In general, I think that our performance went well but there could’ve been some improvements. I learned that the atmosphere must be fast-paced and exciting to keep the audience’s attention, especially for children, but it must not stay that for the entire time. There must be some variation to tempo and mood so that the audience is not subjected to the same constant tension for the entire time and instead experiences new tones. The lighting can subtly tell the audience of the mood and can amplify the emotions and atmosphere we, the actors, are trying to produce. We must be mindful of space and area, how we use it. We also must be aware of the movements and positions of our characters. This is an area we could’ve improved on because I think that in some scenes one or two of our characters are not moving or doing anything. This is reasonable in some way because the focus is supposed to be on another group of actors and a large action may detract attention from the main focus group, but the characters that are not being focused on should not just be standing still and doing nothing. Maybe small actions that add a little to the character’s personality or entertain the audience can be done. In addition to what we could’ve done better, we could’ve had better characterisation for some of our characters, especially mine and the Cat in the Hat. We managed to pick out a specific way of moving and talking (i.e the fish pretended to have fins and moved its arms and the Cat in the Hat talked in rhymes) but the characters didn’t have enough depth in personality. We also should’ve used more of the stage. During our actual performance and our rehearsals, we mainly stayed downstage instead of finding ways to use upstage or centerstage.
Currently, I’m relieved that the performance is over because I was really nervous on how the storytelling would go and I’m glad that it went well and I can put the experience into my brain archive to remember and analyse instead of continuously fretting over it. During the process of planning it out and in rehearsals, I was sort of stressed because I’m new to this school and to Drama and I was supposed to go make an adaptation of a children’s story with these strangers. I’m not really great with teamwork because I find communicating a very hard and nerve-wracking experience and I don’t have a lot of practice in working in groups since most of the time in my old school, group projects meant that each person did their work individually and then came back together once or twice to rehearse and then hoped that their final presentation turned out as a passable grade. Most of the time, I just listened and sometimes contributed some ideas. Other times, I felt a little irritated because I didn’t really like some of the ideas and whenever I suggested change, it was just waved away. For example, Luca and Will wanted to start the beginning with narration so that it’d rhyme with the Cat in the Hat’s opening lines. Will also said that the rhyming will give a boring and slow tone to the story. However, I thought we could just act as if we were bored instead of having a narrative. Because we supposed to be showing that the characters are bored, not to actually bore the audience to death in the very beginning. I eventually just accepted it and (grudgingly) agreed that the rhyming narrative would tell the audience that we’d have a rhyming scheme and that the starting tone is slow, which contrasts with the fast and exciting pace we have planned for later.
