Drama Evaluation - Armistice Day Performance.

Emma Walker 10AGD

Drama Evaluation – Armistice Day Performance

The stimulus for our armistice performance was war and how it affected the people that lived through the experience of it. We gained more knowledge about the topic from photos, Internet and film to develop a starting idea and so that we were able to be more accurate and realistic when developing our ideas.

In our first task we had to produce tableaux working in groups and title each one with a caption. We produced five freeze frames and slow motion melted into each one. Our inspiration came from photos taken during World War 2. One of our tableaux was called Hitler’s Army. It represented the thousands of people helping Adolf Hitler in his army. Hashim was in the role of Hitler he stood taller than the rest of us to represent his importance in the scene. Danny stood with Hashim slightly smaller, he was in role as Hitler’s sidekick. His small stature but evil, devious expression showed his tyrannical but cowardly characteristics. The rest of us stood further back and saluted to show that Hitler had control over us.

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We then went on to working on monologues. I decided to work with Ben and create a broken monologue. Ben played a soldier fighting in France and I played his daughter back home in England. We wanted our work to be emotional and appear realistic to an audience. Ben stood up and I sat down to create the effect that I was a young child and he was an adult. My character was an 11 year old girl called Rosie; she had lost her mother in an air raid on London and had to be evacuated whilst her dad fought in France. My monologue told of how lonely and afraid she was and of how she wanted her dad to come home. We also looked at war poems and used them to create a piece of drama using mime and voice-over.

I enjoyed the monologue piece of work the most because I had more input and was able to spend longer developing my own individual character. Also there was only Ben and I were working on it so we were able to be more organized and creative. I like monologue because the character has the opportunity to address the audience and involve them in the performance.

I think working creating a piece of drama based on the war poems was the most difficult task because we weren’t given a technique to use so we all had to work together to develop something ourselves. It was difficult because we all had different ideas and wanted to have an input in the performance.

I selected the monologue to perform because it was my most enjoyable piece of work and I felt it was my best piece of work. I also felt it had more of my own ideas on because I was able to create the character myself.

We started the performance with a war scene that created excitement in our audience, our inspiration for this was the Normandy landing scene in the film, Saving Private Ryan. I think this worked well because it instantly captured the audience’s attention. When Ben and me entered the scene the curtains behind us were closed so we were at the very front of the stage. We decided to enter from one side of the stage and leave the stage when the curtains behind us opened onto the next scene. We ended the show with a song, which meant we were all onstage together to bow. The finale didn’t go as well as planed in the real performance; I think we could attribute this failure on the lack of preparation because we didn’t remember all the song words.

We performed in front of year 10 in the assembly hall; it was an Armistice Day performance so it was very relevant to the time of year. I think the audience enjoyed the performance overall but especially Toby’s performance because he was able to introduce humour and then bring back the emotion to his scene.

The first scene wasn’t as effective because everyone was nervous and started to giggle. If we performed again, we could change the order so that we could prevent it. We could also learn the words for the finale song better and whilst I was speaking an electric drill started in the background so next time I wouldn’t like that to happen.

If we had more time to practise and improve our performances I would spend more time on the entrances and exits to improve them and make them more efficient and quicker between scenes. Also I would improve my performance by speaking louder and making more eye contact with the audience because before I was nervous about doing this.

I enjoyed the work and performance because it was all-realistic. Before doing the performance I was really nervous but afterwards I was excited and wanted to do it again. I thought that the work was interesting because we were able to experiment with different emotions and create a piece of work that would hopefully have some likenesses to the real experience of living through a war.