A Bit of a Messy Blog for a Bit of a Messy Week.

This week I must firstly draw attention to last weeks issues. Last week I was having a little bit of a stress about the attendance and punctuality, however, this week was different. I believe the pressure of having an assessed performance at the end of the week caused them to pull there socks up. We even had a higher attendance from one of the students that had been cut from the performance - this student was upset that they were not involved but took it well and even assisted well and creatively with the direction of the scene. The other student that was cut was not seen in the college at all throughout the week. Not that I really blame her.

I also moaned last week about the energy of the students - this was also a little better, again, I believe was down to the pressure of the performance assignment.

The third issue raised last week was the lack of rehearsal space. Because of the assessment we were given the studio we were meant to performing in throughout the week. I don’t believe we will have the same privileges in the next few weeks.

So back to this week. I mentioned last week that I was concerned about how the involvement of myself in the performance assessment, and what this would do to the teacher/student relationship. I think the relationship has changed and become more casual and am yet to know whether this is a bad thing, however during warm-up activities the students still responded well, as they have in previous weeks - this was the only hands on teaching I really did this week. Throughout the direction of this scene I felt a huge pressure on myself to maintain a professional manner and to perform at a higher level of the students. I felt that I needed to be a role model for this students - if I was not professional, or better then how can I expect the students to look up to me in future projects.

There were two students who found it very difficult to take direction, because of this the majority of our rehearsal time was taken up working with them. This gave the other two students very little time for directed rehearsal. I thought that this was unfair but as a part of the cast I felt I had no right to raise this issue. In a teaching role here I think I would have tried to be more equal with the time spent on each section of the scene.   

This week I felt like I was here there and everywhere. First I had to learn lines, perform, be directed, teach, find costumes and help with the music and technical elements required for the performance.

Learning my lines were not a problem and I have discussed my issues with performing and being directed earlier in this blog. However, costume was a huge undertaking - who would have ever thought it could take 4+ hrs to seek out costumes for 6 actors (ha ha ha). We were sent on a mission to a costume rental shop, that has good links with the performing arts department at Merthyr. We got slightly lost in this place and found it quite an exhausting effort. However, the costumes we got were very accurate and were a very effective tool. As soon as the students started performing in their costumes they suddenly became more involved in their roles and created a far better performance.

The lighting was designed, set up and operated by 14 year old students, from a local school on a pathway course. Working with these students to create some effective technical effects was a lot easier than I was imagining. The students were very responsive and very knowledgeable about what they were doing. The performance was made more impressive by the effects these students had created in such a small amount of time. I was very impressed and thankful to them.

After all the effort we had put in over the past few weeks to get this performance ready for this week so that it could be externally verified was not as urgent as we first believed. Our mentor discovered on the Tuesday evening that he ha put through this assessment last year. The college is not allowed to submit the same unit for external verification two years in a row. You can imagine how aggravating that was for us after all the effort and fuss we had made. The issue now is the students only have next week to complete a different unit. This coming week then is going to be a mad rush for the students and our mentor has suggested that he will take over for the week and we can continue on the Acting Styles module after half term. So I do not currently know what I will be doing next week. We have a meeting on Monday and so will hopefully come out of the meeting with a firm teaching timetable for after the half term.