Evaluation of Performance

Let me start this evaluation by saying, how much I think everyone has improved since our first performance. The change was extremely noticeable, as confidence and the focus in the group has increased creating a better working environment for everyone to excel in. Even though I did not see everyone's scene during the actual performances, what I saw during run troughs and later on the tape, was very impressive and something to be proud of. I also felt that my group did quite well and being able to see how our scene developed during devising is quite amazing.

Right from the beginning, after we had our initial idea about being becalmed, we wanted to get the feeling of boredom trough and portray it realistically. I think, this was one of the strongest parts of our scene. There were bits in our performance, where we had decided have no talking, but rather let the character's way of holding themselves speak for themselves and so shed light into their inner thoughts in a very subtle manner. Also, given the situation the characters were in, not seeing each for a while and their friendship maybe even be falling apart, the awkward silences and conversation starters told a lot about the dynamics in the group of friends and how they are not as close as they used to be. We used a lot of time in devising to create this 'perfect mood' for the piece. Our scene even starts with an elongated silence, with our characters barely even acknowledging one another. This let the audience really get into the feeling of the tiredness of the sea, and how the characters were feeling in that particular moment.  We were able to show right from beginning the dynamics between characters and set the mood for the piece to then follow throughout the scene. The way we decided to start our scene, with the conflict between Rick and Craig, hooked the audiences attention right away enabling us then to focus more into the different personalities on the boat. This was something we as a group really wanted to have the focus on, the characters, and used a lot of time during devising to make it happen without making it seem like we were trying to force words out of our characters in an unnaturalistic way to their individual personalities.

Poems, songs and paintings about the sea worked as our stimuli, but I believe that the person we began to build our characters from, was ultimately the stimuli we worked on the most, spending numerous hours in and outside of class, thinking about who our characters were and trying to dive into their most inner thoughts. I found this a bit challenging at first, either drawing too much from the original person I based my character, Vera, on, or bringing too much of myself into the improvisation. Vera started out as a character who was very much living in her own bubble, seeing things as she liked. She was the kind of person who saw the universe as something wide and interesting, and the world was something so big, yet so small, but also so beautiful and worth exploring. I think that during the devising, this sort of naive Vera got lost a little bit and got turned into something a bit more contrasting, at least when comes to her way of seeing people. It was like the more I did improv with her, the more she became a character that didn't anymore believe in people, but doubted everything. Now, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I would sooner think, that I used to my advantage in the final piece. Rather than keeping Vera as this mystery to everyone, just showing her positive outlook on life, I decided to show more what used to be hidden. All the improvising and exercises, like the hot seat – game, helped with building up this character out of what really was just a skeleton at the beginning. Our group especially, used a lot of time talking about how our characters feel about each other and the world, so I feel that we really did get a good grasp on who our characters truly are.

One thing that our group did well on, was balancing the different personalities on the boat. All of our characters were very different, some of them having more open and social personalities and others that would rather not talk about their lives so much, but we still were able to let all of the characters have their own time to shine and show what they were all about. We did have difficulty with this at first, since in the beginning of the devising my character Vera and Jades character Paige, were more on the background and not meeting their full potential on stage. This was probably because both of our characters personalities were of those sort that would rather stay on the background, than get involved with the action. What we did to get them more out there, was to use our contrasting personality traits to our advantage. Paige was someone, who liked to stir up trouble and to add this with Vera, who was already sort of on the edge thinking about leaving the friend group, would create drama between the characters and help to build up to the scenes 'finale'.

As the whole piece was on a boat, surrounded by the sea, it was essential for us to be able to establish to the audience that we were actually on a boat, without having any sort of a set to show that. In rehearsals we started of by taping the borders of the boat on the floor, to help us picture the boat and learn to move around on it. Imagining the boom and mast during devising was a challenge at first. We often completely forgot to consider the places of the boom and the mast, and so would simply walk over them. I can't honestly say how many times Max, our boat expert, had to remind us about the different parts of the boat. In the end, I do feel we were able to get trough to the audience, that we were in fact on a boat and create the illusion of a boat remarkably well, even if in the final performance the boom was once or twice ignored, in the rush of performance. It wasn't too ground breaking, but I did notice that once Rick was hit by the boom at the end, and the other characters run up to him, the mast and boom were absolutely forgotten about. I can personally say, that I did the mistake of running through the boom. So, even though we had worked on getting the boat established and did succeed in it in some extent, there were was still some things that should have had more attention during rehearsals.

It wasn't only the physic of the boat that we had to create with miming, but also the movements how we on the boat reacted to the boats movements. The obvious one, of course, was when Rick(Yunusa) was hit in the head by the boom. I am very proud of him to be able to create the illusion of the boom actually hitting him, and he did have a lot of practice to do it. Timing it perfectly and doing that kind of a quick, yet controlled movement must have been difficult to plan out perfectly. But it did work well, and that way we did not have the need to use any kind of props or awkward sound effects to show the audience what has happened.

A smaller part of this miming we used on the boat, was the rocking, once the wind started to pick up at the end of the scene. Even though the movement itself was quite simple, it did make a huge impact to get the feeling of the sea and the oncoming storm. It was also an effectual way to end the piece, by having the characters rock slowly with the boat, starting to realize the full extent of the situation and then having them all been thrown by a hit of a large wave.

Because of an unfortunate situation with one of our group members being involved in an accident, for some time we weren't sure if they were going to be in the scene. This really taught me, that anything can happen during a show. We used a lot of time creating a plan B, rewriting some bits and changing some lines, which in the end was not used. This took some time from doing actual devising or doing the finishing touched to the scene, but ti really was our own fault that we did not have enough time in the end. It would have been smart to take on some extra rehearsals, during lunches or after classes, to work on some part of the scene, but for some unknown reason we never did. Taking in consideration, that in my last show 'Song lyric' we had the same problem with time management, it is a bout time that I and really everyone else as well, learned something from this. Perhaps next time time won't become, or rather we won't make it become, our enemy.

The lack of time really prevented us from looking more into some of the parts in our scene, to get the little things and confusions worked out. For example, there was a part in the middle part, where discussion about Paige's home life started, where all of the lines were not really decided, who would say them. So, we had some over lapping of dialogue or people saying each others lines. This was because those particular parts and lines were not well enough established, when and who would say them was still a bit unclear. This could have been prevented simply by more rehearsals and having a proper discussion about who says what and when. Other part that didn't exactly go as planned, was when the characters decided to play some poker and start looking for the cards, which have been knocked over board earlier. This was supposed to be a bit of a funny scene, with Paige finding some of the cards, and instead of keeping them safe, throws the rest over board as well, and then blaming Vera for leaving the cards on the deck. This would have worked well, if we would have had actual cards to show the audience what Paige really was doing, but since we did not remember to bring the cards with us, the humor in it was somewhat lost.

The biggest thing I would criticize in our performance, was my own delivery and acting. I have started to pay more attention to my accent, and when we were watching our performance on tape, I couldn't stop grinding my teeth every time I heard myself speaking. This might be over criticizing on my part, but it really brought my focus on the fact, that I do need to work on my English. My accent and the fact that I cannot stop thinking about how I say my words has an affect on my acting and my confidence on the stage. What this means, is a lot of work outside of college on my own to fix what I lack in English language, compared to my peers.

Looking back, if I could change something about our devising or the show, would be the fact, that we simply did not use our time right. I would have more rehearsals and I would have also liked to discuss the research within my group more, to have perhaps had a wider image about what is happening in the scene.