A Christmas Time Slapstick Performance.

Wednesday 27th September

This was my first day for HND as I entered my first lesson the students have been choreographing a happy bubbly routine that I would be picking up shortly. They had already incorporated me into the dance however I am already behind and will have to learn this dance quickly. This has frightened me slightly as I don't pick up routines fast and it is quite and energetic performance so I have to mentally and physically prepare. I ran over the routine viciously to try and compensate for missed time this proved to be unsuccessful, I think over time I should run this dance in my own time to try and pick it up faster. The dance has not been fully choreographed yet so I have time to pick it up and polish it. When it comes to dancing I pick it up slower than most of the other dancers so I am already aware that I will have to apply extra effort to ensure I can complete this dance. It is a very exiting and energetic dance by my first reaction was worry as it will look messy if not polished properly. After learning this dance we wrote down all stimulus surrounding Christmas, I have a picture of the list logged on my website. I chose the stimulus night before Christmas. We set off to gain actors for our slapstick pieces, I chose to have Natalie and Dan in my performance for night before Christmas as I feel comfortable performing with these actors. In the future I would like to work with others. Natalie also chose to have me in her piece as well as Ryan for his who included the whole class. We have been given a time frame of 2 and a half minutes per cast member in our piece so I should aim to have s piece that lasts around 7 and a half minutes, this is worrying me slightly as I have not yet had experience in creating a piece incorporating slapstick for that long. Natalie is unhappy with her piece so far and is struggling to find ideas she wants to go home and have a rethink on her idea so this session we just discussed ideas.

On the 3rd of October we started off the session by looking at a reading called 'The provocation of laughter' I missed this reading because I started later than everyone but from scanning the reading and following everyone's group discussion I learnt that it was based on what makes an audience laugh, this taught me that audience members will find it funny watching our misfortunes on stage this is engaging as it has given me some idea for my piece based on the night before Christmas, I have had an idea to have a scene based on parents trying to hid the secret of santa from their child by putting the child to bed and placing the presents, but the child won't go to be and it panics the parents so they are clumsy, the reading said that there should be a build up before any misfortune as the audience will be predicting the outcome and this will make it funnier as they are anticipated. So my idea will be the parents falling and breaking things.

We also worked on the jolly trolley dance and have added a new section, this has been a journey for me so far as I think I am picking up the dance fairly quickly for myself and am now becoming excited, I will try and continue to keep this positive mood as we continue choreographing. Later today I worked with Natalie on her scene for snowball fight I think this will be an exciting piece and I am excited to perform it already we got a bit done today but came to a standstill with ideas as we performed what we had with the music and realised that she needed more material to input before we could finish this scene so even though me Dan and Natalie are in her piece there is little time to choreograph mine for the time being.

17th October

Th jolly trolley dance was completed today, I'm still slightly behind but not by much I forget the turns at the beginning of the dance. The male part of the dance is slightly confusing but I'm sure I'll pick it up I want to run the dance with hats as soon as I can remember the dance, I think this will change the overall look of the dance itself when we are in costume, we had the dance lighted later on that day, I'm impressed with the lighting but I am slightly worried of the positioning of the lights at the beginning of the dance because I am worried I won't stand in the right place to be light up the same way tiff is at the other side, to overcome this I am just going to run it and hopefully perfect it. I need to engage my face in the dance more, but this is difficult as I am so focused on perfecting the dance. This week I have also completed my first group presentation assessment, I chose to research into mischief theatre and Stanislavski to contrast my slapstick and non slapstick practitioners, I found that mischief theatre rely heavily on improvisation skills where as Stanislavski not as much. I feel the presentation could have gone a lot better if I had been more prepared myself and as a group we researched into a smaller amount of practitioners.

24th October

I have worked on my scene but I am worried, I am unhappy with the progress and have come to a standstill with material to add, my idea currently stands as Dan and Natalie play as my mother and father who get extremely drunk trying to keep me in bed and pretend Santa is coming

7th November

I have just come back from taking time off to go to see my sick nan in wales when I came back I have been unfortunately faced with catching up to complete so I made a decision to cut my slapstick piece of the night before Christmas and replace the idea with a scene without Dan, Christmas cracker jokes with puppets, me and nat are researching into cracker jokes and have come up with

" who will be cooking dinner at number 10 this year? Teresa May"

"How can you tell you've got a Christmas tree from B&Q, all the branches are gone"

"How will Christmas dinner be after brexit? No Brussels"

And finally "what's the difference between the clementine in your stocking and Donald trump? Nothing they're both a little orange"

These are adult humour jokes but I am worried they aren't that funny, I think a lot more could be added to this scene then just a few jokes so I am going to go home and research into how to improve it. Also we are reading from Natalie's phone so it is difficult to keep a character when you are focused on reading lines, so I will like to perform without her phone shortly.

We have also developed her scene further by adding the idea that we fall through ice and are terrified by a shark, I think this is out of context in the sense I wouldn't have though of this idea but it works really well and has developed her scene to a new level. Natalie has removed Dan from her scene and has replaced him with Ryan because she feels Ryan will be more reliable.

