Final Major Projects

The final performance. At the end of the ten weeks we organised where we were going to perform, we had four shows back to back in our drama studio at college in front of other students from different  department over the course of a day. This was on the 23rd of March 2018. Considering our final performances was a little bit rushed especially in the days before where we had debated on weather or not we needed an extra rehearsal (which we did) it was a successful and memorable show. Although the show was notable I felt as though it could have been more polished, something we improved upon later at the school we went to on the following Monday. A struggle we found performing in college was that the some members of the audience where distracting and as actors this affected the way we performed. It was less confident than we wanted in the first performance as we hadn't had time for walk through before, however as the day progressed we received constructive criticism from our tutor an

History of theatre in education After the Second World War, people became aware that drama or theatre techniques might be useful as a way of fostering effective learning in schools. This is known as Theatre in education or ‘TIE’ for short. Brian Way, who founded the Theatre Centre in 1953, was an early practitioner   including Gordon Vallins, who established TIE at the Belgrade Theatre in  Coventry in 1965. Their work was so influential that it spread nationwide. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOLhlQhFFKo This a video I watched last year in a previous theatre in education project that I found incredibly interesting and informative. Its done by TEDx and talks about how we as actors can make education fun by simply finding that childish parts of our self and using that childish nature to create drama. Currently Theatre in Education is specifically targeted at school both primary and secondary, the theme of the performance is usually a subject the students are studying. There

Research: primary and secondary. As we stared the project focusing on technology we had research and surveys that wasn't relevant to our final piece. However what we learned was still interesting and now I know more about a topic I previously knew little about. As a class during the second rehearsal we created a questions for a survey for secondary school children who we decided where our audience. Although we wrote out questions for the survey we didn't create or send one off as we split into two groups and changed our ideas. We came to the conclusion that it would have been pointless to have people answer a survey that neither of our piece were about. Q1: How old are you? Q2: How many hours do you typically spend on your phone in a day? Q3: Where do you socialise? Q4: Do you spend more time talking to people online rather than in person? We had planned to send theses questions into school and have the student answer them in class, as well as this were thought about

Creating our piece: techniques After finally having a plan, we started rehearsals with rewriting the scrip. We knew we wanted the main focus of our piece to be drugs not consent compared to the previous piece. although personally I didn't take the role of leading or directing I did share ideas for scenes and how we wanted the piece to end. I as a person struggle taking direction and this is something  I really tried to focus on and using constructive criticism to improve my performance. During our first rehearsal after deciding on the piece we knew we wanted to keep the aspects of being abstract, we started using white sheets in movement and adding words on top, after watching this back the sheets started to show the death of the lead character who end up taking drugs. We later used this at the end of the piece but instead of using sheets we used scarfs that we wore through out the performance. This was alienation effect a technique created by Brecht where it invol

Tec, costume and props. We knew from the beginning that the set should be simple and easy to travel with, although the set was simple; a table and six chairs around it that stay stationary, we didn't want lose the naturalistic feel of the performance by not using sufficient props. To tackle this we used  a curtain rail at the back of the stage with a black curtain to create a almost back stage. This was where we waited fir cues instead of standing of to the side when we're not on stage and were we kept all of out props. This meant we could always have a clean stage and have scrip's/ a running order as a precaution if we forgot lines.  As the setting was a night out we used an empty vodka bottle filled with water so we could drink while on stage, a empty wine bottle filled with blackcurrant cordial for the realistic look of wine. We had plastic red cups and shot glasses also filled with water. We also used our own makeup bags which we did use to make a more realistic

Hi, my name is Ruth Jones a second year student at Oldham college studying performing arts on a University of the arts London course. Over the past ten weeks I've been apart of a theatre in education project to tour around local schools in the Oldham area. I t hasn't been an easy journey but I'm proud of the end product and I'm going to tell you the process of how the performance 'Choices' came to be. Project proposal and initial ideas. At the beginning of this 10 week project we stared as a large class group of 11, we decided we wanted to work together. After brainstorming ideas for a few hours our final decision on what the theme of the piece should be ended up being Technology and how we as a society have become increasingly addicted to our phones. We also wanted to focus on the government ,the way they are spying on us and conspiracies. We stuck with this idea for about 3 weeks, struggling to actually produce any practical work. When we finally did ther