This will likely be a rather lengthy post, seeing as it has to incorporate multiple hours' worth of ideas, teamwork and above all, practice; hopefully it won't be
too daunting though.
It all started on a dark and stormy night. Or, you know, a kind of average afternoon. It was time for Drama. We filed in, sat down and were almost immediately bombarded with our assignment for the unit - a performance, logbooks PLUS a bonus essay! Actually, the essay confuses me. It's apparently an "in-class essay", but we've already been given the scaffold and the question and told that we can fill these out ahead of time, bring them in and copy them straight down to hand in. So, it's a take-home essay that we have to rewrite in-class. It's a little confusing to me.
Tangents aside, the first step in any group task is to get a group, and this seems like a good place to mention a trend I've been noticing recently. Whenever the need for a group task arises, certain people are avoided and kept out of groups (sometimes for good reason, sometimes not). And recently, I have become one of those people. I'm not sure why, or indeed if there even is a reason for it, but it can be particularly noticeable in Drama when we're told to work in groups of 4-5 and I end up working on my own because the groups of 4 were "already full".
So, this happened again. In fact the group including Liam and Jack (because those two always have to work together for some reason, despite making reverse-progress two-thirds of the time they're together) actually asked me if I could find someone else and ask them to be in their group. The nerve.
Anyway, as it turned out, there were enough of us (all people generally considered to be quite good performers, actually) that had been thoroughly rejected to form our own group. Which we did, understandably.
The next step was to decide on what the subject of our performance was going to be. Seeing as our group did already have a gender minority (one boy - me - and four girls), we decided that it would make sense to discuss sexism in our performance. The way we did that, though, was what I find particularly interesting. Although we did not set out with such an intention, as our performance developed it became clear that it was less about overt sexism and more about gender stereotypes and their enforcement (often unthinking) by others. I guess you could say that resonates with me rather a bit given recent developments in my life (for clarification, see signature image/s).
So once we got that out of the way, the next step was to find statistics to present to the audience and provoke thought and consideration. Our group did an admirable job finding statistics, sources for statistics, compilations of statistics, analyses of statistics, and pretty much every other thing you can think of with "statistics" in it. Which we then proceeded to not use in our performance. At any point. Good job, team.
Then, the casting and the stage/set design. We did these simultaneously as they impacted each other a bit, as will be explained in a sentence or two's time. Some aspects of this were pretty simple (such as casting me in the lead male role, because, you know, I was the only actual male in the group), but others required a little more thought. The final cast we decided upon consisted of these people in these roles:
- Alex M: Male Lead (Peter)
- Kate G: Female Lead (Wendy. Yes, this is a Peter Pan reference. No, we didn't expect anyone to get it.)
- Emily H, Ellen O'S, Tarryn R: Secondary Roles, Props etc.
This is where the simultaneous casting/stage design came into play. We decided to divide the stage into two halves - a 'boy half' and a 'girl half' and create a physical barrier between the two (even if it was just a strip of masking tape, but it got the point across). As such, we had to attempt to keep all cast members (including secondaries) on one side and one side only, and this factored into our casting decisions.
Finally, it was time to start practicing. Because we didn't have a solid script as such, a lot of the blocking was improvised, at least to begin with. At this stage, we were about 3/4 (or more) of the way through our assessment and had less than a week left to get it done.
Then, Oscar.
I don't mean to complain about Oscar specifically. He can be quite a good performer, actually (as he proved rather well in our final performance). It's more just the issue of having to take something we've already spent weeks working on and add roles for a whole new person and then re-rehearse those scenes with only a week left to do so.
Now I'm going to rant about Liam and Jack's group again for a minute, so bear with me.
We were told that the reason that we got Oscar (he hadn't actually had a group up to that point, so obviously he needed somewhere to go) was that Liam's group was originally asked to take him, but had said something along the lines of "No, we had him last time. Give him to someone else instead."
Now, I was in their group for the last assessment. We didn't have Oscar in our group. So not only were they refusing to accommodate Oscar and treating him as a burden (presumably while he was right there), but they also straight-out lied and said they had had "the burden" last time and so refused to take him in this time.
Bear in mind that this is all based on the evidence that I have, so it may not be even remotely accurate. The group may have been referring to a separate time (that wasn't an assessment) when they took Oscar in. It's also undoubtedly clouded by my own personal bias. But I still feel that however one looks at it, that kind of behaviour is still wrong.
Okay, rant over. After working out a role for Oscar (he also functioned as props and secondary characters, although his most common role seemed to be that of a table for some reason), we actually rehearsed the production. We didn't have enough time to rehearse fully in-class, so we set up another appointment in which to rehearse. Unfortunately, Oscar and Tarryn didn't receive the communications for that so neither of them showed up for that rehearsal. However, those of us that had known about it worked out where they would be and what they would do. In fact, Oscar and Tarryn both did remarkably well considering they weren't able to make it to our largest rehearsal.
I will also admit to having missed a smaller rehearsal after that - I was sent an email explaining that we were to have a rehearsal before school on Monday and didn't actually check my email until around noon that day - but I don't think I missed too much (I didn't feel lost by anything the next time we rehearsed after that, at least).
And then, it was eventually time to perform. The production went surprisingly well, all things considered ('all things' being lack of practice; a song that half of us didn't know the words to, let alone the actions; and Oscar). We were particularly complimented on our use of the halved stage - many members of the audience found it clever, innovative and above all effective.
I felt that we all worked together well, and I don't believe anybody forgot their lines at any point. The closest we came to a real problem was in Scene 1, when the "babies" (or babbies, if you prefer) were thrown and were meant to be caught. Unfortunately, both babbies were thrown too high, rebounded off the roof and hit the floor rather than being safely caught. As you can imagine, this would not normally be healthy for a newborn.
Again, I feel like one of the biggest shortcomings in terms of our performance was the lack of statistics. The other performance presented during this lesson (Liam's group) had a
lot of statistics. Possibly too much. That's beside the point though, what I'm really trying to say is that the statistics
did lend a little more impact to their message and that our group could probably have done with some of that.
Well, I guess that's the end of my production documentation/reflection. Was there too much Photo Finish? Not enough? Just the right amount? Let me know, I like feedback.
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