Evaluation

Overall, personally I feel that our performance went well and that we created a strong piece of theatre that challenged us as performers and the audience as well. I also think that we incorporated our site into our performance in a really affective way, making full use of it and getting inspiration form it.

 

One of the things that I think we did well in our performance was the way that we used our space. As a piece of site specific theatre the space that we use and the way that we used it is one of the main components to the piece that we create. I think that we choose a really good site in the first place which put us on a really strong position for the rest of our devising and creative process. Our space was quite a large space relative to others that we could have chosen, however I think that we used this to our advantage and were able to keep the whole of the space alive throughout the performance. We used the stairs down to our space to create an entrance, this was really affective as it created an atmosphere and made the audience feel as if they were entering the world of the performance and it was as if they were transported from their own lives into a completely different world. We made sure that in our performance we didn’t just stay in the middle of the space, instead we moved around as much of the space that we could, we went to the corners, the edges and the centre a like to include all of the different areas. Also the way that we used these areas was really affective because it said something about the characters and often their personalities or mental state; this was shown where the two central characters went to the corners of the square while the other moved around the space saying the horrible thoughts that run through their head. This showed how the thoughts in times dominated the characters and that they can get trapped in the darkest corners of their minds. Another way that we showed this was with the meeting scene between the couple and how their relationship progressed from that point. This took part in the middle of the space, this highlighted the importance of their relationship and that this was something we wanted to get across in our piece, however it also showed how they as a couple could be the centre of attention or part of a world with things happening all around them but they will never see beyond each other.

 

I also think that we were successful in tackling a really hard and taboo subject of the Moors Murders, and that all of us in our company worked really hard to tap into the emotions of the characters and the situations. Something that we really wanted to emphasis and explore in our performance was the human side to the murderers and to look into their minds. To do this we had to work hard on researching into them and to trying our hardest to connect and understand the human side to them and why they did the things that they did. Personally I think that we achieved this and that we were really mature in trying to see past the horror that they created and personally I don’t think that our performance would have been as successful as it was if we hadn’t been able to understand and look at the emotions behind the characters.

 

One thing that was a result of our performance was that it wasn’t technically site specific; it was in fact site responsive. We took elements of the site and used them to inspire the piece that we created. We used the handprints on the walls as inspiration and this lead us to the picture that was created of Myra Hindley out of children’s handprints and consequently our piece was born out of it. We couldn’t have made the piece we made from any other site however it could have been performed in other sites.

 

However there were a number of things that went wrong on the day and that I would change if we were going to perform this piece again to improve it. One of the things that went wrong on the day was that one of the members of our company was sick, this meant that on the day of the performance we had to rearrange some parts of our performance, giving certain pieces to other people and trying to make it work with one less actor. One of the main problems that this caused us was that at the end of our piece the member missing had created a small newsflash to present, however none of us had been given that piece so we had to recreate it in a very small amount of time. In hindsight we should have been more organised and have that piece of our performance created earlier with a copy for each member so that we could have been prepared for such a problem to occur. Unfortunately it meant that that part of our performance was slightly weaker than the rest as it hadn’t been rehearsed as well we would have wanted to.

Another problem that occurred was that the audience number that we had asked for and required for our performance was 20, however only about 5 people turned up. This was for a number of reasons, some may not have known exactly where our site was or as it had run over time they might not have known what time our performance was. However because of this I felt that our performance wasn’t as good or affective as we had hoped it had been. Our performance was very audience related and just because of the size of the space we needed a large number to fill in and consequently to create an atmosphere. We deliberately had no set part of our space for our audience to stand so that they could move about as if they were moving about the mind and world of the characters. The amount of the people moving around the space would have created a sense of busyness in the mind and this meant that the audience played rather a large part in our performance. Also in our performance there lots of parts where we broke the fourth wall and talked to the audience, having a small number meant that this didn’t have the same affect that we wanted and didn’t challenge them like we had hoped.