11/06/15

Devising skills

What devising skills did we discuss today?

Today we used improvisation, physical theatre and creativity.

Which of these skills are you most confident in using?

Physical theatre because I'm confident of how to use my body in abstract ways.

Children's Theatre 

Our piece is for a very specific audience. Why is theatre for children so valuable?

Theatre for children is valuable because it allows them to see how everyday things in the world, that they see on a daily basis can be seen in different ways. It also significant for a child because it would have been their first piece of art they have seen which makes it memorable.

Log questions:

What activities did we do today?

We recapped the storybook and all of us were able to say our opinion about the book and how it affected us, this was helpful because we then began to have a great sense of the book and the meaning and how it was significant for little children, if they dream while they're little they're dreams will come true when they're older so basically he's saying kids shouldn't give up on their dreams. Following on, we were put into groups and we were told which part of the book we had as a strand,we then thought about the different ways we could use physical theatre to portray the story and after we were sent away to devise a small performance for the sections (pages) we chose. 

What ideas did you/your group come up with? 

At the beginning of devising our piece we decided to keep the movements simple as it was going to be shown to little kids who can loose interest really quickly and possibly wouldn't follow along to technical movements. We started by having a young boy (played by Tim) asleep on a bed in the centre of the stage, his toys then began to come to life which we thought would be significant to little children as they normally wish for their toys to come alive. He woke up to find his dolls (played by me and Jamie) talking to him, we used dolls because we didn't want to be stereotypical and use action figures. We used basic lines from the book , for the underline story we wanted it to show that Tim decides which of his dreams come true, so to portray this we wanted to make it obvious that he was alive in his dreams hence the reason his toys came alive and spoke to him.Following on from this  we used physical theatre when he talks about how he wants to be a captain of his own ship and we all became waves  and used a soundscape  as the sound of waves to keep it exciting for the children. We decided to do it this way to emphasise on the authors message that anything can happen if you keep dreaming. 
Finally we had Tim fall into the 'water' and swim with fishes before running into a spaceship but waking up in his own bedroom, as he got up and left his room he looked back at one of the dolls and they waved back. We stopped there because normally when children get deep into a dream and almost start believing it is true they waking up finding out it was all a dream and obviously a dream doesn't always last.

Why did you reject some of the things?
We had to reject some of the tricks we originally had because of  safety, we wanted to preform some of the tricks because we know that children are easily impressed by those things and it would have caught their attention.
We also rejected some ideas because we thought it would give a more negative message rather than positive and we wanted to stick to things that make children laugh and smile, also we had to think of the things we were doing and saying thinking if it's suitable for little children.

What acting skills/performance skills are you using? 

We used physical theatre because we felt that children are more likely to be intrigued into actions than to listen to people speaking for a long time and using big words, it also made the scene more real because in dreams you would normally had a lot of actions than speaking due to all the crazy dreams going on at once.

Another performing skill we used was communication, as there were five of us trying to get our ideas across we all had to listen to each other and be patient and finally we succed to listen to everyone's ideas.