Evaluation of Final Performance

I believe that our final performance was extremely successful and that we had increasingly developed and learnt several elements of performance through our performance which enable us to perform "The Most Horrific".

I believe I was most successful in creating a journey throughout my speeches on the block. I felt that this was important so as not to continuously shout at an audience for 30 minutes, shoving information into their heads and quintessentially making them inactive or switching off. I feel that with each sentence I was given, I aimed to create a stance; deciding level of desperation and the height of extremity whilst also keeping my energy up and ready. I did this with an analysis of my lines, and experimenting with the stresses that I put on words and the most sensational phrases that require volume, whether that be up or down. I also experimented with the use of whispering making it so that I could whisper "two fingers inside her" and make it as grotesque, hopefully juxtaposing the extreme and overdone physical scene that I had just portrayed.

Physically staying alert was quite difficult but I think remained constant throughout, trying to include the entire audience without blocking them and keeping the board was hard however I found that in the final performance I was easily able to create opportunities to escape from the popular front and engage the back of the stage, balancing the stage and keeping the audience entertained. I also immensely enjoyed our "Ugandan lesbian" scene and enjoyed the heightened tension of the ending and felt it really broke the barrier between the audience feeling incredibly uncomfortable and overstepping the line of desperation. I think that it was effective as the audience were involved in this gradual build up of physicality and voice and created a really incredible moment of gestus. 

I believe that Kims character was immensely effective as it completely contrasted everyone on the C D side of the stage, her earlier improvised moment wherein she order sushi, interrupting a speech created a moment of spass, breaking up the speech and exposing the hypocrisy and cruel nature of those who seem more excited about lunch than hearing about those suffering around the world. Also the incredibly gestic moment wherein Billy holds up a "Save Our Girls" and Romy and Kim both ignore the sign until the name "Cheryl Cole" is mentioned, both sides deliberately opposing each other as well as the connection between the almost trivial name "Cheryl Cole".   

Our interesting use of placards in our devised scene worked effectively amongst the promenade section, as the ending where Zion and I both escape through the audience diverting their attention to the next group. I feel it would've had even more clarity if they included labels of our names so that even if the audience didn't look upwards they would still understand what we were presenting, and which news story we were recreating. Also the use of song, as one of Brechts techniques, I felt gave it an extra energy and edge hopefully making the songs used stick in their heads. 

In Sarah's group I found the use of multi-rolling incredibly effective it distanced me personally from attaching a person to a particular character. I also found the use of dressing Jacob into the dress really created enjoyable spass and exercised the idea of dressing a character and developing it directly onstage rather than covering he audiences eyes, but exposing every second of it. I also found the rap written by Rory was shocking but almost shocked us into becoming active members of the audience and directly reacting to what was being said and displayed to us through different forms, breaking up and highlighting their groups development from the script and stories within them. 

I thoroughly enjoyed the split scenes of the almost Goggle box-esque audience in Wills performance and found it incredibly interesting to see what was being created by all of their separate reactions and the ensemble feeling of all of their heightened characters that worked incredibly well in unison. I also enjoyed the gestic moment between Jasmine and Ben wherein he had a gun to the head as he stage raped her, this section was incredible because you could see the enjoyment drain out of his face and the after moment wherein he adjusted her skirt after committing the act, I think this exposed the corrruption of the media and the idea of demanding horrific things to occur and feeding off of the money that they brought into the newspapers and maybe not for this story but the sensationalism that journalist must go through to create "worthy" news stories. 

I think that this term taught me a lot about the development of theatre and Brecht's work to produce thought provoking and entertaining theatre and the various techniques used to do so. I also believe that as a group we successfully incorporated many of these ideas into our final piece and felt our energy delivering the lines pulled our performance through. The only element I believe we could develop was sustaining our physicality at a "seven", I feel that sometimes we may have dipped throughout the performance, however I feel it can be easily accomplished if more intense work into physicality was rehearsed in our own time. I feel that I have learnt numerous elements of political theatre this term, and would love to continue to incorporate this into further pieces of theatre.