HIC Evaluation

My performance of ‘Humanity in Crisis’ went really well; a lot better than my previous devised piece. I feel that by devising a drama piece based on a topic (education) worked so much better than when we tried to create a story in the previous devising attempt. I really liked our topic of education but I feel that we generally stuck with the sub-theme of discipline in the education system, which could lead to a whole new performance about discipline of children in any situation. This is why I think we should have discussed early on if we are going to open up our ideas to the field of discipline in general or are we going to stick to education in general and only have a minor part of our piece about discipline of students.

The staging of our piece we decided early on to do in traverse however after creating our piece, I feel our future and past scenes didn’t work very well in traverse. We had to alter our past scene so it works better for an audience in traverse and after altering it, I feel it worked rather nicely. However we then had two future scenes facing the stage side of the hall and we weren’t giving the audience behind us a good view of our performance. I feel we should have either rotated one of the future scenes to face the other way (the back wall of the hall) or we should have created the pieces to work better in traverse. ‘We don’t need no education’ scene, I feel, would work a lot better if we had the two rows back to back and facing the audience, especially since we no longer had the virtual teacher projected at the front we had no reason not to face the audience.

I felt that the scripted scenes went well. They allowed the performance to progress and clearly expressed the issues our piece was trying to present. I regret not being able to organise it so each time we revisit the scene we rotate around so the audience don’t just see the same angle each time but we just couldn’t transition back into the scene and rotate at the same time, the tables never aligned in the same way each time so it looked weird. In order to solve the situation I think we should have put little markings on the floor to always align the tables in the exact same way each time, I feel this will allow us to set the meeting scene up and rotate quickly and efficiently. However if I were to do the performance again, I would probably set it differently. I think that having the meeting happen in a tight circle in the centre of the stage restricted the audience in their view of the scene. This is why I would probably move us so we sit with the audience and rewrite the scenes as if we were in bigger meeting and the audience are a part of that meeting. This way we could get the audience more involved in the scenes. I would also move the snack table to the centre of the stage so the stage isn’t completely empty and since we all got up during the scenes to go to the snack table anyway, we won’t leave the audiences view and they will understand why we got up every now and then during the scene.

I would like to have spent time in lessons each of us writing clearer characters together so we understand each other’s characters better and put input on what we each think the characters should be like. This could also help us when we wrote the script, so we have more depth to the scenes rather than just have them as a way to move from one movement piece to another. I would also have liked to send the scripts to other teachers so we get their feedback and opinions on how a meeting would pan out or if teachers would behave in the way we wrote them to behave in.

Next time I create a performance I would like to spend more time discussing the costumes. I think we looked good for our parts but I feel we could have done better. In the future scene where the students in control I think we should have shown the students to be more wild and maybe a bit feral. I think wilder hair and ripped clothing would strongly suggest that the students are out of control and wild. In the next future scene I would have liked the guards to look more guard like, with riot shields and masks along with the metre rulers. This is so we would establish that these aren’t the teachers they are there to simply keep students in line. I am also regretful that we didn’t have an actual teacher robe for Dan in the past scene.