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N2C - performance reflection

On Wednesday we performed our play for the Directors Challenge: Purple by John Fosse.  Overall, I think it went really well and there was no major slipups, no huge forgetting of lines or staging errors, there was a few pauses and silences but because of the nature of the play I think these were seen as intentional and just built the tension in the scene.

 Something that I hadn't acknowledged fully before the actual performance was the dry humour of the script. I had been quite oblivious to this and focused quite heavily on the kind of dark, emotional aspect of the script and not realised the comedy of it. It wasn't until I was performing and I heard the audience laughing at certain moments, I realised this and therefore the real performance had a slightly different atmosphere to the other times we had rehearsed it.  One moment in particular was when The Boy starts playing his solo on his guitar, because the actor playing The Boy was so inexperienced at playing the guitar,  it was really obvious that when I say 'that's nice' in response to his awful attempt at making music, I was only saying  it to be nice and comforting (or perhaps to make him stop playing, or even, if the audience did think of me as this 'slutty' character, then it could be seen as sort of manipulative). Weather because we had not  rehearsed fully with the instruments before or because we hadn't performed this bit infant of a full audience before, these things only occurred to me in the actual performance and it would have been really useful to have realised this sooner so that maybe I could have changed the delivery of some of the other lines in the script to fit this moment better.

In terms of the semiotics of the performance we had quite a dark set with dim, uncoordinated lighting reflecting the mysterious unknown aspects of the play. The white lights were cold to better show the unwelcoming temperature of the room so that the audience could believe fully that this rehearsal space was indeed 'a cold, dark room that's cold and horrible' as The Boy describes in one of his first lines. The floor was covered in wires, rubbish and general debris, not only to show the messy, disgusting, teenage atmosphere of the space but it also increased the element of danger in the play because from the moment lights come up in the first scene the audience is able to see that this is not a safe place and it adds another element of danger to the violent scenes. The space reflects the dark, confusing essence of adolescence that the play illustrates.
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