Theatre in education was a really great experience and has helped me realise I have some hidden talents. I made a huge contribution to our group by writing the majority of the script give or take a few lines, as well as writing two of the songs out of the three we created.
I had many difficulties when writing the script as I thought it would be a good idea for genies to speak in rhyme. It was a great way to make the genies stand out from the normal children to show they are a bit more important and they’re so magical all the words they say rhyme. Which I think just made it seem more real to the children as they were very engaged. It also gave me a challenge and with my history of poem writing I would I would accept the challenge to write the lines for the characters as I had never written a script. Closer to the end of rehearsal time, some of Emryss’ lines didn’t rhyme very well, however myself and Erica accepted that this was okay. After all there are hundreds of songs that have some lyrics that do not rhyme. For example during the bridge in Ed Sheeran’s song “Castle On The Hill” there are a few lines and none of them rhyme with one another they merely sound similar. It was coming close to the show as well and I thought I could try and find a better way to say a certain line to make it better or I could leave it because you could understand it and it wasn’t far from rhyming, so I left it.
Jess and Sian also helped at the beginning with the rhymes and dialogue they had written was very good. After having many different suggestions from Paul and Gary on what we should write in the script me and the group decided that our script was fine and Erica agreed no more changes to the storyline should be made. This is because it could just end up being confusing and Paul and Gary’s opinions were also different and we weren’t writing a script to please the tutors, so we carried on with the script we had as we thought it was best and still educational and made sense. However in the prologue I wrote, the children talk about how Emryss puts his memories in the paintings, but we hadn’t really mentioned the memories at all. Erica and I went through and both agreed we just needed to tweak a few lines and make them about memories so that the story made more sense. This didn’t effect line learning either as we just reworded a few lines and didn’t completely write something new.
During our performance and in every rehearsal people would miss or forget at least a couple of lines. I think it didn’t help any of us that the final script hadn’t been finished long before the day of our performance. However if some people in the group made more of an effort to actually learn the lines and not just hope when we rehearse it will go into their head and they’ll automatically remember it. Thanks to this we did miss out a chunk of dialogue in our show near the end, but the children seemed to know what we needed which was very lucky. This was because they had seen the painting and knew what the Eiffel Tower was so even though we missed out a rhyme it was okay because we hadn’t confused them.
Our workshops went well as well. Erica helped start it off and we all created actions for each character so that when we yelled one out all the children would do that action. It was good and prepared them for something we did later with them. We then asked them various questions just o make sure they had learned some things from the show. They knew every answer to the questions even ones that were a bit harder, we were so impressed! We then thought it would be good to teach them a song and the kids chose the chorus which seemed to be their favourite and then we chose kids at random and they came up with an action for each line. It worked really well and the kids seemed to be loving it, judging by the responses. As we left we were asked if we wanted to stay and have a little interview,one of the classes were going for their arts award and so they wanted to ask us questions about being performers and acting. They asked us what our favourite musicals were and what we did, they couldn’t believe we performed and did acting, dancing and singing everyday.
Overall our performance did have some educational factors but it was definitely the most entertaining and engaging show out of the four shows we produced. “The missing shapes” were definitely the most educational and the other two were good but I think if the dancers had written their own show it would be more impressive and if the fairy tale show was more prepared maybe they could have done more with their show. However they all did very well to even have a show that taught children something in the small amount of time they had.
Sophia Lerigo - Year 2 Musical Theatre 