Today's session was mainly focused on refining our performance ideas while adding more to the piece.
While the dance group expanded, taught each other the routine and rehearsed, Vlad, Nicole, Andy and myself began coming up with ideas for a theatrical piece to put in the middle of the song 'At The End Of The Day'. This was a very long process! For some reason, neither one of us could think of a good idea. Since we are a group of mixed strands, I think we were putting too much pressure on ourselves to come up with a good idea so that we could 'prove' ourselves as actors. We began experimenting with physical theatre however we found it hard to find a piece that we could involve the moves in. We then came up with the idea of a treasure hunt that we would go around as pirates with a map in search of how to express ourselves creatively; again, this idea didn't work out.
After a while, we decided to sit in a circle and talk in hope we would come up with an idea. Shockingly, we got a good idea when talking about Kim Kardashian! We came up with an idea to use balloons. I came up with the idea to write creative ways to express yourself on the balloons, such as 'Dance' 'Acting' etc. Vlad came up with the idea that we are all sad until Courteney turns on music and hands us the balloons (as if they were 'keys' to finding happiness). Together as a group, we all thought that we could invite the audience onstage to dance together and go into the audience to dance with them! Instead of having this piece in the middle of 'At The End Of The Day', Nicole and I had the idea to have it as a finale of our whole piece; I think think this works better as a finale as it ends the piece on a really positive note and delivers the message we were sent to portray that we can express ourselves through the arts. The song we all decided on was 'Happy' by Pharrel Williams as it's a happy, positive and popular song that the children will probably know the lyrics to so they can sing along easily and enjoy themselves.
For the rest of the session, we rehearsed our piece and edited it. One of the main things we did was include transitions between each piece. Our transition between 'Can You Hear St. Giles Sing?' and 'At The End Of The Day' is that Carys and Ben are talking about going to lesson, causing them to break away and knocking people, creating a chain reaction of movement into our next positions. Carys bumps me, who then bumps Vlad, which then leads us into our positions. Since I am not a dancer for the 'I Dreamed A Dream' piece, my transition to go offstage is to walk backwards carefully offstage; this transition makes me anxious as the dancers are sinking to the floor while I am doing this therefore I am afraid I will step on them or injure myself. Other than this, I like having these transitions as it really makes the piece look more professional and slick. After the dance piece, the dancers go offstage while the finale piece go onstage and get into position.
I felt really included in the ideas process today as I found myself pitching many ideas that were taken onboard. One of my ideas was for the ending of the 'At The End Of The Day' piece when we rise in the final stanza; my idea was that we rise of the penultimate line and turn sideways to the turn our heads sharply on the final line. When I said it, I wasn't very confident in my idea but when Ben and everyone agreed, I felt really good about my ideas that I continued to pitch ideas confidently for the rest of the lesson.
Because the last stanza of 'At The End Of The Day' was really hard for all of us to say, Ben spent some time helping us with tongue twisters and warming up our faces. After these exercises, I felt a lot better about delivering the stanza that I sung it with ease and confidence.
I think this session today was really productive in the sense that we did so much and also I found out a lot about myself as I began to become more confident in pitching ideas, which I usually hesitate from saying as I don't think they will be accepted.
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