Saturday 24th March Of Practice and Performance

So this was the day of our end of term performance.

It's always good to distance yourself from a performance before going back and analysing it too closely. There is an emotional attachment immediately afterwards that, speaking from a creative's point of view, is extremely fragile. In my opinion, actors should never be given notes immediately after a performance. Similarly, if you're ever giving feedback on a performance then wait a bit if it's critical. Otherwise, the danger is that the performer/director is still too close to the performance to look at it objectively and might feel slightly put out or upset.

The four hours in the morning were a real joy and fulfilled a bit of a personal dream. I have always wanted to be working with a large group of young actors in a theatre putting on a decent length performance. From the get-go the focus was fantastic. Here was a company of actors, some who had never met before, working closely together and concentrating hard on creating our story. This enabled us to do some great work and get the performance ready for the evening.

Generally, technical rehearsals are long and tiring. They involve a lot of repetition. The lights need to be programmed in and focused and then refocused and then reprogrammed and then the operator needs to run the scenes a few times to get used to timings. This usually results in the actors repeating the same actions over and over again. But, as I said in a previous post, it is much more fun if you embrace that repetition as a chance to hone your character and the blocking. These days are always a real teller for which actors have a good sense of humour. My advice is to embrace the excitement of being in a theatre and have as much fun as possible whilst listening to what the technical team need!

And so to the performance and the story.

I am very aware that the story needs a bit of work. I will constantly be developing the script and looking to make things clearer story-wise. Having said that there is something wonderful about keeping things obscure. We're found that the majority of the joy with this story has been the discussions that we've had in rehearsals about the subject matter and the characters. We've asked the Windmill Young Actors to explore some pretty complex subjects and have found not only wonderfully imaginative and open intelligent minds, but also togetherness. This was and is their story. They have invested in it, written it and devised it together. It is their work. Together with Tanushka, we have simply tried to empower that story, give it some shape and create our performance.

The show itself was extraordinary. If you look at the facts, here are 35 young actors, a lot of whom had never performed in front of people before. Some of whom hadn't even had the confidence to put their hand up in class and had struggled with confidence. Yet here they were playing lead roles in front of hundreds of people. Amazing!

I am immensely proud of the piece of work and of all those who performed and helped develop the piece in rehearsals. Every term brings new inspiration and more delight and I can't wait until we get back on April 21st to continue to develop both the stories and ourselves as people and artists.