Evaluation

Reflecting on our final performance, I feel we did very well. The pacing of the performance I fell was fine. In the scene Reverend Peters and Christopher, a lot of that was down to pacing between lines, this was challenging as I had to sync up my dialogue to the recording so there wasn’t long pauses between lines. I felt the overall pace of the performance was fine as we were within the time given to us by the brief, however I did feel that we could have slowed a lot of it down for example the scene with number 40 and Christopher could have been a lot slower, and the opening scene could have been slower also.

We had spent a lot of time on sound, creating a lot of different recordings. I felt these did fine and I felt they were effective, at providing the effect we wanted. I did however feel we could have used a little more sound like backing music for the times where we used the nursery rhyme “how Much is that doggy” as this could have given it the more child-like feel we wanted to create when using it. Overall the use of sound was good.

The lighting we used very much reflected the style we had chosen; Artaud. Artaud used a lot of reds, greens and white lighting to hint at the themes of Death, gore and suspense. We tried to reflect this as much as possible when using lighting. We primarily used red lighting throughout the piece and a little bit of white lighting at times. At some points we had originally planned for the use of green lighting, however we chose to not include it as the change of lighting took away from the performance and it made the lighting change distracting to the audience, so due to this we took out the use of green lighting. We also had the use of strobe lighting however I do not believe this was that effective at disorientating the audience.

The audience interaction throughout the performance was good. We each had our moments of interactions with the audience; Dom with licking the audience, Me with Number 40 and Reverend Peters, and Alex with Siobhan. The only problem I encountered with this was the lack of movement with the audience, I feel this was primarily due to the fact that we were using ropes as leashes and this restricted their movements. So to combat this I should have physically moved them more or we should have not used the leashes at all.

I felt that we got the reactions we wanted when preforming this to our audience. There were two main moments when the audience’s reactions were as expected. One of them was when we put an audience member in the coffin, and the other was when we poured water over the cage at the end. The audience reactions were as expected.

I will now evaluate my own performance. First I shall start with my vocal skills, at the start of the performance when I played Mr Shears, who in our interpretation was getting stabbed by Christopher. To give Mr Shears a voice I choose to scream and shout for help. The next character I had to play was Voice 2. Voice 2 echoes all of Christopher lines. So to do this I had to soften my voice and be quiet, I also had to delay my lines a slight bit behind Dom who played Christopher. The next character I had to play was Number 40. Number 40 is insane, so to do this I had to bring up the pitch of my voice and sound happy, this allowed me to sound very strange and odd. For Reverend Peters, I choose to speak normally, this was due to Reverend peters being one of/if not the most sane character in the whole of our interpretation. However there was one point where I had to raise my voice and shout at the audience. Lastly I played as voice 2 again and I sang “How much is that doggy” to do this I increased my voice’s pitch and make my sound childish.

Next I will evaluate my movements as the characters. At the start of the performance I feel that was my weakest moment. As Mr Shears; Dom and I had to do slow motion movements of him stabbing me. I felt this was my weakest area as I was just moving up and down. The next part I did was Voice 2, as voice 2 I also echoed and emphasised Dom’s movements. Next I played as Number 40, as number 40 I started crouched down on the floor, I had to act very perverted towards Dom, to do this as the audience was sitting I would hover above Dom and stroke at his face. I would then as I continue with the dialogue I crawl towards Dom, I then caress his face again and I return to my original position. After this Dom then chokes me, to emphasise the struggle I placed my hands on his and tried to remove them from around my throat, at this point I used my legs to kick and thrash about. Next played as voice 2 again in which I mimicked and emphasised Dom’s movement. The next character I played was Reverend peters, I stood over the coffin and I lifted the coffin lid, for Reverend Peters it was not a movement focused part. I then replayed as Number 40 and for this I had to hover over Dom again. Finally I played as Voice 2 as I skipped around the cage. I attempted to make this as child-like as possible.

Overall I feel my drama performance went well. If I were to change one thing it would be the size of the audience and take off the leashes, as this would allow the audience to move around more.