Week one

This was the first week of our rehearsal process. We started our rehearsals by brainstorming ideas about the stimulus of our performance. We agreed on one thing we did not want to do it on a topic that has been overdone. We started listing the things we had a passion for the first thing we both said was food, and it kind of stuck. We wanted to play to our strengths which was music and musical theatre, we both have a huge history with this genre of theatre and we knew that nobody else would of chosen to do it. From previous modules Shannon and I have worked well together in past performances and achieved good grades. Our best performance grades were in the modules Music theatre and theatre in sexuality where we created a musical and cabaret, we knew it would be best to play to our strengths for our finale performance. So To begin the rehearsal we started listing aspects that we might like to include in the performance they were:

• Post online comments to see people’s opinion of food
• Life experiences with food(storytelling)
• The disco pop music performance that came to the university
• Cabaret aspect to the performance
• Linking the songs through memories (storytelling)
• Singing to food as if it is a person
• Physical theatre aspect (fighting over menus
• Giving the audience food to begin with
• Possibly starting the performance in the audience
• Misheard lyrics- Peter Kay’s live comedic act
• Recreating commonly known adverts live on stage using live feeds from camera’s.
• Fridge confessions
• Karaoke
• life food experiences
• Disco performances
• Fitting in… to your jeans
• Linking our songs with previous memories

We started to some basic research which started with duet performances, this is where we discovered Flo and Joan. Flo & Joan are the multi-award winning British musical comedy duo, and sisters, Nicola and Rosie Dempsey. The piano/percussion pair have headlined and played to sold-out audiences across the UK.(Key practitioners) They perform original songs about serious situations and add a comedic element to them. The video that struck my attention the most was a song performed about a drunken night out. I felt that we could apply their comedic aspects to the songs we create, the duo sing about situations that the audience can relate to and for me that really stood out that’s an element I wanted to achieve In our performance. We wanted our performance to be high energy and to make the audience laugh at us but also themselves and Flo and Joan do this naturally. We also wanted to take the aspect of using instruments in our piece as a way of breaking out from acting and singing .

Reflection of first rehersal

This week I think has been an amazing start. We took initial ideas and started exploring them further. I think In terms of the session we were not massively productive but it is early days. Through discussion we have started to develop a concrete idea on what our performance will be. Next week I think we need to arrange a meeting with Tim to discuss over all ideas and take some of his opinions and ideas forward. I already feel confident in that this will be an amazing performance hopefully Tim agree’s too. I feel this week was more of a discussion on where we were taking this performance which to me is a good start. I can already sense that working with Shannon and Tim will be a lot of fun and I’m excited to see the end results.