Week 9

This week we watched 2 separate videos, 1 was the set and behind the scenes for Matilda, we watched this to spot any health and safety measures and precautions the take and what need’s, NEED’S, to happen for everything to go smoothly (refer back to unit 3, health and safety) to see the precautions they took, and the precautions we have to take.

The second video was the set, and behind the scenes for Aladdin on tour (theatre performance) this wasn’t as much health and safety focused as Matilda, however it was more focused on set design, props/costumes and the making of the scenes. Watching that video made me realise just how much work, effort and resource’s are put into a good performance. The costume’s where extremely expensive, and that’s just the costumes alone, the set/scene’s are extremely detailed and well made, and the amount of work they had to put in just to keep everything up is amazing, and that also made me realise how much health and safety is important and how much work is done behind the scenes to ensure, us the actors are safe.

We went over each job role involved in theatre and how they are all just as important as the next. The stage manager is the person oversees everything that happens behind the scenes, and chooses what goes where and chooses if something gets put in or not. The stage technician’s operate the lights, smoke, sound effects and prompt desk. they will change the lights, replace broken ones, and or change the gel. they would make sure that all the lights are connected and working. They need to make sure the smoke effects are ready and working and that they have all the sound queues, lighting queues and smoke queues ready on the script, the rest of the work is left for the actors as they need to project all the way up to the tech box at the back of the theatre, so that the technicians know the queues. There is also a stage designer that has to make sure all the costumes, make-up and stage design is ready and in place. Last but not least there are understudies, which are spare actors if the main actor can’t show up or is late they will take their place.

We learnt more about Brecht and how we can apply those techniques to our performance to break the forth wall and get more audience interaction.

We rehearsed our play more and have started to think about lighting and sound design but we are just making sure everything is pristine and ready for performing, obviously we will add more along the way but we want to have our play to a good standard before we start to think about more in-depth stuff like, sound and lighting design.

With Olexandra we created an alternative to Hansel and Gretel. We modernized the play and twisted it to fit our day and age more, me and my group decided to make the family a higher class rich family, and instead of there being a brother and sister, we had it so that it was two brothers who meet a tragic fate (go to unit 4 Hansel & Gretel research).