Overall Evaluation for the ‘Li’l Abner’ Process
In this process my regular company has been combined with 3 other companies to work on the end of year show ‘Li’l Abner’. Li’l Abner is a musical, based upon an old American comic strip by Al Capp. It surrounds the story of a hillbilly town that is awarded the most unnecessary town in the USA, meaning it shall be bombed. The plot follows Li’l Abner Yokum and his family in their attempts to save their town alongside their unusual customs. Since the musical is based off of a comic strip, the characters are very cartoonish and larger than life. I feel that through this process, I gained many skills in dance and also in slapstick comedy and I feel that this will be useful to me in future projects
I think that this was a very successful project and I really enjoyed the whole process. I feel that I benefitted a lot from this process and that I leaned many new skills. I also learnt a lot about what it takes to be in musical theatre and how much larger and more exaggerated this is as opposed to naturalistic theatre. I feel that throughout this process, due to the amount of singing and dancing involved, I improved my stamina and I feel that I can use this in all of my future work, regardless of whether it is musical theatre or not. I bonded a lot with other members in my company and I feel that this was the same for many company members and that this could be shown through the quality of work we have produced and the general positive and supportive vibes of rehearsals.
I think that the most successful moment for me was opening night, as I feel that this is when I could really appreciate all of the hard work that the whole company, tech team, band and directors had all put in. I feel that we created a comedic atmosphere and that the audience were on our side, appreciating this work. I also feel that in this performance, I did not worry so much about what I was doing, and instead, let my character react, and even through multiple hiccups and small problems, I still feel that I stayed in character and that I helped to cover these well. I feel that, while my movements and reactions were heightened, this made my characters seem more realistic and relatable as I was using genuine character reactions rather than over thinking this. I feel that in the show, we were able to still play inside our characters and think about different tactics in order to achieve the same thing. I also feel that in the shows I was able to see how much my confidence has risen throughout this process when exploring heightened movement and dance.
One unsuccessful moment for our company was that we were sometimes lazy when it came to drilling dances and scenes and this meant that we did not put all of our energy into our characters. This affect the rhythm of the scenes and also meant that our character intentions were not as clear, meaning that the audience would not understand what was currently happening in the piece and how the characters felt about this. This would also mean that we would often lose the cartoon sense of the piece as our actions would become very small and naturalistic. This also affected dances as we would not add character, meaning they would become flat and messy. This is very boring to watch and I feel that we dealt with this problem quite well as we later made a rule that whenever we ran dances and scenes we would always try to use our full energy so that we could continue to develop the dances and scenes and also our character reactions within them.
I feel that one unsuccessful moment for me was quite early on when beginning to use heightened movement to develop my secretary character. I found this very difficult as I was very used to naturalistic acting. I also felt as though I was getting stuck in scenes, not knowing what to do and being uncomfortable and not confident in using heightened movement to express myself. After researching the style of the play and talking with other actors in the same scenes as me, I found ways of slowly exploring this new style of acting and I feel that I did become much more confident with this as the process progressed. Inside of my small group, I was able to come up with ideas in which we could use movement and also adapt other people’s ideas so that they made sense in a scene, reflected our characters and also looked good onstage.
I feel that I have gained many skills throughout this process while looking at the style of this pieces and I feel that I was able to apply the appropriate skills to my work when I needed to. I feel that I have improved my stamina throughout this process through dance rehearsals and the general energetic nature of this piece. I feel that this was a gradual improvement and it was not until the end of the process, when reflecting back, that I really noticed this. I think that I will be able to use this skill in many other processes and I hope to continue to build upon this skill in future projects as I feel it is a valuable skill to have. I also feel that I have improved my dance and singing abilities in this process as I have been in many dancing and singing workshops. I feel very confident in how to warm up my body and voice and this is a key part of any show but I feel it is especially important in shows as fast paced as Li’l Abner. I have become much more confident in these skills and I feel that I can apply this to wider skills such as heightened movement and vocal quality in the future when creating characters. Even though dance is not strictly related to character, I feel that I can use some aspects such as pace, fluidity and height when looking at characters in scenes, in order to make them more interesting to watch. One other skill that I feel I have improved up in this process is my accent. At the start of this process, I was finding accents very difficult and I felt that it was something that you could either do, or you couldn’t and that they were very hard to learn. However, after some accent sessions, I found that by breaking down individual sounds that occur within the accent, I was able to start using the accent. I continued to work on this whenever I could and I feel that this helped me to add the accent into dialogue and into songs. I feel that this breaking down technique really helped me and I plan to use it more in the future to explore other accents.
I feel that throughout this process, we really bonded as a company and this was very useful when creating work as you trusted the people you were working with. It also allowed us to try out new ideas and take risks without the fear of being judged as there everyone was respectful and supportive. I feel that this was a big strength of our company as even when the process got tough everyone would always be supporting one another and helping one another out. Even though it did not seem like it at points due to stress and a lack of focus, we often showed this company bond when quickly running dances or going through songs before rehearsals so that we did not have to take time out of rehearsals to do so. I feel that being in this large company was very daunting for me at first especially as I was not particularly confident in the cartoon, slapstick style of the piece but I really feel that through working and bonding with this company I was able to improve my skills and my confidence when working n this piece.
I feel that I was very strong in coming up with ideas for myself and my group. I feel that the group of secretaries, that I was in, were all very strong in this and this allowed us to bounce ideas off of one another and try them out. I feel that this was really useful in developing my character as I could think about how my character would react in all of these ideas, whether they were used in the final piece or not. I also think that by doing this I was able to improve my physical clarity and show my emotions and inner thought process t certain situations without actually saying anything.
One of the main weaknesses I feel that we had as a company was our focus. Sometimes we were very focussed and this allowed us to take risks with our work and produce good work efficiently. However, when our focus was bad, it would drastically affect this. Sometimes the lack of focus became very contagious and all it would take was one person to be unfocussed and this would eventually be passed around the company, as opposed to just reminding the person to be focussed. I feel that we did improve with this as the process went on, however, I do not feel that this issue was fully resolved. In future processed, I think that we should all take it upon ourselves to be focused before entering a rehearsal space as this way we will not run into this problem.
I feel that something that I did begin to improve, however, I feel could be improved upon more in the future is my physical clarity. Especially in heightened pieces like Li’l Abner, it is very important to have very clear physical clarity as this can tell the audience how your character is feeling or even a character trait. I feel that if I had done this more in this process, I could have tried experimenting even more with my movement in the piece, especially in scenes with no dialogue, like the Sadie Hawkins Day Race.
If I had more time to work on this process, I feel that I would have looked closer into how my characters act towards people they dislike. I did begin to explore this; however, I feel that I could have done this more as I mainly focussed on the complete opposite. I also think that I would have looked closer at habits that my characters had and how this related to the emotions they were feeling. I feel that this would have made both of my characters more believable and also would have helped me in developing my character further.
I feel that our final performances are going very well and that they are suitable for our target audiences. I feel that we have been creating funny, positive and cartoon-like atmospheres that all help to show the style of the piece and tell its story. I feel that the audiences have been very engaged with the piece and that their response has been very positive, meaning that our characters were detailed and had clarity so that the plot could be told.
Overall, I really enjoyed this process and I am really enjoying the performances so far. I feel that I have gained many new skills that I can apply when looking at comedic, larger than life scenes and I also think that I have gained many new skills surrounding characterisation that I can adapt to multiple different genres in order to create a character that the audience can relate to. I am very excited to work on our next process after summer and I hope that I can use all of the skills that I have learnt, not only in this process, but throughout this year to create a high standard of work and to have fun while doing so.