Drama nerd NOT GEEK

Haven’t posted in a while, lots of stuff’s been happening. Creative Arts was a brilliant night and the group that performed for Year 11 were fantastic! The energy of the performance definetly increased a notch from rehersal, most likely because you guys were so pumped Jess don’t worry about your mic! You were loud enough for everyone to hear and everyone still laughed at your jokes! It is disappointing but sometimes annoying things like that don’t work out… Good work and I look forward to seeing the new and improved solo at Bunjil! (Not that you guys need to change anything :P)

 Our ensemble. Well apparently we have been labelled ‘the group of procrastination’. Not exactly the label I would have wished for but hopefully we can learn from our mistakes and pick up the pace of our progress. We are slowly getting there. Cashy recently allowed us to focus on a more ‘dramatic’ response to the technological revolution topic which for us, was a relief as our group are not the most comically able. I’ll explain…Some of us can do comedy but only when someone else comes up with the plot We are a thinking group…an over thinking group who unfortunately likes everything to be perfect. Being the perfectionists that we all are.

So, therefore, with our new approach to the ensemble we have decided to intertwine an actual plot into our ‘decade’ theme. We should have done this from the beginning as we now realise that tension cannot possibly be incorporated into 20 second - 30 second mini skits. We also realised that we really should have start from the beginning of the 20th century. The 1900s. We started from the end which is pretty silly considering we did not even know how we could start our ensemble. Basically, for the beginning, Heather acts as the narrator and Leah, Jess and I are sitting on chairs watching television. While we are frozen, Heather begins to explain our simple example of how the television has revolutionised the way the world spins. Leah, a child, Jess, an Aussie and I, a proper ‘french lady’ all different people but united by the revolutionising technology. Heather then intervenes and directs, ‘Now we will venture into the 20th century and discover how technology has revolutionised our world.’ She holds up 1900s placard. Meanwhile, Jess, Leah and I resemble a factory conveyer belt and begin to operate in sequence of putting a car together. Heather leaves her narrator role and takes on the supervisor claiming we will not have food on the table if we don’t do this right. The cars we are making are for the extremely wealthy (contrast) we switch to a scene where Heather and I are driving in all our prestige in the car, ignoring the beggars on the street (Jess and Leah).

Somehow we need to connect with our earlier scene. At least we have a beginning now

There has been a bug that has spread through our ensemble group! First Heather gets sick, then Jess and Leah and now me I feel shocking…didn’t come to school today but hopefully I will come tomorrow! It’s so boring at home.

Oh yeah! Drama! Congratulations to Nadia, Jess P, Jacqui, Flick and Laura!! Yay they will be performing at Creative Arts!! Can’t wait to see it!

We need about three more scenes in our ensemble plus HEAPS of touching ups and improving script lines making transitions smooth, making sure people know when to hold the sign up!! We had an embarrassing pause when we were showing Cashy and we were all looking at each other saying with our eyes, ‘Who the hell is holding up the sign?’. But that’s what practice is for. We also need to make it funnier! Our group is struggling with the comic aspect. Research, information, dates, characters we can do but we just need that comic timing.

So glad I’m not performing my solo this Thursday…being sick and all. Knowing me it will take ages for me to better. Whenever something is going around I always get it! Although I haven’t been sick at all this year touch wood. Also my dad will be overseas so he wouldn’t have seen my solo! Hmm maybe that would have been a good thing…anyway… good luck to the girls performing on Thursday you will do great!!

 BRING ON BUNJIL!

Hmm…what to say…

 Things haven’t been at their greatest this week. We have not had one whole rehersal this week within our group because of illness of some of our members.

So it’s looking extremely unlikely that our group will be chosen for creative arts simply because we haven’t had the rehersal time (i.e our first practice of the week will be performing for Mr Cash). Very unfortunate because our group would have loved to have performed but we still get Bunjil!

