Energy and Pace!

As with any piece of theatre energy and pace are vital in making a good performance. When we did our pantomime we were constantly being reminded that the energy and the pace needed to be picked up to prevent the performances from dragging and this was the same with our Children’s Theatre piece.

I found that as a group we struggled more so to keep the energy and pace up throughout our piece compared to when we were doing pantomime because we weren’t following a script and instead were always devising new scenes, and I think this meant that we were less aware of when a scene was lacking in pace or the energy of a scene had dropped.

As our piece was designed to be fast-paced and comical it was crucial that our performances were high energy throughout. I personally found it rather easy to perform with high energy because Goldy was such a physically demanding character and the character would not have worked if I had played her any less than “all-out”.  

Some scenes were much easier to perform with high energy than others because of the characters in the scene. Mr Pig, Goldy and Scarlett were often responsible for setting the pace of scenes and so that would help pick up the pace if it ever faltered. However there were other characters, such as Grandma/Grandpa that were continuously being re-worked because we hadn’t quite found the most effective way to portray them.

In our final rehearsals we spent a great deal of time working on the scenes that would drag in pace. The McDonald scene was an example where we spent several hours prior to shows working on in continuously. As I was not in the scene I would take a directing role when this scene was rehearsed. The scene heavily relied on dialogue and as we observed when we saw “Grandpa’s Railway” large portions of dialogue can result in the children becoming bored and distracted. To overcome this we spent time going over the delivery of the lines and picking up the pace. There are several lines in this scene which are repeated and so it was vital that these lines were delivered quickly so that the pace didn’t drag. We didn’t want the dialogue to be lost but it wasn’t important that the lines were delivered a beat after one another rather than pausing between each line.

Another way we looked at improving the pace of scenes was shortening scenes that were unnecessarily long. An example of this was Scarlett’s opening scene when her mother sends her to visit her Grandpa. Initially we the scene beginning with Scarlett yelling at her mum about her headphones and her mum making comments about being a stupid girl and dressing Scarlett. We were told that this was unnecessary dialogue that was doing nothing but dragging out the scene. We then looked at how else to approach the scene and to fasten up the pace. When we first devised the scene there would be dead air in the moments that Scarlett’s mum was handing her coat, bandana and basket and so we altered it so that when mum would mention one of these items it would be pushed out from behind the set for her to take instantly. This picked up the pace of the scene and helped Shiquerra portray an impatient teenager who wants to go out as quickly as possible and doesn’t want to me mollycoddled by her mother. (See 0:00-0:25 on video) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzzFojfUWac&feature=youtu.be

 

 

This styling was then used in the Mr Pig Museum scene. Where we initially had Ola and Sam coming on to take on the appearance of shelves it was suggested that once again the props would appear from behind the set and Mr Pig then had the ability to move about the space more freely. This helped to combat the slow pace of the scene.

Before each show I always noted to the rest of the group that we needed to be as big as possible with our action and dialogue and this would vastly improve our energy levels and pace. I found that it was much easier to give lots of energy when we had a particularly interactive audience, however as a group I think that was one of our faults: if we had a quieter, more reserved audience we allowed their silence to affect our energy and this meant that the audience were getting less of a performance than other audiences.

Although we had moments of difficulty with our energy and pace I think we did achieve to perform with high energy and I found that the more shows we performed the easier it was to go out and put absolutely everything into the performance.