Week 5

We started off week five by having a bank holiday which was useful as we had extra time to focus on polishing up on our lines and performance skills. However, this was also a disadvantage as we had one less day to tech the show. Our first, and only, tech day was on the Tuesday. My group was up first to figure out the lighting and sound effects and to get accustomed to the theatre space. The tech run was mediocre at best as it took too long and was run more like a dress rehearsal than a technical run through.

The lighting states themselves were fairly simple and would be added on later when I went over them with the assistant technical director. We discussed how we could make certain scenes more interesting by using lighting add some features that were stated in the script. For example, during the scene 'Schizophrenic' the characters talk about traffic lights, so using the lights we created a representation of a traffic light. This was achieved by having a red, yellow and green light in the background. This could have been improved by adding a sound effect of a traffic light which would lead to a better representation.

Another scene that we added lighting to was 'Dream'. During this scene one of the characters talks about 'bushes of brambles', 'an orange and black butterfly' and 'a yellow rose.' The assistant technical director explained to me how we could create a physical representation of this by using the moving lights that we have in our theatre. Unfortunately, neither of these features are clearly visible on the recording that has been made.

On Wednesday, there was a big technical issue which delayed our start of the dress rehearsal. This was fixed quite quickly and we were able to proceed with our planning which consisted of doing a quick warm up and the dress rehearsal. After this we performed the matinee show without the planned set. This created stress amongst the cast as they were worried about performing with the set for the first time during the evening show. The matinee show went fairly smooth except for three things:

• There was a miscommunication between one of the cast members about costuming. This was resolved by speaking to her and addressing the problem and how it could be resolved. 
• A member of the technical team informed us that during one of the scenes a member of the cast had knocked a chair off stage. With this information I began attempting to figure out a solution. The technical team gave us a new chair given to us by the technical team so I got Elena who was in the next scene to take the chair off in the next scene and Mya to put the new chair on in the scene after. Luckily this fit well with the scene but to avoid a problem like this happing again I would either make the chair more stable or ensure that the chair was not as close to the edge of the stage as it was. 
• There issue was and issue the transition speed as at certain points there was nobody on the stage which made it feel empty and cold. As this was not what we had intended, the next time we will rehearse entering and exiting much more to ensure fluidity.

With the evening performance approaching I helped the tech team to build the set out of PVC pipes. This allowed the evening performance to have the originally designed set which had both negative and positive reactions. The negative side of this was that we were performing on a set we had never performed on before, however, the set allowed for a more impactful and overall better performance.

Breakdown of the set