Victoria Station

In the beginning we were each given a script labelled Victoria Station. It was representing the commotion of the train station, Victoria Station. We were told to use our voices and acting skills to present the script to an audience during the Performing Arts Evening. I felt quite sceptical at first because I hadn't had much experience doing this sort of thing, but then gradually developed ideas to contribute to the piece.

Physical theatre is a technique used in theatre to portray an object like furniture; this can be done by the actor using their body and voice. When they do this, they are not in character; this technique is usually used in non-naturalistic pieces. The research I did was during my drama lesson when in a group we used our voices to show the script through soundscape, we had a script about a steam train, we performed this to the class.

I worked with the whole class during Victoria Station as it is a group piece. The main strength of the group was that lots of people had ideas to contribute however unfortunately the communication in the group was ridiculous, every person was trying to put forward their idea and no one listened to each other’s ideas, and then if someone were to get their idea across someone would try and interrupt with their own adaptation of what the group should do. Another thing that needed to be fixed was that there were certain people in the group that hadn't been including themselves as much as they could have.

When the group actually decided on what idea to try, it took too long for the group to stop discussing it and try doing it for real. I found it hard to contribute ideas to this group as it was quite frustrating. Although I did manage to put forward quite a few ideas like the clock in the opening scene being physical theatre, I remembered this from another piece I did in year 10 Performing Arts.
As we continued to develop the piece we began to coordinate more so that we had an organised speaking system. Then the confident members of the group invited the quieter ones to speak up if they had any contributions and making sure they all had something to do. This was a positive development. I also think that trial and error played a significant part in the piece as we could tell when something didn't work and we were able to create an alternate idea.

Our final rehearsal was in the theatre and we were given some minor tweaks to make to our performance better, we were told to make the end scene into a freeze frame and slow down the wave and add more context during the ticket booth scene. By the end of the final rehearsal we had fixed the majority of the errors.

The actual performance started off quite badly as no one was told that the tabs were staying open from the previous act and we were all expecting them to close before we got into position, this was not good since Connor and Jake were already supposed to be on stage in their clock position. When they finally caught up to the fact they had to be on stage for us to start, they took their place. The lights came upon us and we started our individual pieces coming onstage from the wings and I think the build up of noise was good once we were all on stage. From this point onwards I think projection was a big issue as some people would project their lines however others could barely be heard. We worked well together as a group because we all knew where we all had to be and what lines to say, no one forgot any lines however holly wasn’t there to say her lines which made the rest of us struggle. We assigned her lines to other people who we though did not have enough