Thursday 19th March- presentation

Today we showed an extract of our plays to the other class. I personally feel this was well needed as acting in front of a live audience was something our whole class needed. This acted as reassurance to us that actually we have put a lot of work in to Dissocia and it is paying off. We could see this through the amount of laughs we received off of the audience and we could also tell from their facial expressions that our acting was justifying the content of the play.

Whilst watching the other classes play, Our Countries Good, a contemporary piece about a play within a play, indicated to me how they have used certain theatrical devises within their performance that I could adopt as new ideas for Dissocia. The main device I liked about their piece that doesn’t appear very frequently in Dissocia, is physical theatre. They performed a fantastic piece of physical theatre at one point where a group of actors were crouched around Amber, who was delivering a monologue in the middle of them moving on the spot in an anti-clockwise direction, making a slight humming noise. This was effective because as a member of the audience, we couldn’t see their faces as their backs were turned to us. This added an element of mystery to the piece as we were left to interpret from the words which were spoken by Amber, as to the mood and atmosphere of the scene.

I found that giving and receiving feedback was one way in which helped me realise what went well and not so well in today’s practical based lesson. One key point the other class brought up about our showing of Dissocia was the way the script uses humour to express the feelings behind some of the characters and how well we interpreted this form the lines. This made me realise just how vital the humour element of Dissocia is the play as a whole and how reliant we are on getting the humorous moments correct to an exact science.

I feel today I have learnt how to expand on the ideas and elements we already include in Dissocia by watching other pieces of contemporary theatre and analysing which parts would fit in to our play in an appropriate manner. I also got out of today that all of our hard work and determination regarding the staging and character development work for Dissocia is really paying off as the feedback we received was all positive and constructive.