Theatre For Children: Third Lesson

Hey,                                                                                                   17^th September 2014

We had our third lesson of Theatre for children and now I will be including performance workshop class as well, because we all working toward the same goal, A performance of “twas a night before christmas”. We were told it was going to be like a journey through different scenes that we would create in groups. 

Performance workshop class

In this lesson we were asked to come up with some ideas in our group we would be doing our scene. We were given the lines “The stockings were hung by the chimney with care” and our teacher gives her idea on what she thought we would do. Which was that we could all be one toy of our choice, we could be in the wrong stocking or we could get lost in the house or some other idea so we took in on board and discussed ideas. We come up with the idea that we would be toys and then one of us would get lost and we would need the children help to find him. As we develop the idea. We discussed we would have 3 stockings on stage and the character would get lost in them. The audience could point to where the character is on stage like Panto. We also thought about some staging ideas which included having the bottom of christmas tree and big presents to make it look like we are small. We would all finally end up in the right stockings in the end and maybe sing a song. We started thinking about characters, the lost character could be based on “Where’s Wally” image. This is a good idea because it something the kids will know. The other characters would be a doll of some sort, teddy, baby doll, robot and a fairy we thought these characters would be easy to understand and recognises. We are still developing the idea but I think we have a good base to work from. 

Theatre for Children

We looked at some games to help us focus because some of the class were talking and not really listening, the first game a counting game, all stood in the circle starting at one, we had to count up to 20 in order without saying and number twice or talking at the same time. Some of the class were in high sprints so they were shouting out the numbers hurriedly. Each time we had to start over, not reaching 20. I suggested we slowed down but the still people were too enthusiastic. We were split into two group and hand to hold hands and tangle ourselves without letting go. My group was slower and therefore the other group finished before us and came over to help. This muddled what we were going because lots of people were talking at the same time, so our teacher told the other group to sit and start talking about our homework. So we ended up breaking our hands because we all thought that we would be missing some of our lesson so we all went over to talk about our ideas of what we thought of the Matthew Bourne‘s Nutcracker. We all basically had the same idea same idea of what we could use from the nutcracker. We went into pairs and counted to 3, have one person say 1 and then other person say 2 and so on. We did this for about 2 min and then had to do an action instead of saying one which our character for a production might do, so as a fairy waved my arms go up and down to seem like I was flying. Then had we had to do an action for all three, then come up with 5 and I did these actions:

Á       first action was my arms going up and down like flying

Á       second action was my wand making a taping move

Á       third action was twisting elegantly     

Á       fourth action was sprinkling fairy dust over my head

Á       fifth action was to bow gracefully

I thought my actions were well suited to my character. The different action showed how elegantly my character should be, kind and smiley.

Following on from this activity we started to decide music we could use for the production, so my friend and I played one of the songs we would use and everyone seem to like it and Laura thought it was good idea. Other people came up with music that wasn’t really appropriate for the 5-11 year old group our production is for. So we didn’t really get anywhere with the music for our opening and closing parts of the show.

My Research

Following on with my research for the theatre for children, I wanted to look in to what Justin Fletcher did before he became Something Special’s Mr Tumble. He studyed drama at the Guildford School of Acting, he was in his final year when he started watching Phillip Schofield who was in a show called Gordon the gopher, which is new presentation format between afternoon children's programmes on BBC1. I watch some clips of this, and its show me how far the children BBC has come. This is the link to the website I found all the information for “Broom Cupboard” link: http://www.thebroomcupboard.co.uk/page2.html   after watching this he came up with a “show reel”  (This is a motion picture, video, musical or voice-over announcement equivalent of an artist's portfolio.) called Justin time, which encompassed two different characters: Anna Conda, a myopic reptile house warden; and Arthur Sleep, a regional newsreader who has difficulty staying awake and can sleep anywhere no matter what.  I looked up another show he was in called “fun song time” I remember watching this show but it was with different people in it and it was more modern with a feeling of pop music tangled in it, but I loved that show (I still do) It was a really up beat and it taught you different nursery rhymes it also had simple actions that the audience can pick up easily so we could use that idea in our scene for our production. He came up with another show called gigglebiz and this show is with Justin Fletcher playing different characters that have different storyline including Anna Conda and Arthur sleep. I'm going to send a letter to cbeebie so ask about how they come up with shows and if they could give me anything to put in with my school work for theatre for children.

Till next time

Jenny