exploring the space' and giving us different emotions. 
 

Second Exercise

We'll the kids into groups, and act out different characters from the play, testing out different hierarchy and status', for example the King and Queen Rat, and then the Mayor of 'Hamelin' compared to the market workers. This will hopefully get the children engaged, and thinking about the different characters in the performance, and a chance to tell us who their favourite characters were. I will mainly run the first two exercises, as they are acting orientated.

Third Exercise

Louie, and Chloe, who are from Dance, will then lead a short workshop on the dance of the rats, and will firstly demonstrate them a snippet of the dance, and then engage with them in learning it, in small groups, and hopefully some children will feel comfortable in performing it to us afterwards. Dan, who is from Musical Theatre, will also help with this.

Final Exercise:
Rebecca, from CAP, will lead a discussion in which the children will sit around in a circle and talk about the performance, what they enjoyed, what bits they found funny, and what questions they want to ask us. This will nicely round off what has hopefully been a successful workshop for the children.
 
Our workshop went really well, the kids were really engaged and asked loads of questions, and were really excitable, we had to calm them down so they could focus  but all in all it was really lovely meeting them, and seeing their reactions to our performances we'd worked so hard on.

Performance Evaluation

Performance Evaluation

We did our performances of 'Hamelin' at the Ashcroft theatre in Fairfield Halls, on 2nd and 3rd of July, and it went fantastically. I was thoroughly proud of myself and the whole cast, I think we did a great job.

On the 3rd of July, we did three performances in one day, which would naturally be tiring anyway, but especially as our piece was so physically and vocally demanding. Because we were aiming our piece to be a children, family orientated piece, it was a challenge, to keep up energy for all three performances but it went so well, and we had such a great reaction from the children. Before our show began, we had our pre set, which included us walking on the stage, one by one, and it was so exciting being on stage and holding our positions, as we heard the children shuffling in their seats, really bubbly and happy.

The energy was able to be maintained because of the adrenaline, and excitement we felt before it began, and during. I think we achieved what we set out to, and excelled it, because of the reaction we got from the audience, and the happiness we saw from their faces. It was so fantastic and self rewarding, and a wonderful way of reminding us exactly why we set out to do this performance.

It also really excited all of us to do our workshops, and meet the children who came to see it.

Photos of our costume/makeup

Polymath

 

A polymath person is a person of wide knowledge or learning, someone who has a wide skill set. Therefore a polymath performer would be someone who is able to have some education and skill from different genres within the arts, for example being able to sing, dance and act. By taking part in 'Hamelin' at Ashcroft, we are allowing ourselves to learn about different things we may not do in our strand. For example we would never have a chance to work with Rob on songs written for this particular musical, or even be part of a musical in Theatre. That's why the rehearsal process for 'Hamelin' was so interesting, and different to our usual method in 'Theatre'.

The same with CAP (Community Arts Practice) we get a chance to run workshops for children in our local community, during which we can learn new skills that we may not have realised we had. It's such a rewarding experience to work with the children who will come to see our performance, and inspire them.

Overall this term at Brit has helped us so much, in learning new skills, and gaining experience for the future. We have taken part in something we can include in personal statements because of the skills we have gained and developed. I believe we have learned different vocal, and physical warm ups that we didn't know we had before, which also can help us before future auditions, and rehearsals.

Rehearsal Process

Rehearsals for 'Hamelin' were very interesting, but also difficult and intense.

It was difficult, because there was only five or six of us, from theatre strand, in the community project for 'Ashcroft' and we had to rehearse dancing, and singing, as well as acting, which we weren't used to at all, so it was interesting learning new skills and rehearsal techniques.

We also split off in rehearsal, the actors, dancers and singers, and then came back at the end of the rehearsal and showed the rest of our cast what we had done. Then we had to show and teach them what we'd rehearsed.

It was also really interesting and fascinating being part of the rehearsal process of 'Hamelin' because we got to work with so many talented people, and got to meet some really amazing people from other strands which inspired me so much, and we made such a close knit friendship with our cast, it was lovely.

Community Arts

During the last term of year 12 at Brit, we take part in a Community project. For us this means working with students from other strands, whom we may never have met before. Many of the projects work with people from the community, some of them visit hospices and schools or drug rehabilitation centres. Our group is slightly different as we don't directly interact with our clients (our community) on a weekly basis. Instead we are in rehearsals for something known as The Ashcroft Show. This year we're rehearsing 'Hamelin' which is a modern version of the well known tale 'The Pied Piper'.

Our audience:

 Our show has been created as a family orientated show. We are performing to children of the ages 7-11 in schools based in Croydon. It's very exciting because many of them will never have been to the theatre before so it's our responsibility to introduce them to the world of theatre and performing.
 It's an incredible opportunity for us, to have that responsibility because the children come from less privileged backgrounds that perhaps some of us have come from, so it's an honour to be able to introduce them to something they can be a part of in the future and may never have known they could.
We are also rehearsing and performing an hour long workshops for many of the children who will see the show for the week following our performance.