Aladdin Rehearsals

Earlier in the week we were told that the 2nd year students would be helping us out in our pantomime. They would be mainly performing as villagers\chorus. When we were going through the opening scene to Act 1, with the 2nd years themselves being on stage, I did feel it was useful having them by our sides because they provided us original villagers with a little enthusiasm which meant we wouldn't just be standing around looking unengaged. So I did feel that having the 2nd years with us helped a lot.


We also went through the opening song, Live While We're Young by One Direction while the mains were line reading. But we danced and sang it in small groups of 5 on the stage to see who was the strongest performer and those people would be in the opening number. I did get some comments back stating that I looked really stiff and that I was interlocked. I think the reason why I was like that was because I didn't treat it like a competition which we were suppose to and that I was so busy worrying in my head whether or not I was doing the dance properly. I didn't get selected for the opening number which I completely understand so instead at the end of the song I would enter on the lyric of 'Tonight let's get some and live while we're young'. Then we would all go into the village scene and be carrying on with our business in the villager of Peking. I did find that we all had so much more energy this time a round and were a lot more switched on with our characters. I personally feel that had a lot to do with the 2nd years being with us and we could bounce of their energy.


On Wednesday mornings we have a 1 hour session with our personal coach who is meant to help us with our confidence on stage, audition techniques and character development etc. I do find these sessions useful as it is always good to be able to develop our characters in panto a little bit further. But I do need to try and apply this in our rehearsals for Aladdin. So far in our sessions we all had to walk around the room in the style of a panto character that our personal coach would say. We was then allowed to add in a few words and one particular movement that our own characters in Aladdin would use. I decided that I would go around the room miming as if I were carrying a basket to sell bread. We was then allowed to increase it on a scale of 1-10 with 10 being an exaggerated version of what were doing, and 1 being just casual about it. We was then put into small groups all with different stimulus's to act out our little performance in the style of panto characters. Our stimulus was the news. I decided to play a villain style news reporter who liked all news violent and dark. I did enjoy this task. We have now been set a little homework task to come up with a dark secret that our characters in the pantomime would have. My secret that my character would have is that he would have a secret crush on Widow Twankey but he told the whole villager how much he despised her.