Post show reflections
Shoes To Fill went well other than a minor technical error which was dealt with professionally. I enjoyed performing in a somewhat comedic show. We wanted to provide a mix of comedy with our poignant verbatim stories to allow the audience to experience a mix of emotions and I think we achieved this. I enjoyed the challenge of playing different characters and emotions, as well as singing.
When acting in verbatim scenes I remembered the original recordings in my head thinking about the struggles those people went through to improve how realistic I acted. When performing the expectation versus reality scenes I tried to remember what it was like to go through a similar experience and matched my voice and body to do so using Stanislavsky’s emotion memory technique to guide me. For example when I said “Santa will always bring me good presents”(Foden and Parkes, 2015,) I tried to release my inner child and the excitement Christmas brings. I also remembered how I felt when I found out that the magic that was Santa was not real and the sad emotions that came with the thought of being lied to all these years, the magic being broken. However I have no experience of being old or taking “15 pills a day”(Foden and Parkes, 2015) so had to imagine how this felt. I thought this would be difficult to remember so acted out counting this number on my fingers as I walked offstage.
I also thought about the research I have done over the module to aid my performance by thinking about real life situations I had read about for example alcoholism in our Ashleigh diaries scene with the feet. I thought about how it would feel to have an alcoholic parent and tried to evoke this. I enjoyed helping to market the piece by handing out flyers on the street of Lincoln. The show day was well organised, and included two dress rehearsals which we improved each time from helpful feedback given by our lecturer and director.
I feel as though I now understand processes involved to create a theatre company as I have done so practically, this includes gaining the knowledge of the budgeting and planning needed for performance, as I have seen and helped peers through this process.
Group dynamic has played an important role in our process of Shoes To Fill as we have overcame disagreements and pulled together to create our show as a company.
I believe I have succeeded in ensuring that the company has not drifted off topic and that we have continued to look at expectations in life and role models for ‘Shoes To Fill’ by using appropriate research to inform the writing and devising which maintained clarity for the audience. We believe the truths we have performed are relevant to all – as many have come from verbatim. Through our performance we challenged expectations by showing reality alongside them, through comedic voice overs. We hoped to inspire people to break stereotypes and follow their own expectations in life as we sang in our reprise “the only shoes you need to fill are those life helps you find” (Foden and Parkes, 2015, 30).
Rachael
Works cited
Foden, H. and Parkes, O. (2015) Shoes To Fill. Unpublished.