Unit 18 - Auditions

Contemporary audition piece

Danny - Eight

Classical audition piece

Parolles - All's Well That Ends Well

Risk Assessment

Possible hazard	What we would be ideal to prevent it	What we can do	Would this make it safer?
Someone getting hurt due to the creation of the barricade.	Have a bigger space to move about in, keep objects being thrown very light, and make sure the performers are well rehearsed.	Move all unneeded objects out of the area, try to create the biggest space possible, only throw cardboard boxes, and rehearse the scene many times before even going into the church.	We still won’t have a massive amount of space, but we won’t be able to fall over any unneeded objects, no heavy objects will be thrown at all, and the performers should be able to play the scene out perfectly due to rehearsals.
Limited space to dance to ‘People Help the People’.	The barriers are removable and the chairs can be moved out of the way to create a bigger space.	Take the barriers out and put them in unused pews, and move the chairs to another space, creating the biggest possible space for the performers to dance in.	The performers would have a lot more space to perform the dance and there will be very little chance of hitting the choir pews as they would be behind the area in which the dance takes place.
Fire due to lighting.	Use LED lights as they are cold - unlike normal stage lighting.	Use LED lights.	The LED lights are cold and so there is no risk of fire from them.
Performers falling off the window ledge.	Have lots of rehearsals on a similar material to find the best way to make it safe for them, and get a step of sorts to help the performers reach the ledge.	We can cover the ledge in blankets so it keeps with the theme of the performance, this would mean the performers would not be able to slip off the ledge. We can also move part of the barrier next to it, so they can step onto that to get them on the ledge.	The performers would easily be able to get onto the ledge and get down off of it, also the blankets would make them slip less while they are up there.
Fire due to candles.	Use electric candles wherever possible.	We have a lot of electric candle available to us; however we feel we need to use a real candle for the ending scene.	No fire will be unnecessarily used in the performance and the performers will be briefed beforehand - making sure the risk of a fire is minimal.
Performer getting stabbed due to penknife.	Use a fake knife.	We will use a real knife to make it look authentic; however the performers will have many rehearsals before going into the church.	There will still be a little risk, but due to rehearsal beforehand - this will be minimised.
Performers tripping over in the preparation for creating the barricade.	Walk down each isle at the beginning of the day and make sure they are clear, also brief the performers and anyone in the church and keep the isles clear throughout the day.	Walk down each isle multiple times throughout the day, especially before dress rehearsals, tech runs, and the actual performance.	There will be no obstacles in the way of the performers, and they will all be aware of the dangers - making risk of injury minimal.
Steps being a trip hazard for the audience members or performers.	Put up signs and highlight steps.	When ushering the audience through the performance, extra performers must highlight that there are steps that need to be climbed; also brief the performers of where the stairs are.	This will make the trip hazard minimal as everyone will be aware of the steps around the performance space.

Diary: Day 24 - 17/06/13 (Inc. Evaluation)

It was the day of the performance today and we were all getting a little nervous. When we first arrived, we spoke to the reverend of the church and she was very helpful in telling us what we can (and can’t) do with the space provided. So we spent the first few hours moving things in the church to make way for our props and where we will be performing. Unfortunately (but not surprisingly) we weren't allowed to do much with the alter, so we spoke to the reverend and moved it out of the way – putting a table in its place. We quickly briefed the last of the extras on what they needed to do and then promptly started a run through. This went surprisingly well and so we sent the extras back to school, so we could sort out the finishing touches. We did a final run through, then were ready for the performance in the evening, so had a break. When the audience arrived, there were more than expected, but we managed to fit them all into the spaces provided – other than that, the performance went ahead with no mistakes, a near perfect performance really. It was quite emotional afterwards due to the fact that this was the last performance we would ever do together as a sixth form group – we started with about twelve people in our class and we finished with six.

What went well?

