Theatre in education evaluation

The process for TIE was quite long. We knew that TIE was about using theatre to educate youths on crime/drugs, this was what we looked at in the  first lesson. For TIE we had to research what TIE was, which is all about using theatre to educate people on knife crime, drugs and other important lessons to teach youths in key stage 4 to let us have a better understanding of the project. We then for the next lesson was given different topics of TIE which was given to groups within the class. We had to devise pieces based on these subjects. Ours was social media, so as a group we talked about what's bad within social media and how it can make people feel we used Instagram to show this as we knew that it would make sense for our audience, for key stage 4 students that's what we wanted to set it for. Miss Day helped us create this by giving some initial ideas about adding up our likes for our 3 best pictures and one of the comments and just repeat them over and over again which we did. This was to show how people are put across on Instagram and about body image, in the end of the performance we all came in for a group picture all posing and saying "selfie" . We presented it to the other groups  at the end of the lesson. The next lesson our tutor Miss Day introduced a script for a short film called faceless. She explained that it was about knife crime and based on a boy called Tyrone, throughout the short film he is battling whether to become a hoodlum boy with his friends or to be a ordinary boy and impress the girl he has been crushing on. In the end he goes to a party only to find out the girl he is interested in is a smartly dressed boy .Tyrone becomes angry and stabs the boy. It ends with the victim having no face lying on the floor dead who then turns into Tyrone .This is a use of a warning of an old woman saying your all killing yourselves. So as a class we agreed that we wanted to do this short film but turn it into a play and make all the main boy characters into girls. The rehearsal process was slow and not very progressive. For the show we all tried to rewrite scenes and add scenes. In the end people got cut from the performance because of certain problems. Because of cuts there were no boys in our performance which caused a problem for scenes, with the girl Tyrone 'Tyra' who was crushing on a boy. In the end as a group we decided to make Tyra a closet lesbian. This was quite hard to adapt because we had to get Montana to rewrite the script with the new scenes that we came up with. Miss Day had to remove us from performing to the schools she had chosen because our performance wasn't ready as it wasn't up to a good enough standard.
         Throughout rehearsals at the beginning people were talking, we were taking too long to finish a scene because everyone had ideas and some people didn't show up for rehearsals. So in the end that is why Miss Day had to cut people who weren't pulling there weight and let the people who were to get a good grade. Rehearsals after that was hard because of cutting scenes and working with what we got,  because people got cut out so late into the performance we had to work hard fast which is why rehearsals were slow and sometimes weren't very progressive          
  My production role for the performance was to organise the AV which set the scenes in the background .For example Tyra's sitting room, I was in charge on setting scenes with the AV and sound effects. These worked and flowed well with the scenes. I worked with Darren one of the technicians, during rehearsals and after college. Darren helped me edit the sound effects and videos for the AV which worked  well but  didn't sound the best.This was because they were downloaded from you tube but they still sound good.
                  Initially I was the old woman in the performance but it was thought that it  would be better for me to take the part of the mugger which I agreed on. My peers gave me good constructive criticism  throughout rehearsals which worked well on how I developed the part which I improvised as there was no dialogue for this part in the script the criticism was helpful because I could see where I was going wrong, I don't think I felt as confident with the character but I knew that my character had to be confident and threatening. So I just gave it my all and tried to be confident, which I think in the end worked well because I felt threatening as my character rehearsals helped me develop this for the final performance.
              The audience understood the plot , the only criticism was that the ending was rushed. We understood this and in future we would act on this criticism and rehearse more on our timing and add more dialogue. The lighting worked well in the scenes and set the mood. For example the club scene we used disco lights to create a party mood. The staging worked well and was spread out so the audience had plenty to look at. This was a slight challenge as we didn't have as many people that we wanted but worked to the best of our ability with what we could use during rehearsals, we thought of how we could spread everyone out but make it look good instead of small we still spreader scenes out even with our numbers of classmates.
             Hopefully we have learned more must be put into rehearsals and must be more of a team effort from the beginning throughout rehearsals, and not last minute. This would have enabled us to finish more clearly, not rushed and with more dialogue.
           When we got the script we knew that this piece would be fit to perform to a key stage 4 audience which is year 9, 10 and 11 we had to cut out swear words because that wouldn't be promoting a good image for young children and the image of our course. We all discussed how we could turn the short film script into a scripted play. We agreed on  what scenes could be added so there would be more to show and make it into a strong performance. The reason why we thought it was good for key stage 4 is that it wasn't a corny TIE piece about drugs it was realistic and sent a powerful message to youths. Even though we had to adapt it to a different story line with lesbianism we still wanted to keep that strong message as much as we could about knife crime. As it was adapted for lesbianism we added another TIE subject which is sexuality and deciding who you are. I think in the end our message was still really strong we worked well with what we could work with.
     The performance fit our target audience because all the important messages in the story where about sexuality and peer pressure. This we felt is what youths in key stage 4 are going through at this age. This is why this play had all of those important messages about being who you are, not being scared of your sexuality and not to get involved with knife crime or cracking under peer pressure.
       The HND's at the end of our final performance asked us what we thought of our performance, we all said that we knew it could have been better than what it was and could have been much longer. They all said that it was too short which we all understood, because of the sudden changes of people being cut and why we had to cut scenes that didn't make sense. They gave us a lot of negative feedback which we all understood because we knew we could have done better within rehearsals to make the performance longer. The positive feedback told us that the message of the plot of the play was clear which is what we all hoped for. So at least we knew that the message was clear, that the staging was good ,apart from the last scene .In  the club scene when we all bundled together, they said that this looked messy which we agreed with but we knew that if we had more rehearsal it could have been better.
     So in general the feedback was positive and negative which we kind of expected on how obviously we could have done better but it was good to keep it short in a way, because we don't want to bore our audiences, which we used to know it's horrible to sit and watch an hour long or just a long performance in general, so it was good to keep it short and sweet this way we would have our younger audiences attention throughout the performance,  and not become bored. Nether the less We understood the criticism and that we would take this as a learning curve and try much more in our FMP.