Performance project
For this project we were commissioned to develop a murder mystery dinner party event. We gathered ideas from different types murder mystery party games and settled on a Christmas themed event as the performance was near to Christmas.
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Over the many rehearsals we each developed our characters and our relationship to the victim with my character being the annoying neighbour and radio host. We also developed our character through a movement workshop to give ideas of how our characters walked and how they would interact with other characters in the cast. For my character we established that he has had a prior meeting with the character Pierce Filmlid as they were celebrities in the village the performance was set in.
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Over the many rehearsals I established my character had two ways of speaking. He would have his regular speaking voice which was like a normal voice which then went into at times a stereotypical radio presenters voice when ever he would speak about his show.
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We also had the idea to move the cast to a table on staging to indicate that they were the main cast and to set the area for character introductions for the audience.
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Performance
Overall the performance and rehearsals went really well. I definitely think the clues we were giving throughout performance were getting through to the audience. I definitely needed to interact with the audience more as I only interacted with them once. The character was an interesting person to play as it is a type of character I've never played before as It was a very eccentric man. The development of the performance went well as we all chipped in to develop specific part of the show
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I definitely feel like we fulfilled what the commissioners were looking for in the performance.
Rehearsal playlist
Each week we developed one part of the performance. The first two weeks was mainly discussing characters setting and the theme of the performance which we decided to set a Christmas theme. The next few weeks was focused on character development and script writing and from then on we were focused on getting the script learnt which we decided had to be learnt a week before the performance. We also focused on the character movement and character positions during dialogue and the character interactions in non scripted scenes.
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While developing on the performance we all kept tabs on what needed doing after each week as well keeping an eye on how much time we had left. Some weeks we worked on the plans for the lighting and the layout of the performance.
The commissioners
The charity that commissioned us were Gloucester welcomes refugees and they had commissioned us to make a murder mystery dinner party performance at the forest of dean campus. The decisions was to make it set around Christmas as we were performing it nearer that time. We also decided to perform it in the theatre of the Gloucester campus as the original performance space was not availible.