Most things in the performance process went extremely well. Due to the fact that we only had about four weeks to create the performance, we moved at an incredibly quick pace. This meant that very few ideas didn't make it to the end performance as we didn't have time to sit down and evaluate good/bad scenes and we just put them all in – making them better if we felt they needed work. We had all worked very closely together on previous productions, so we were all very open with ideas to put into the piece. This was extremely helpful as we would have many different ideas for each and every scene for the piece – meaning we could try out each idea and see which we prefer.

We were a little surprised at how accommodating the members of the clergy were when we arrived at the Church. They were happy for us to do almost anything – we had tried to keep our piece away from any blasphemous dialogue or actions due to it being a church. The extras also did extremely well – I feel we chose an extremely talented group of individuals and they managed to settle into their roles very quickly and understand their purpose in the performance extremely well.

What didn't go so well?

In a short answer – not much. If we had a little more time to get the performance ready, I think we would have an extremely good performance, but nowhere near what we actually ended up with. The short time span meant we had to experiment with things quite a lot to see if they worked – meaning our performance had a nice balance of dialogue based scenes and more physical scenes. We did have one or two scenes based around the alter which we couldn't use the same way – but we simply changed the alter for a table and used a window ledge instead. I was also ill during the day of the performance, but that couldn't be helped. Other than that, I feel the performance and rehearsals went extremely well.

If we were to do it again?

To be honest, if we were to do it again, I wouldn't know what I would change really. Maybe spend a little more time looking at venues and different concepts, but I think we talk a lot about things instead of actually doing them – so we could easily spend months on end looking at venues and concepts without actually choosing one. If we had a lot of money, we may have had a deal with Rochester Cathedral and performed in there – that would be an equally as good performance, but in a much grander space. But again, it would be a completely different performance and to be honest, I think the audience would be distracted a little by the sheer size of the rooms. It would also be extremely expensive to light the space and get the correct audio setup to perform effectively – so I still prefer our church setting that we chose.

Early Ideas for St Margret's Church

Before we had come up with an idea to go into St Margret's Church, we took lots of photos of the church. When we got back, we all sat down and wrote down things that came to mind for each part of the church in the photos. Hopefully, these ideas would help us decide on one to perform. These are my notes:

An Idea to Start

Audience walk into the church and it's set in the future where there has been a war and everything is destroyed. Throughout the performance, have characters from throughout history that have done things wrong to teach the audience the right thing to do.

Pews

People sitting motionless in the pews. Staring, creepy, candlelit. This all happens when the audience walk in. We will have to black out the windows to do this. A view from the pulpit - people 'dotted around' the church, all motionless.

Entrance

One person, silent and staring, can encourage the audience to come in and sit down.

Cross

Sitting on the ledge (maybe perform a monologue) with light coming through from behind (creating a silhouette).

Archway

People standing/crouching around the archway, maybe hiding? Someone ushering them in.

Pulpit

People standing on the barrier, each side representing a choice and they can't decide which way to go. Maybe someone watching from the pulpit - making them choose either one.

Statue: immortality.

Hedge Archway: a new world.

Diary: Day 23 - 14/06/13

Today we set up the hall as a rough version of the church and did a run through of the whole performance. This was extremely useful as we could test out all of our scenes and transitions and see how well it ‘flows’. Overall, the rehearsal went well, there were only a few hiccups, but we can all sort these out over the weekend – they were mainly forgotten lines and/or transitions. After this we each allocated one or two extras to each member of the group – this way, on Monday we can each brief the extras on what they have to do for their characters. Overall, an extremely productive lesson and it looks like we are almost ready for Monday. Over the weekend, we will all work on the little parts that went wrong today (such as the odd scripted scene), ready for the performance.

Diary: Day 22 - 12/06/13

We focused on doing a run through today. After quickly looking at some videos of the earlier scenes, we ran through the performance up until Millie’s song where she sings and we grab things around the church for the barricade. This was surprising as we moved pretty easily through the performance and rarely forgot parts that we put in. We have decided to create the barricade out of cardboard boxes, so will need to get as many as possible over the next few days (we used chairs today as they were close to hand) and for each scene we had to quickly make a rough version of the space that we will have in the church. Today was extremely helpful as we went through scenes we hadn't looked at in a few weeks, so we just need to run the whole thing a few more times and we will be ready for Monday. The scenes I am most uncomfortable with at the moment are the first scene and the scene which involves our argument just before we dance to Paramore – ‘We are Broken’. Tomorrow we will most likely continue with the run through until the end and then go over scenes we think aren't strong enough.

