Unit 1 - Introduction/Identity and Unit 2 - introduction to production

Rob's Performing Arts Lessons and my personal development - UNIT 1
The first lesson I had with rob was a simple introduction which started with a warm up of me placing an imaginative chewing gum in my mouth and chewing while also exaggerating the action. This helped me be comfortable with my class mates which I believe is the first step of our healthy relationship as a whole class. After the warm up we all made a circle and gave our definition of "Identity" and intoduced our selfs. This gave me an opportunity to get to know the people I'm going to be working with as team work is a huge importance in drama to me and also gave me a chance to tell my team some things about me. Overall I enjoyed my first lesson as it was really basic and improved my confidence. After getting to know the class we had a go at devising pieces about identity.
The following couple of lessons were also really basic as they would start with a quick warm up of the splat game or a imaginative chewing gum chewing, but around the fourth lesson Rob commanded us to get into pairs of two and gave us an emotion to improvise in. This felt like a challenge to improve my facial expressions, gestures and movement so I can prepare to start my identity piece.















After the first week of an introduction, we got in groups of four to five and began planning our identity piece. My group contained four actors including myself and we aimed for something that others weren't thinking of but certainly can relate to which was family. Most people in life face family problems which help the actors to connect with the audience as the piece may relate to something that they may be facing in this stage of their lives. Aside from the audience we chose family problems as it also portrays some of the groups personal life styles of a 16/17 year old working class family member.

Level 2 "Identity" Evaluation 
Over the past five weeks I believe my confidence has had a major boost and this is from getting to know my teacher, classmates and rehearsing everyday. The rehearsals have also led to high voice projection so i can be heard and most importantly get my message across the audience. This mostly had to do with my solo poetry part of the piece where i have the whole stage to myself which allowed me to be flexible, creative, mature and in control.
When I recieved my feedback from my pairs a lot of people said that I had developed thick skin and they spotted that through my pauses in my production when the audience laughed through my witty and started clicking as a way of showing respect for what I was saying in my poetry. My reason for pausing was fearing at the fact that if I would've carried on while people was cheering and clicking I wouldn't be heard. Therefore I managed to pause while staying in character.

When rehearsing my performance I noticed that all of the laughter and immaturity was fading every time we would step on stage and practice which made myself and the group really mature to the point where me and my partner Anastasia could really go at it and argue a lot giving a realistic vibe to the audience making them feel as they are in the set with us. As Anastasia and I ran the performance over and over again, we became comfortable with each other which improved the eye contact between us where we could also communicate with each other without speaking.

(pic)https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=T-afUrE8bFQ

Unit 2 - Rebeca's lessons 

The first lesson with Rebecca was also a basic introduction of getting to know her and being informed about what am I going to be doing in unit 2. A couple minutes into the lesson we watched a couple of videos about some roles in the performing arts industry such as working in costume design, sound technician, light technician etc. The class had to take notes while the videos were playing as I would have to pick one role to write an essay about. The role I picked on to write an essay about was costume designers. I chose this due to my high interest in fashion.

During my research about costume designers I came across many well known costume designers that work in the industry which I had no knowledge about such as Mark Bridges who had worked on the costumes for fifty shades of grey and other costume designers such as Colleen artwood who had work mostly on adventure/fiction movies like the 2016 Fantastic beasts and where to find them, 2012 snowhite. Before starting my essay I did some more reaserch about costume designers and found basic info on salary, qualifications, timing schedule etc. When I started to write my essay I quickly introduced the clothing designers responsibilities in the industry which is providing the characters clothes and costumes in theatre, film and television production. Depending on a costume designers experience and qualifications this will judge their salaries as a minimum of £13,000 to the maximum of £35,000.

The skills required for costume designing have to do with communication levels and leader ship skills as they are both important because without those two skills not much can be accomplished. Another skill required for costume designing is the ability to work under pressure due to time and being aware of costs so you can invest into something really good without spending a lot on. In many situations for applying to be a costume designer a good portfolio and evidence of some of your work will help you stabilise a job. Qualifications are also important in the industry such as HND, a theatre design or performing arts (production).

Unit 2 was a introduction to production as my job was to understand and learn the roles of the hidden parts of theatre. There were many options and roles I could have chosen e.g. Lights, sound and music, prop work etc but all of these roles show that without them in the process I'd just be standing in a empty space with no sense of emotion and excitement to let off to the audience which means performance levels would be very low. During the past few months of performing on stage I have picked up on some things around me that have more to do with my success of getting a message across to the audience than my acting has. Production work enhances performances more than the acting it self and this is based on experience with the immigration play of the container when the production team had a few difficulties on giving the right music and lighting for each scene it had a huge affect on my performance as I could not give off enough of emotion towards my character to the point where I interact with the audience on a extreme level.

The essay writing was a little difficult as writing is not my strong point but as a person I'm always up for challenges and trying to better myself in life. One of the problems I had writing the essay was finding sources of information regarding costume designers as I had never heard of any. My relationship with fashion is standard as I have my own scent of style and know about big designer brands such as louis Vuitton, Moschino, Alexander McQueen, Phillip Plein and such but these designer brands are not common to be seen on theatre as directors always need to be on budget about productions and not go over the top with it. The way I approached this problem was through listing my favourite movies and listing my favourite characters and icons through those productions, seeing what type of clothing they had on and the tone they let out of their characters with certain costumes. An example of this would be Brian de Palmas, Scarface character Tony Montana. Tony Montana was performed by Al Pacino and he was a Cuban criminal immigrant who chased the " American dream" with vengence. In the beginning of the movie you can see Al Pacino wearing a worn out flower shirt and a bandana on his head where he is stuck in a refugee camp/prison in America and through that outfit he let out the tone of poverty and being hungry for action which made him into a dangerous character. Progressing further into the movie you see Tony Montana in a suit and things are going well for him which Al Pacino let out more humour out of the character to set a tone of happiness and success.