Evaluation of La Mer devised piece

Evaluation of La Mer Devised Piece

B0471 Acting 2

Sophia Hinchliff

My group’s devised performance was based on the theme, “La Mer” which included a range of stimuli, the stimuli included poems, songs, a painting, our individual characters we chose and naturalism techniques.  Our performance required a lot of research on our real life characters, situations they were in and naturalistic acting techniques.

On the whole I feel my group and I delivered a very strong, moving and naturalistic piece. I feel our energy as a group helped us vastly throughout rehearsals and our performance, and it inspired us to become more detailed and emotionally connected to the performance. Our group energy I feel showed throughout our performance and there was never a moment in the piece were the energy levels changed, I feel we maintained it very well throughout, which is certainly something that worked for our piece.

During director’s notes after our rehearsals, we received great feedback about our projection and volume. We were always projecting to high standards, and were always clear throughout the whole performance, this a largely important factor to drama performances, as the audience has to be able to hear and understand what is going on at all times.

I personally feel I have naturally quite a loud and clear voice, which is a clear benefit in acting as projection is key, especially in theatre.

I feel the energy is linked to the projection, as we all felt confident with each other as performers and confident in our ability to produce a strong piece, which enabled us to have great projection and clear speech at all times.

We also received great feedback about our articulation and pace during rehearsals from our voice tutor. These factors worked extremely well during our performance as our dialogue was easy to adapt to from the audiences perspective and we were audible and understandable throughout our piece.

I feel on the whole our performance concepts and idea’s worked really well as they were realistic and easy for the audience to relate to in some ways, particularly about our characters having lost their fathers, this is something the audience can relate to, and we conveyed empathy for each other throughout, in which the audience were able to empathise with the characters too.

During rehearsal time, my group and I were always trying out new ideas and seeing what would work and what wouldn’t work, I feel compared to my song lyric devised group, we tried out so many more concepts and ideas this time around, as I feel we have all become much more confident and versatile as we know have more experience of devising. As a group we showed consideration to one another at all times and we were always researching together about Naturalism, storms, real life facts about boats that have sank during storms and images of storms so we could visualise as a group how it would feel for us to be in that situation together.

We worked very well as a team and there was never any bad feeling or competitiveness within our group.

I feel working together as a team and sharing ideas during every session enabled us to make our performance work as we were constantly experimenting and changing little details, and developing relationships with each other as actors.

If someone individually in the group had an idea, we would all discuss that idea and interpret it into how we would all visualise it within our performance.

We of course, studied our chosen real life characters individually and together, making links between all characters and acknowledging the unique personality traits each one had, this really helped us in creating our performance as we all became so absorbed in our characters, and I felt at some points, I had turned into my character, especially during the performance, as I was seeing things through her eyes and not mine and I became totally in the zone with my characters emotions and opinions. I feel everyone in my group felt this way too.

Naturally, during our devising and in our performance there were some aspects that did not work quite as well. During devising, we came up with various ideas that we later realised would not work in our performance, one the ideas we came up with which we decided to let go of was to have Sophie’s character, Kelly die tragically from her heart condition, and all the other characters frantically screaming and becoming slightly mad that they were stuck on a boat with somebody they hardly knew, dead on the floor.

We tried out a few improvisations for this idea, but in the end we all came to the conclusion that this idea seemed a little too “cliché” as her character had a life threatening illness, and it almost seemed too obvious that this would happen to her character. So as a group we decided it would be much more effective for the characters to drown and die together, rather than having just one character dying. We wanted all the characters to feel the same pain and empathy for each other, they started on the boat together, so the idea that they leave the boat together was a dynamic idea which I felt worked very well, especially as we used the voice recording of our characters just before they drowned at the end of our performance, which we learned was very haunting and chilling from feedback.

In our final performance, there were little details I feel did not work and things we could of improved on, for example; I feel we could of dived even deeper into the father link all the characters had, and maybe could of portrayed even more emotions about the situation, it could have been mentioned more, now that I have watched the performance.

Another little detail I noticed we should have used more was physical contact with one another. My character used physical contact with Izzy’s character towards the end of the piece by linking her arm and leaning on her shoulder. But I feel all the characters could have used more physical contact with each other as it could of made our performance appear more naturalistic, because if I was in that real life situation and was sharing my personal emotions with people who I empathised with, I more than likely would have hugged them or held their hands during the storm and the confessions.

In rehearsals and during devising sessions my group could have discussed in more detail what they would do in this situation and how they would react, then we would have been able to portray an even more naturalistic piece, and more importantly, discussed what our real life characters would have done, we did discuss it, but I feel we could have discussed in more detail and adapted this to our piece. We should of spent more time on our spacing around the stage, but as it was naturalistic the spacing did not matter too much as it was mainly focused on our acting abilities, and the audience were in Arena, which meant no body was ever masked, but I still feel we could of mapped it out more clearly with each other, for example, having the black blocks more into the centre of the stage and having our characters more close together at times.

I feel overall our performance was very strong and I am pleased and proud of my group and myself for putting together our piece and the effort and energy we all bought into our performance, however we could have made a few little changes to improve our performance to make it even more stronger.

I feel we definitely should have spent an extra few minutes towards the end of our piece when we all open up about our characters Father’s, in order to establish the situations more and to create more dramatic effect and empathy for the audience and for our characters. It felt ever so slightly rushed, but it has improved massively from when we first started devising. I also feel to improve our performance we could have spent a little bit more time creating stronger relationships between the characters, even though I do feel the relationships were there and the audience could see them forming, particularly my character and Izzy’s character, I feel all four characters should have been more linked and could have bonded much more during the storm and just before their death came.

In conclusion, my groups performance was strong, emotional and haunting, I feel as a group we worked extremely well together and always maintained a great attitude towards devising, and were never stuck for ideas. It seemed rather difficult at first, but after we all shared ideas and began improvising it flowed extremely well and enabled us to create our piece together. I am happy to have worked with my group and am delighted at the outcome of our hard work, which came from devising and rehearsing together.