Theatre Drama Task Reection

1. Describe your piece of text. The text that we chose was a spoken account from a friends perspective - Sophie Heawood. As a close friend to Amy Winehouse, the text was rather emotional. It seemed to present a different side of Winehouse, one that was not captured by the paparazzi. Sophie, the friend, also seemed to be defending Amy from the circulating rumors about her life and apparent addiction to crack. 2. What did you learn from your text? We learnt the truth behind the rumors of Amy; that she was more addicted to vodka than crack, interrupting conversations to send her assistant to provide her with more of the alcohol. I also learnt how her relationship with her husband had started to deteriorate, as she admitted to cheating on Blake Fielder-Civil at the time. This, combined with additional pressure from critics and the media, drove her to binge drinking, as well as aggravating her addictive personality. 3. Copy out two statements/words from the text - why did you choose them? I think there are two main statements that we repeat throughout our performance. The rst one is behind her wit lies a will of steel. I felt that this embodied Amy Winehouses personality perfectly. It showed us that behind the relaxed facade she put on, Amy was determined to carry on living life as best as she could, even with the obstacles she was facing from the media and her own relationships. I also thought that it added a tone of determination to the text, to show that she was willing to stay true to herself. The second statement is a scared little girl whos been in the public eye since her teens. As a group, we also felt that this showed the downside of being a celebrity - having little to no privacy. Even from a young age, Winehouse had been in the public eye, hence having constant pressure on her back. We thought this could have contributed to the cause of her derailing career, so we incorporated it into the performance to showcase more details about her personal life. 4. What was your performance style? Our group decided to perform a reinforcement - this meant using words from the third text to create song lyrics which we sang against our own melody, as well as creating movements in time with the lyrics. 5. Describe your performance - what message did your group want to show? Was it a hard piece of drama to create? What challenges did you encounter? How did you overcome them? Who did what in the group? The point of theatre drama is to showcase the different aspects of a story, thereby presenting different perspectives to an issue or topic. We wanted this meaning to be carried across in our performance, hence we used the words of Sophie Heawood to show another side of Amy: confused, unsure, vulnerable - maybe even a bit scared. I personally felt that the drama was relatively difcult to create given the amount of time we had. There were many obstacles we faced when planning the performance. Firstly, there was the problem with time. We were given around three lessons to plan and rehearse our reinforcement. However, our style of performance was more complex as we needed to compose our own song, lyrics and movements. Hence, we stayed behind after lessons and met up for one day to work on it, thus giving us time to practice. Secondly, we realized that our reinforcement focused more on the music of the performance, rather than the acting. We wanted to emphasize the drama of the text, so we did this by using key facial expressions and body positions (i.e hands on hips to look suspicious, circling around a

gure to create a tense atmosphere, etc), this helped the audience understand the emotions and feelings associated with each part of the song. Lastly, after lming one of our performances, we realized that there was a problem with angles. Often, we would be blocking the audiences view of one person, or it would be difcult to see the facial expressions on our face because we were facing away from the audience. We solved this by dissecting each scene and looking from the perspective of the audience to make sure that everyone in the group was visible. We had to stand sideways so that our backs were not to the audience, as well as making sure that we were arranged diagonally. Apart from this, the rest of the rehearsals went smoothly as we divided up the task evenly in our group: the melody was mainly composed by Cheryl and Michelle, while Joyce, Jovita and I helped write half of the song. We all pitched in to choreograph and create props, hence there was equal work distribution. 6. Based on your feedback, what would you do differently? I think that the main feedback we had was clarity. There were two issues with this: the rst was about the volume of the performance. Although we had variation in volume, there were times when we sang too softly - this could also have been a spacing issue since we performing near the back of the studio.To change this, I would have placed us nearer to the audience as well as making sure we projected our voices. Secondly, the song was slightly fast, so the lyrics were sometimes communicated unclearly. I think that we could have set the song at a slower pace, making sure that we were all enunciating each word clearly. Another idea would be too pass around a lyric sheet - that way, the performance would be conveyed more effectively if the audience could understand what we were saying.