Evaluation for humanity in crisis

Humanity in crisis                            Dan Smith                                30/12/2015

On the 14th of December we performed our performing arts devised piece for humanity in crisis, we performed in the main school hall at around 2pm, I had the role of four very different characters, a controlling father, a stranded hopeless migrant, a man against the suffragette movement, and a human trafficker, all characters were very different so i wasn't stuck with just the one. Our performance went extremely well and we brought around some important topics that have altered history over the past century, we focused on one specific topic which was “womens rights’, But we cleverly had four different stories which all linked into the one topic, we had, feminisation in migration, which is the struggle for women refugees, Human trafficking, which displays the dangers of women being abducted into trades, suffragettes, which showed the movement of female power which brought around equality, and finally, arranged marriages, where both young males and females are forced to marry without consent. We wanted our piece to have an effect people to walk away from our performance and think about the fact that all the hard work from the brave women back round the early 20th century, is perhaps starting to dissipate due to the fact equality is still uneven. Despite the performance going well there were some small problems which could have been fixed, especially during the rehearsal process.

Our performance was pretty much flawless, i will explain below a few of the successes, and a few of the weaknesses that could have been turned into strengths if the rehearsal process was better structured. 

One thing that went well with the performance was the transitions between the four segments, we had a specific light colour which would let the audience know that it was a costume change between scenes. We chose the neutral colour of blue every time. Also in the background we had the same song play each time which also defined that it was a transition, this song was by the band “Five Finger Death Punch”, entitled, “Coming Down”. Im extremely happy the transitions ran so smooth, this was one of our main concerns, had it not been for the good transitions, the audience would have not understood that we were following into a different scene, and may not have understood the entire piece. We left transitions until last because we were so focused on getting the scenes perfect and making sure we had our lines learnt, i feel we should have put maybe a bit more time into the transitions as we worked with each scene, we would have felt more confident then during the performance.

Another thing that went well was the extremely difficult lifts during the suffragettes piece, funnily enough we spent the least time on this specific scene, towards the end we were even considering cutting it out, due to the fact we didn't balance our time well, however on the week of the performance we put every effort into the scene to bring it to life, it ended up being the most factual and intricate scene in the entire piece, the main girl character in this “emily Davidson”, one of the suffragettes leaders, was played by Ellie. and one of the most historical events in the world happened because of this woman, sadly though her actions caused her own tragic death, i feel that when we showed how she died it should have had a strong impact on the audience, a young woman being mowed down by a speeding horse, just to prove a point. This is why the scene was so important to have. We reenacted the death of Emily Davidson, but instead of hiring moving horses which would have cost an extortionate amount of money, we decided to use physical theatre, because its always interesting to tell a story through actions and not words, we wanted to make the audience think about what was actually happening, so it kept them engaged throughout.

The dialogue in the performance went perfectly with the physical movement, it was graphic and really showed the audience, what really happened to the suffragettes, all the pain and abuse they went through to have the power to vote. During every scene we through facts and figures around to  back up our movement with some statistics. In was concerned at the start because we had quite a lot of dialogue to learn, for instance one of our performers had to learn a monologue. Another good part of dialogue we used is when in suffragettes, a man actually stood up for the movement in a courthouse. This was quite powerful because it showed a male going against one thousand others using powerful dialogue.

Although the performance was executed well there were some problems technically and problems with the rehearsal scheme.

One of our weaknesses was trust in the group, at the start of the devising unit the chemistry of the group was extremely good, we all came up with good dialogue, movement and facts that we wanted to use and we were all bursting with good ideas, unfortunately the group had a big falling out and a loss of trust, the chemistry of the group went down and we had lost friendships within the group, which was very unprofessional and ended up throwing us off at a tangent, we didn't get work done for a few days, the problem we had was when we were doing the main lift in the suffragettes piece, one person was supposed to be counting as we lifted her above our heads, unfortunately with a miscommunication within the group two people were counting but at different times, so as one side of us brought her down, the others raised her again, causing her to crash down onto her head. This erupted into blame and anger, which should have and could have been controlled if we had listened to one person, we were a bit careless when it came to safety and we ended up paying the price. The groups trust was damaged for a few lessons as tensions were still high. We should have formally dealt with it there and then to restore trust.

Another weakness was the fact that during some of our scenes we experienced technical difficulties. During the refugee piece we were supposed to have “welcome to the jungle”, played, which is a song played by “Guns N Roses”, this went along with a projection of pictures which was on stage, sadly due to the song not coming on due to a problem with the stereo, peoples attention was not drawn toward the stage, so the hard work for the projections suffered in the end, as the attention of the audience was focused on the people onstage, i feel personally that the projection should have been put in a different place, maybe on the floor of the performance space, so both the projections and characters could have been seen. We could have evaluated this during the rehearsal process however we weren't able to spend much time overviewing small potential possible problems which ended up being quite big problems for our piece.

There wasn't really any other weaknesses when it came to the performance, i would like to say how proud i am of my group for pulling through the disastrous rehearsal process and actually producing something quite professional, however this could have been doubled if woe had only looked over minor issues that we ignored. Like potential technical problems. Our improvisation for the problems was good on the day, because we managed to keep the audiences attention controlled. Nd one of the audience members stated that he would have “paid to see it”, which made us all feel extremely impressed with our work, i must add that i was skeptical with the women rights idea, but after researching all these different stories and facts, and learning movement to songs, we ended up making a very powerful and moving performance.