Theatre after the holidays!

So here it is. I know, I know, I'm terribly late and I do apologise. The "blogger" reflex is one which I desperately need to acquire! Well, without further ado, here is the blog covering the last two weeks and today's lesson.

So to recap, I am missing entries from the first week back from the holidays. So let’s start with that one. The first Monday was sports day so our first real lesson was on Wednesday. Despite having masses of homework due in, we started off with our TPPP presentations. Lydia went first, and described her TAPS as many different lessons that which made her feel clearer about theatre in general. Halley's presentation was about about her newfound understanding of theatre, seeing as she joined the class after having been on TAPS. Bekki's presentation was more about finding herself as a theatre student and the effects of TAPS concerning this. My presentation was a sort of day by day account of what happened and how it changed me.

On the Thursday following this, we dedicated an entire lesson to finding out more about “mise en scene”. Literally the action of “putting on the stage”, mise en scene is everything that is concerned with the process of producing a play. We saw that everything from lighting to set design, all in relation to the performance concept, is crucial to the mise en scene. For homework, we had to write our pitches in relation to a play we saw at TAPS.

The pitch needs to include every aspect of the play in a maximum of 250 words. I misunderstood this and wrote a sort of advertising pitch to show off the play’s qualities. Mr Fearnehough then told us to rewrite this, first at the original 250 word limit, then at 50 and then at 10! This quickly became hell but I tried. This was to show us that it helps to completely break our work down to a few key words and then do it again from those words.

Following this, we started our master classes. So far, we have had Lydia’s, Bekki’s and Halley’s, with mine to be done tomorrow. Lydia’s was centered on immersive theatre, Halley’s on mime and movement and Bekki’s was on creating an ensemble. Mine is on Verbatim theatre and lineals and I can’t wait!