Back to our ensemble. We have our 60’s scene…barely. But I cannot be a man! It is very odd…I cannot seem to get in character as a blokey bloke. And I think Jess is finding it hard with her character in the skit. Heather and I were thinking at lunch today that maybe we could swap Jess and Heather around. Jess has been in 5/5 scenes so far so if she is in 4 instead then she can be apart of the earlier scenes. Otherwise it would be very uneven.

One thing that I have been happy about the progress of this week is our 80’s scene! Leah and I have added extra dialogue and facial expressions and hopefully we can portray the contrasting types of music in the form of a boom box and an ipod.

For our 50’s scene we are going to be portraying television (Australian context). Heather and I were trying to come up with the perfect scene but it just wasn’t coming. I think Heather was feeling very sick…she looked very tired! After this I’m going to go google 50’s and see what I can come up with.

I’m stressing…we still have tightened change overs, made it slick, make sure timing is right and scenes don’t drag on. This week has been hell! We should have had an afternoon rehersal but Friday has come too fast…

So last lesson we did lots of run throughs of our end scenes. There are definetly a lot of things we need to work on like cutting down and tightening changeovers.

 AND I AM DOING DRAMA UNIT 2!!! I’m so happy. The lines changed so instead of dropping Geography I can drop English (I’m doing lit as well so that’s okay).

Cashy came round and watched some of the parts that we have come up with so far. It definetly wasn’t our greatest performance haha but I’m glad he saw us now so he could give us lots of advice before it’s too late to change the plot. Basically, Leah and I can extend our scene, Heather has to cut her little rant down and we don’t have to read each placard. It will be much better once we have real placards and it will make much more sense.

I’m pretty sure we have four more scenes to come up with! Should be interesting next lesson!

Drama ensemble is coming along very nicely! Currently we are working backwards. Yes, we started with 2000s and we are now up to 1960s. We have all scenes in between which is good! We have rehearsed these scenes over and over but we still need to work on slick scene transitions and work out who is holding the placard up.

 For those who do not know, for our ensemble on ‘technological revolution’ we are taking the 20th century (as it was the most technologically revolutionalised era) and starting with 1920 are satirising (is that a word) each decade and what technology revolutionised it. Brief overview without giving too much away: 2000’s, of course, video games. 1990s- MSN (close to many people’s hearts), 1980s - Good ol’ Olivia and 1970s…uh what the hell happened in the 1970s? (inside joke guys). OH and we have the start and the finish of the ensemble!! It’s good Our aim is to be able to relate with the audience. Because most of the audience in Bunjil will be school kids and mums and/or dads.

In today’s lesson Leah and I started organising the numerous placards that we will need. It’s part of our ‘non-naturalistic’ approach. We are also following Epic Theatre through use of talking directly to the audience by breaking character. Should be interesting and mix it up a bit.

I really cannot wait to perform it! I love ensembles!!! newayz mumz yellin 2 get off da comp. (um inside joke again)

Solos are done and bring on the Ensembles! I am in a group with Heather, Jess and Leah and we must create a 10 minute long ensemble (quite short) on a form of technological revolution. We were having difficult coming up with a plot because it must be comic and we were heading into the more dramatic and quite deep performance style. We asked Mr Cash and he gave us an idea that we could take a snippet from each decade of the 20th century and the 2000s of an example of the technological revolution. That was all it took, we are now going to focus on the stereotypes of that era. For example, we figured out an opening scene: 1920s first aeroplane used as transport. Of course, aeoplanes were a MASSIVE technological revolution. Leah will be the flight attendant and she will notify all passengers of the safety procedures. We’ll exaggerate characters throughout the decade that the audience can relate to.

We have four members in our performance, so we will each star in 2-3 skits each. Each skit should be around 30 seconds to a minute. I’ll be looking forward to actually sitting down and writing the script. I love writing scripts and I think it’s my favourite thing about drama. I love the acting too of course

It’s been difficult. Hopefully everything will fall into place.