Diary: Day 21 - 11/06/13

Yesterday, Joe and I went through our scene and tried out ‘God and Satan’ and managed to get it to a standard that we liked. We will now learn the scene at home and the next time we do it, we should know it enough to perform it properly. This was extremely useful as it was one of the very few scenes we hadn’t quite finished. Today we all discussed the building of the barricade as we had experimented a little with it, but hadn’t finished it entirely. We decided the best course of action would be to get a lot of cardboard boxes to create the barricade out of, so we will have to do this another time. We then moved on to the ending as we desperately needed to decide how we wanted our characters to end up. We finally decided that Dave’s character would get up after the quiet scene where we all talk about what we wanted to do when we were younger, and he would then explain that he wants to fight for his life. One by one we would join him and eventually we would all sing ‘Us Against the World’ by Coldplay as we slowly band together and leave the church. This was extremely good as we left the audience inside the church, while also having an emotional way of ending the show. We then showed some different scenes to year 12 students and got some feedback – this was mainly good, but they didn’t quite understand the relevance of our dances to ‘We are Broken’ but we felt this would be more clear if they had seen the rest of the performance. Today was extremely useful as we went over a lot of different scenes that we hadn’t done in a while, whist also finishing the ending of the performance and showing some scenes to an audience. Tomorrow we will start running through the performance and start making sure the smaller details are being taken care of (such as props and maybe have a look at costumes).

Diary: Day 20 - 07/06/13

Today, we first ran through the dance for ‘We Are Broken’ due to the fact that Dave hadn't performed his with all of us and Jay had made his dance slightly shorter than last lesson. This went well and so we moved onto working on the piece of dialogue before this. This posed some problems as we each didn't know our characters well enough to just improvise speech and so even though people had brought in ideas for the scene; it took a while to start creating the scene. But we ended up with a fairly long scene that explored quite a lot of our characters thoughts/feelings on different matters. After this we decided that we were going to kill Stevie’s character (by her leaving the safety of the church) and this would shock our characters into coming together for the last dialogue scene and the final song. We tried out this final scene and it went extremely well as we used a lot of silence in it and told a little of our character’s back stories. Finally, we started to come up with ideas for how to actually end the show (with Coldplay – ‘Us Against the World’), however we ran out of time for this and said we’d each come up with ideas over the weekend and bring them in next lesson. This lesson was extremely useful as we created the last few scenes and now have a good idea of the show as a whole – not to mention feeling much closer to our characters. Next lesson, we will hopefully finish the show and start to possibly run some of the scenes we haven’t done in a while to get used to them again.

Diary: Day 19 - 05/06/13

We focussed on the dance that we wanted to create for ‘We Are Broken’ by Paramore today. This was because we had each created a small piece of movement to go in the song, but we needed to find a way to make them all fit into the song and space we had. After deciding where everyone was going to perform their dance, we ran it a number of times to try and get the best order – as some pieces worked better with a certain part of the song. During this, we realised that the dances finished after the song, so a few of us made our dances longer/shorter to suit the song. After finishing this, we started to look at the dialogue before this dance, but we quickly ran out of time and so said we would come up with ideas to put into the argument for next lesson – meaning we could come in and start blocking it almost straight away. This lesson was extremely useful as we completely finished off the dance for ‘We Are Broken’ and just need to run it once next lesson to make sure it is finished. We also started to talk about the dialogue before the dance and so to finish the production we just need to create a few more little scenes, which shouldn't take too long. Next lesson we will quickly run the dance to ‘We Are Broken’ and then focus on the dialogue before, then hopefully move onto the final song we will all be singing to end the show.