14th November

Entering this session I have had an idea of how to push my puppet scene further, we ran it today with the puppets becoming sexual, the reaction from the other students was amazing I am becoming to love my scene, I feel the jokes are not the main point of the show anymore, the sexual scene has completely taken away from it, but Nathan said it was a build up. We have been given feedback on the jolly trolley dance and out kick together is out of sync so I have been focusing on my peers and trying to synchronise. We had a full run today also, which I think went really well, we still haven't performed with all props and costume and will not perform with consumable props for the time being, the run went smoothly and we got a feel for how the show would look, has a cohort we have been really supportive of each other by acting as audience members for other people's scenes.

21st November

Show week

We came in the Tuesday 21st of November I'm nervous now because this is show week, we have yet to see the transition from contemporary into slapstick, so we focused on this today, this took a lot of time then we thought and was really stressful (see contemporary logs) after we had spent as much time on it as we could, we moved on and ran slapstick which cheered me up, I love this piece and I'm proud to perform it. The puppet scene has been developed further by the use of silly string to add to the sexual humour. I have to work on my facials for slapstick and mouth the words to Jolly trolley, I'm finding that hard because all my life as an actor I have tried extremely hard not to mouth along to words, so getting out of this habit and trying to mouth is hard. On the Wednesday we ran it for the last time before the show, the run went smoothly, I don't personally feel ready for the show as I've just only learnt the finale but that is the only reason I am nervous for slapstick. The show went really well despite there being a power cut in the afternoon performance. I am happy with my performance but I did notice a few things that I will alter for the evening performance; in snowball scene my box was too close to Ryan's, I am too mouth the dance more, be careful when standing in the wings not to be seen and to improve my stamina. In the even performance I will have water backstage ready. The even show was the best we have ever run it, people were laughing and cheering and getting involved, which was a nice feeling because we felt it had lost its comedic touch because we had run it so many times over and over again.

Contemporary Dance Blog

My first day working with Leroy tested my abilities as a performer because I realised I needed to work on many skills personally such as stamina and flexibility, this should come over time but I am going to work on this at home because it is important as a performer to because to work on these skills and improve. I was introduced to '6 breaths' by Rafael Bonachela, this dance is fairly straightforward, inspired by the 6 forms of breath. We are studying practitioners like Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham.

I have started learning the dance to ‘Mary Did You Know’ choreographed by Leroy. I was surprised at this lesson to find that there were many people sitting out of this session. The dance is extremely professional and I am nervous to see how I will do learning this as I do not pick up dances very quickly.

We have been grouped off into our own groups to create a contemporary dance routine, I have grouped with Lucy, Tiffani, myself and Ryan to create a 4 minute (roughly) dance. Tiffani and Ryan chose the song ‘let it snow’ however I feel quite strongly that we could have a stronger song to perform too as I find that Mary did you know is quite slow and powerful but for a Christmas show the music is quite peaceful where as I feel we could have something more uplifting and fun, so I researched into other Christmas music. I was delighted to find that Sia has just released a Christmas album, I instantly fell in love with ‘Santa’s coming for us’ and have proposed to the group that we should use this song so I demonstrated how our choreography that has already been devised would fit with the new track, after a few minor adjustments I found it worked nicely with the music. My group members were happy also. Unfortunatly due to the fact that Ryan is in all other dance pieces for the show we have spent little time with Ryan. Tiffani is a production arts member and has had to spend time lighting our opening dance so this left me and Lucy to choreograph the rest of that dance. Lucy I find is a creative student, who imputed many ideas to the development of this piece however, I felt this piece was held back slightly due to me having to go over the beginning multiple times with her so she could keep up, in addition to this, missing members also caused a delay and I have grown slightly worried.

In the last few week leading up to the show, I have worried over my piece as Ryan and Tiffani are yet to learn it and we have around 40 seconds of material to complete before we can finish the dance off by repeating the beginning choreography.

When we finally got around to placing all the pieces together to form our show it was quickly apparent that our piece was the least developed, which Leroy pointed out straight away, this has upset me because due to circumstances I feel this piece has not been given the time that it needs. When performing this piece to Nathen, he called me and Tiffani up to him during a break and we spoke about cutting the piece all together. I spoke to Tiffani and asked her if she would be prepared to do it as a duet with me, and cutting Ryan and Lucy as Ryan had no time to learn it for the show and Lucy would not be able to put the time in to choreograph the rest. Tiffani was happy to do this. I spoke to Leroy and told him the plan, he was happy to let us do this as long as we had the dance choreographed by the end of that day and supplied him with a video as evidence. We stayed behind for 3 hours to complete this dance. The next day we ran everything as a whole. But as the dance was freshly learnt we froze on stage. This felt awful as we had worked so hard to complete it, I spoke to Tiffani afterwards and we discussed cutting the entire piece as I did not want to go on stage on the show day this week and forget our choreography. We refreshed our minds and ran it over a couple of times and finally we had a piece to perform. I have been given feedback from Leroy how to improve my ‘Mary Did you know’ performance by getting into character more and really feeling the energy of the dance. At the beginning I should extend my arms more and become a character.