Evaluations and reflections should be added here, particularly final evaluations of the project overall. There may be some cross over with your practical skills page as you will continually reflection on your progress in your rehearsal logs. You do not need to duplicate this work.
Evaluation
Performance Evaluation
I feel like the performance went very well. During the show, my first performance on stage was “Banana Boat”, my dance piece. Throughout this project, I felt very anxious about performing this piece specifically, as I constantly compared myself, and my dance, to the other Dance piece. However, whilst we were on stage, I feel like this piece went phenomenally. During the final performance, I made sure to make all of my facial expressions, and movements, sharp and precise. This was to really drive the story that none of these movements were natural, and we were being possessed. Overall, I believe this provided the effect that was needed, as watching back the final performance made me see how unnaturalistic the piece was, which is the effect we were going for.
My second performance, which was my Duolouge, also went very well, and in my opinion, was one of my best pieces, from a personal perspective and from the reaction we got from the audience. I really enjoyed how me and Kady did the scene, as it was a very fun and engaging piece. The general consensus from people talking to me after the show, was that they really enjoyed our performance, and found it interesting and funny. During this performance, me and Kady made sure we were on top of everything, making facial expressions and body language always purposeful. I made sure I had the clear pathway of the imaginary children down perfectly. And our final lines got the reaction from the audience we were hoping for. Kady helped so much as a partner with the piece, as we were both very committed to this piece near the end, and I’m really glad it went so well.
My final performance, which was the ensemble singing piece of “Why God, Why” was the one I was looking forward to the most. I hadn’t had a singing piece up to this point in the show, and I had a mini solo within the first part of the song, and I thought it looked visually amazing, while also sounding great. The parts in the song when more people joined in, ramping up to this epic finale, felt amazing to perform, and ending with the contrast of me being left on stage to sit down where I started, gave a lovely ending to the piece, and to the show as a whole.
Overall, I think with this performance, and everything I’ve done throughout this year, I have done well. I’ve pushed myself to do things I never thought I’d be able to do a year ago today, and my confidence has rose substantially within the three disciplines, and the subject as a whole. This performance really showed me how much I’ve improved. We’ve never had massive opportunities to do pieces like this within the course, so being able to go on stage felt amazing. I love being on stage most of the time, as I love performing, I’m and glad I had the opportunity to do this.
What helped me a lot during the three disciplines, was taking things a lot slower and making myself less stressed because of it. Within acting, I made sure I knew all my lines quickly, so I could focus more heavily on actually acting, and figuring out what we could do for actions, since I find if I have a script in my hand, I focus less on the actual acting side of it, and more just reading out the lines, which doesn’t help me under any circumstance. So if I drilled the lines, I could focus more on getting confident with the scene. Something I could’ve done better however within acting is staying in character. With the more comedic bits near the end, where me and Kady lock hands and meet eyes, I broke character a little bit, as I gasped quite loudly, which is something we didn’t rehearse, so it threw us both off a little bit, so we laughed. However we recovered this very quickly, and it wasn’t too noticeable to the audience I don’t believe, but for the future, I need to remain in character throughout the performance.
Within singing, during the rehearsal process for my songs I had throughout this project, it was very similar to acting, as me learning my lyrics so I could focus more on the physicality of the piece was helpful. This let me work on the accent more in “Why God, Why”, as well as the facial expressions, while also setting the scene. The stage was very empty in that song, by choice, as it would put more emphasis on what I’m saying without distracting too much. The song talks a lot about the senses, of what I can see, smell, feel and touch, so looking at Kady, who was laid down in the song, while moving my head away from her while singing about the how the air was cool. I very much tried to feel these senses within the song, and drove a lot of the piece on emotion too, as it fit the character and scene. I could have improved this performance however by projecting a lot more, as watching the final video of Why God Why, I realised I was very quiet throughout the song, so some words or lines could’ve easily been left. I am quite a soft singer naturally, and thrive in that genre of music, but I need to find a way to project more with those softer songs, while still keeping the same energy.
With dance, I decided that I wasn’t going to take myself as seriously. This helped a lot as I then could do more strange and interesting body movements during the piece. I had a lot more confidence throughout this after the first couple of weeks, as during that time period, I was really upset about being put in this dance, as I didn’t want to look stupid on stage, but as I got more comfortable with the idea, I got a lot happier with the end product.