EVALUATION OF DEVISED PERFORMANCE

by Heta Nikula

This is an evaluation report on our site-responsive performance. I will be critically discussing the positives and negatives of the show and exploring what I've experienced during the devising process.

Overall, my groups performance piece went better than I had hoped for. There were few to none mess ups. During rehearsals we had made sure that we went over each part as much as possible, so that the performance would go smoothly and have a flow to it. Even thought we succeeded in this, it was also pointed that perhaps we rehearsed some of the parts too much, since the excitement and energy of some of the part fell a bit. Too, much rehearsals isn't necessarily the problem, but rather that we weren't able to keep the rehearsal process fresh for ourselves, and so got a little bored with the piece by the end.

During the beginning parts of devising, we were lucky enough to find our poem quite early on, which meant that we had more time to create the piece around it and learn our lines better. My group also thought, that we could use different chorus techniques, such as call and response, unison, and echoes to emphasize the important parts of the story, but also create different levels to the over all experience. Unfortunately, our devising was more focused on the movement and after changing our room, adapting our piece to the new site and so at some point we forgot about focusing on the poems potential. In hindsight, this is something I would like to change, since it would have brought so much more to our piece. It would have also used all of the voice skills we were learning last year and so showed how we are able to take in new skills and apply them into different projects with different focuses to create a piece of theatre.

Using practitioners might not be evident from the piece itself, but we had three pain sources of inspiration to our devising. We used DV8 in creating a lot of our movements in the beginning, starting from simple gestures and then broadening them to make them more effective and powerful. We also used Frantic Assembly's Chair Duet's in our piece and were inspired by their method of starting out with robot like turn in creating movement, and then by rehearsing it, giving the movement more of a flow. Michael Chekov was probably our main practitioner, since in our performance we used radiating to create silent, but powerful moments to tell the story to the audience. We also kept in mind Yoshi Oida's idea on Jo-Ha-Kuy to keep a balance between different parts of our performance.

Working in this group , I found myself in a leadership position. I initiated a lot of rehearsals and made sure we were on track, but also found myself encouraging my group members to bring out their ideas to the table. This role was hard at times, since I went trough a lot of stress in my life and this showed in my actions during rehearsals. From this I learned the importance of keeping work and personal life separate, but also to be honest to the people you work with and ask for help.