Overall, I would say that my performance in ‘Tales of the Afterlife’, was the best that I’d ever done it, as during the tech rehearsal, I missed my queue on a section of the piece that we named ‘Ghost’, which helped me when it came to the final performance, as this was something that I could correct before the actual show itself.
Before the show, my main priority was to work on my monologue, which contained a couple of large statistics, and during rehearsals, I kept on getting the numbers mixed round. The statistics were towards the end of the monologue, and as I was performing it, I would always worry about whether or not I’ve got them the right way round. On the night, I messed them up a little bit, but after the show, when it came to getting feedback from my peers, they didn’t notice that I went wrong. What I’ve learnt from this is that people get distracted by you’re performance levels, as they don’t see any text that we have to remember, and I’ve also learnt not to worry about getting sections of a monologue mixed up.
Moving on from my monologue, one thing that I found we did well, as an ensemble, was the second scene, that involved us saying something about someone we know, and then we had to walk in a line around the stage. I thought that this scene was quite effective, as having spotlights on certain people and not everyone made people look like they were not speaking to someone, so they were just speaking to a dark space. Also, not just this scene, but in general I thought that the lighting was used really effectively throughout the piece, nit just having a specific colour for each of the scenes. There was a section in the piece, which was about someone’s memory, that involved asking out someone, whilst watching a firework display. What we wanted was not just to have a normal spotlight for the scene, but we chose to have slightly dim lighting, along with diverse coloured spotlights dotted around the space. This made the scene more realistic and looked like they were actually watching a firework display rather than having the performers pretend that the fireworks were there.
Furthermore, people said that they really liked the energy that people gave in the ‘Joy’ section (which was our last section in the ‘Tales of the Afterlife), as the section required us all to be happy that we were in the afterlife, and the fact that we were all smiling made everyone in the audience smile as well. During a section where we all run round the space, there was a projector screen placed at the back, which had four stand, two at the front and two at the back, and the front person by accident tripped on one of the stands and the projector came falling down in the space in which we were running in. Some of us slightly panicked at this point, as they thought that they were going to trip on the screen or maybe fall down, but on the positive side, all of us didn’t break out of character, and even though some people weren’t running around as they were putting the screen back up into its original position, they were still in character, which didn’t differ from thee atmosphere on the piece.
Finally, if I was ever to perform the piece again, I would definitely work on what movement I could do for my monologue and learn my queue more quickly for ‘Ghost’.
Devised Project 