T.I.E Reflection

This is my reflection on the T.I.E Performance we created for the year 4 students. It was an adaptation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to educate them about friendship through the use of a common fairytale. The "story" contained friendship advice through direct interactions with the audience which allowed the us, as the characters, to be much more connected with the students. 


1) Identify two moments from your performance that you believe were successful and explain why you think they worked so effectively. 
The first moment of my performance that I believe was successful would be the very beginning of the performance where we cheerfully introduced our characters as dwarfs. This is because we danced to the most well-known song in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, "Heigh Ho" This made the performance start off with high amounts of energy to attract the audience's attention right from the start. As well as, appealing to their interests as they were year 4 students, we were able to gain their attention through buoyant choreography.  

The second successful part of the performance were the mini advice parts, where a harp sound played and the characters all gathered together to give an important piece of information about friendship. There were, in total, 7 parts like this in our performance, each corresponding to every letter in the word "FRIENDS" like an acrostic poem. In specific, the most effective one, in my opinion, was probably the letter F. This is because we were all there to deliver the message which already made it more prominent as well as the fact that the audience reacted most to this specific one. I believe, at their age it was also the most relative one. It stood for "F" which is for "fighting, which friends should never do" We also had actions to go with these which probably also made the students much more intrigued. 


2) What areas of your performance do you believe you could have improved and why? 
I believe we should have put more effort into memorising the acrostic poem as they were highly crucial parts of our performance. This is because I did not say two of the letters in the right order which, even though did not make much of a difference, could have drastically effected our performance, especially if we didn't have the skills to improvise and cover-up the mistakes. In addition, we also could have practiced how to deal with active responses. This is because we mostly focused on how to carry the performance on if the audience did not respond, however, we disregarded the fact that they are hyperactive, year 4 students who were enthusiastically reacting to our performance. Therefore, if we could have improved how to deal with this situation we could have performed much more clearer and we would not have been ready for all kinds of reactions. 

3) What response did you get from your audience and did it meet your expectations? Explain. 
We were able to receive high energy responses from our audience which completely met and exceeded our expectations. This was because they were able to listen along to the story and answer questions relating to the performance as well as reacting to certain characters with cheers or boos. We knew they were paying attention because we had a section of the performance which was "Sleepy's Game Show" where we called up two teams of two and they were able to answer our questions correctly. Two out of three questions linked to the performance which was about the letter F which i mentioned earlier. They were able to correctly repeat the phrase and even perform the actions, which is also why it was successful and met our expectations for response. The other question that was related to the performance was what the Evil Queen used to kidnap Snow White and they were able to actively answer with "a poisonous apple" Furthermore, the first question related to the original fairytale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and it was to name another dwarf other than Sleepy, Doc, Dopey and Grumpy. This gave them the freedom to answer between Sneezy, Bashful and Happy. They were also able to answer this correctly which made me believe that we chose an effective fairytale which was well-known to this target audience. 

4) Do you believe you met your original performance objective? How do you know? 
Our original performance objective was to inform the students about friendship and how they should always overcome problems by working together and without causing conflict. We tried to create this by overtly explaining how we should behave when a problem arises to suit a sort of speech directed towards a younger audience which made us speak much more slower and clearer. As well as, over exaggerating every movement to make it more comical. I believe we were able to achieve this because the students were very enticed during the performance and they were able to take in all the advice we gave them. We also prepared an A3 Poster with the acrostic poem of "FRIENDS" just to embed it into their young minds even more. 

5) What was you main contribution to the group and what skills have you developed? 
My main contribution to the group was creating much of the choreography for the opening scene as well as the Quest Scene which included movements like crawling, jumping, hopping, skipping as well added comedy through the use of clownish actions like slapstick. I also provided some props like fake apples, framed pictures to decorate the stage to make it look more home-like, origami diamonds and plastic axes which were used throughout the performance. Other than materialistic contributions, I was also able to improve my character development skills by trying a newer role which required me to be overly goofy and dumb. I was able to develop this skill by lowering the pitch of my voice and articulating the endings of my words/sentences to make it more silly-sounding. I know I was able to develop this skill because in the beginning and during our practices I was struggling but with different exercises to improve my characterisation I believe I was able to achieve an accurate representation of my character, Dopey.  

6) Any other comments or observations? (targets for next time you work collaboratively)
I was able to observe that scenes are much more easier to create when there is a certain focus or message you want to convey. This was especially more prominent since we did not create a script. We thought creating a script was unnecessary because it takes too long to write, perfect and memorise. By creating it without a script we were able to focus on our actions and our lines simultaneously which further helped develop the scene because this way ideas were able to originate much more effectively. Therefore the next time I would have to work collaboratively, I would at least create a story-board with each scene and what message/theme/motif we want to address in-order to keep everything coherent and focused.