Wednesday morning was spent re-working the "Gretel/Wendy House" scene and "Mr Pig's Museum". A note I received Tuesday morning after our performance was that the character of Gretel was not clear enough to the audience and so I needed to go away and further develop the character:
A suggestion was to make a reference to the Gingerbread House that Hansel and Gretel visit in the original fairytale. We changed the opening of the scene so that Mr Pig refers to Gretel by name when she first enters so that the children know who she is instantly. Other lines that were added were "Wendy House, that's nothing. I used to live in a Gingerbread House" after Mr Pig mentions an important memory. To make this reference even clearer Mr Pig would then say "Didn't an old witch used to live there?" which was referring to the Witch that tried to eat Hansel and Gretel. As Gretel I would then hastily dismiss the thought and bring Mr Pig's attention back to his "Wendy House" flashback.
Another change we made was how the "Museum" scene was set up. Originally the scene was set up so that Ola and Sam would come on stage and act as shelves to hold the glass and paper to hold Thumbelina and the plates of Gingerbread crumbs. It was commented that it didn't work having Ola and Sam on stage acting as props and was suggested that the props are handed to Matt from behind our set, similar to the way that Scarlett is dressed in the opening.
Once again we went over the "McDonald" scene to work on keeping the pace up and is it a dialogue-filled scene and so it was important to ensure the children did not begin to lose interest.
Wednesday's performance was at Round Diamond Primary School and we learnt once we had set up that the whole school would be attending out performance which meant we had to bring our set back because the children were using most of the floor space and could see around our set. To effectively deal with this issue we had to ensure that we remained still and quiet when behind the set or the children would become more interested in what was happening behind the set rather than the action on stage.
In this performance I made a few mistakes with my dialogue, but I found that I dealt with them considerably well without making it obvious to the audience. My most notable mistake was in the ending when we all go into Goldy's "power" position and rather than punching my fist into the air I did it to my side. However it was not a massive issue as with it being Goldy's move it would not have been particularly odd for her to have done it differently to the other characters.
As our audience was made up of children between the ages of 5 and 11 year olds the children found a variety of moments to laugh at. Mr Pig and the Bears were the favourites of the performance and when Mr Pig called himself Peppa Pig when he dressed up as a Grandma both the children and the teachers were in hysterics. I found that this performance was our best in terms of keeping the energy levels up as we all came out in bags of energy and ensured that all our movement was over exaggerated.
In previous performances when Scarlett asked for help to learn Goldy's moves to protect herself she asked a teacher to come up and help her as we were unsure as to whether any children would be comfortable enough to volunteer and so brought a teacher up as it would be amusing for the children. However at Round Diamond the children appeared more comfortable with us than in our previous audiences and so Scarlett selected some children to help her. This scene worked really well and because of the way Shiquerra remained in control of the situation she was able to quickly and efficiently get them back into their seats before Mr Pig's entrance.
Once we had finished our performance and packed away our set we made our way to the back if the Hall and as we walked past the children they were thanking us and were doing the "Stealth" and "Power" moves. This was really nice to see that we'd had some kind of impact on the children.
Part 1 of our performance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzzFojfUWac&feature=youtu.be

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