Diary: Day 18 - 04/06/13

Lots of people were off due to exams today, so Dave, Jay and I sat down and listed the different scenes we had already created. This helped us a lot because we could calculate roughly how long our scenes were and how much we wanted to add to it.  After doing this we thought it would be a good idea to plan out the ending to the performance in detail. So we did the same thing and started a list of sorts to get an idea of how we would end the show. This was brilliant as we could clearly see our ideas taking shape and have a very rough idea of how long each idea would take to perform. We also decided that we would each create a part of a dance to ‘We Are Broken’ by Paramore – this was one of the possibilities to use for the dance that Millie choreographed, and we thought that we could each create a piece of contemporary dance to show part of our individual character’s back stories. Tonight we will each create part of a dance for it and possibly come up with a few ideas about dialogue to go in between the more physical parts of our performance.

Character Profile and Back Story

Character Profile

Name: Matthew (Matt) Alton

Age: 25

Occupation: Schoolteacher

Hobbies: occasionally plays golf with friends, but spends a lot of the time with friends at the pub. However, he does not drink too much because he usually goes on week-days and has work the next day. He also has to plan his lessons for the next few days before going, so it reduces his time at the pub. He spends the weekends in his local church as he runs a kids club and enjoys feeling close to God (so helps out with as many events within the church as possible).

Personality: a very calm person – not much will affect him and he can always turn to God for the things that do affect him in a bad way.

Marital status: was engaged to his girlfriend (Madeline [Maddy]), but she committed suicide from jumping off a bridge into a road about six months before the riots started.

Back Story

Matthew was born on May 1st 1988 to loving, Christian parents. During his time growing up, he spent almost every Sunday at church and remained a devout Christian all the way through school life. Every now and then a peer would mock him, due to the depth of his feeling for Christianity, but his faith in God would overcome his feelings for them. However, every now and then, he would ‘talk’ to Satan as well as God to see the opposite view of the situation and to make sure he was doing the right thing.

He met Madeline at university as she was doing the same course as him. They quickly became attracted to each other and while she wasn't Christian, she could see his point of view of things. They both finished university with very good degrees in teaching in 2009. They quickly found work in the same secondary school and moved in together. However, Madeline had developed Major Depressive Disorder while they were are university (because of the work load) and found it hard to cope with going straight into working in a school after studying. She entered into a downward spiral of stressing about how much work she had, feeling bad because she didn't have the time to do it, feeling down because of that and then not actually getting much done due to the depressed mood she was in. She was often late for work and occasionally didn't plan her lessons for the day. Matthew noticed this and tried to help as best he could – but he had his own work of course and Madeline felt that he was interfering with her job role and didn't like his help too much anyway – making Matthew feel helpless, but again being able to talk to God about his fears in the hope that he will guide Madeline to the light. Halfway through the school year, the governing body of the school decided it was time for her to depart from her position. When she was told this she drove home, in the car she had an emotional breakdown and stopped on a bridge. She got out the car, went to the edge of the bridge, left a voice-mail on the phone at home for Matthew, and jumped to her death. Matthew didn't know about any of this until he arrived home later that night and got the message on his answer machine. Matthew was obviously shocked that it had happened; he also felt sad that she had died and angry at himself for not being able to help her. He turned to God to help him through this time – he took a few days off work and prayed for her safe arrival in heaven, hoping that God would allow her entrance, even though she wasn't Christian. Three years on and his belief in Christianity is stronger than ever; the riots didn't affect him much, until they started to get closer and closer to his home (and workplace), at that point he fled to his church, but when he arrived, it had already been attacked it in some sort of rage (maybe people blaming God for what has happened to them), due to this he went to the next nearest church (St Margaret’s). Due to no-one there being religious – he took up the role of reverend and took responsibility for the people inside. He did regular services to help keep people’s moods up – however, there were a couple that kept distancing themselves from the rest of the group. The woman in the relationship was very kind and helpful with anything he needed, but the man seemed quite anti-social and didn't like Matthew’s company as much. They were there before Matthew, and at first they were both against the idea of letting him in, but they soon saw that they needed to let some more people in to help them all live together.