Devised Evaluation

I believe that our “Humanity in Crisis” devised piece went well this year because within our group we had managed to come up with a very effective issue and diverse ways to portray each one of our ideas. I believe that this devised piece went well this year because I was able to come up with many ideas from the devised title, my group managed to come up with multiple ideas to test and research. So I feel our creativity and planning skills have improved as well as been shown during the start of the devising Unit where we experiment with several different ideas, researched them In depth, before settling on the main idea to use. I believe that one of the things we did well was the deciding on our main focus for “Humanity in crisis” because we were all well informed about all ideas we had from research and managed to make mature and interesting choice. Our main focus was education and more specifically behaviour from students, this was a very interesting issue to show to an audience if we can portray the issue effectively even though this was considered to be a very difficult issue because it’s a subject not a lot people other than teacher might find interesting. This is what I believe went well as I think we managed to not only portray our point to the issue we set out to show, we also managed to make it visually appealing to members of the audience who wouldn’t acre about our issue. Another thing we did well was how we made our piece appealing for all types of audiences, we created visually appealing movement segments and thought proving dialogue with humour in to show the relation between student and teachers, what it should be and why it is like the way it is. I also believe that our self-written dialogue was another skill that was well used in our piece. I believe this aspect went well because when we had written dialogue in the past like for last years devised piece we didn’t think much on our dialogue which ended up having written our script in the form of cliché dialogue. This year we had spent more time working on our dialogue so we could achieve a more naturalistic tone, we managed to do this by researching our characters in depth, as our characters were teachers we had teachers look over our script and help us improve them to the more realistic standard.

I believe that what could have gone better with our devised show was the physical theatre pieces we had created, even though they suited the tone of our devised piece and managed to be physically appealing, I believe we could of worked harder to make them stand out more to the audience as most of the pieces had over half of our group sat down in chairs. I would have like to have looked into a way of making our physical pieces bigger and less tame, one of the physically piece we had created was where the students were controlling the teacher, which we had done very well, but the piece was meant to show the decent towards a chaotic future where the children were being destructive which I don’t believe this piece had shown as the execution of the physical piece felt too neat for a chaotic future. I also believe that our piece could have been better if we had looked into furthering our scripted scenes more, what I mean by this is that although we had managed to write effective and realistic dialogue all our scenes were very static or had us stuck in chair, It could have been better if we had looked into a way of getting our teacher characters up and moving around. Another idea would have been too create a few scenes in a classroom or the teachers with their life outside of school so that we could have had movement in our scripted scenes making them less static. Another thing we could have improved with our piece was the choice in staging because although the Traverse staging worked we could have looked further into the types of staging we could have used for the piece. When we talked about staging we originally set out to do traditional staging for our piece but were later inspired by a show called the “Black watch” to try Traverse for our show, which made me feel we had all settled on the idea on traverse staging very early on in the creation process of our show. This meant that we could of experimented with different idea of staging that could of helped set the tone of our piece like we could have had our audience sat on exam desk to help pull them into our devised pieces issues or of had them sat like a classroom to watch the piece.