unit 3 working on performing arts

tuesday 14/11/17

we went on a backstage tour of the national theatre and it was amazing to see how everything was made and how you can even have jobs in the background of musicals. we had to wear a safety vest and write down questions on a sheet but we got to look at the props masks set and the different theatres.

The nation theatre was built 1976 there are three different theatres in the national theatre there is the Olivier which is named after Laurence Olivier who was the national theatre’s first artistic director. The Olivier is the main stage and was designed to look like an ancient Greek theatre so instead of the audience being in front of the stage it goes around in a semi-circle in two levels and it can fit 1100 people. In the centre of the stage there is this thing called ‘the drum revolve’ this is a huge five story circle that can rotate and allow different viewing points for the audience. The stage is designed so that from every seat you have the best seat in the house. The next one is called the Lyttelton Theatre which is named after Oliver Lyttelton who was the first board chairman this theatre is smaller and can fit 890 people. The design of this one is completely different to the Olivier it is two floors and is straight facing the audience this creates the effect that you are watching a T.V as there is a box where the stage is. In one of the productions ‘network’ you can even to pay to eat in a restaurant on stage so you are right in the action of the play.  The last theatre is called the Dorfman named after Lloyd Dorfman chairman of the Travelex group, this is the smallest of all three and it can fit 400 people in it. The design of the Dorfman is that it is again straight forward but unlike the others you can sit on the sides, what’s special about this theatre is that the seats can actually come backwards so the stage becomes bigger and they allow people to join in, in one production they were doing a dance scene and the audience were allowed to join in and have a dance with the actors. All of the theatres do two shows in then so one show will have two weeks of shows then it will rotate. There are constantly different shows running in the national theatre. 

Dorfman:

The winter’s tale 

Nine night 

The great wave 

John

Barber shop chronicles

Lyttelton

Absolute hell 

Network

Pinocchio

    

Olivier

Follies 

Macbeth 

Amadeus

 

The first show to ever be shown at the national theatre was hamlet on 22^nd October 1963 and since then the theatre has performed well over 800 shows since then and for the first 13 years they performed at the old Vic wile they were waiting for the national theatre to be built. There are well over 1,000 shows each year, there was even something called the temporary theatre which used to be outside the national theatre it opened in 2013 but closed in 2016 it seated 225 people and it was used to celebrate new works.    

vocal warm up 22/11/17

we were told in this lesson that we were going to be put into groups and we had to come up with different warm ups and then they would be recorded and we had to act as if we were teaching a class some people chose to do physical warm ups but i thought i would be better in vocal as i have more experience doing that.
in my group we all sat down and started thinking of different things we could do to warm up peoples voices so we wrote down that we needed to think about things to help with breathing, projection, articulation and other things you need to perform. we then wrote down all the things we wanted to do so i wrote down that i wanted to do breathing exercises (breathing in, holding then exhaling) i also wanted to do a song we did with our teacher called 'warm up my voice' this is good because you get higher in rage when you finish then repeat it.

when we filmed our video at first it was going well we had created an order to go in but then when we were filming one person in our group came up with an exercise that was really fast and very complex so when we all had to repeat what they were doing we all started laughing and then someone else in our group walked out of the video laughing so we had to carry on without her because we were being assessed on what we could do then a couple of days later we had to film it again and be serious and i think it went really well we had to change a few of the warm ups but it came out really well.

                                                  we completed a health and safety test
national theater staging follies   

me and Nerissa chose to sing a song from the show follies we used the concept that i was the older version of Nerissa character. And we made a dance to that song i think we did very well as we put the time and effort into what we did, i also think we captured the sense of what the actual show is about