What ideas did you/your group come up with?

My group came up with the theme of dreams or aspirations. We collectively decided that we would focus on what the child wanted to be when he/she grew up. For example, an astronaut. We thought we could physicalise each aspiration and then slowly transition back into a boring office worker. This works well with the pages in the book in which peoples dreams have died. I decided in our group to be really exaggerated as if we were children ourselves, playing in a garden or in a playground where your imagination runs wild. 

Why have you chosen some of these ideas to develop further?

We have chosen these ideas to develop further as in our original piece we were holding back as we were all afraid of what our peers would make of our characters. So we all decided to just go crazy with our acting. Flailing ourselves around the room and going out of control may not be suitable for our peers, but it will almost definitely be suitable for our target audience of 2-4 year olds. We also developed the idea of the astronaut to as it correlates to the theme of dream big. We developed it because it's a very stereotypical thing to dream about when you're a child. Also it makes sense as the universe is so big that it's such a big dream.

Why did you reject some ideas?

We scrapped the idea of acting like ferocious lions or dinosaurs as we thought even though the children want to see dinosaurs, our acting would be to terrifying for the target audience. And it's very difficult to play a friendly, happy lion without a visual aid, like a costume or prop. We also scrapped the idea of having the group walk on from the one side of the stage. We did this as we ended up in the centre of the stage, leaving the central focus point (Matteo) too far away from centre stage. And when we rehearsed it again with Matteo centre stage, we ended up walking to short a distance to continue with our choreography, so we removed the sequence.

What acting skills/performance skills are you using? 

In my performance, I am using lots of unique facial expressions to show clearly my emotion and characterisation. My facial expressions are also very exaggerated to show the target audience my emotions clearly. I also exaggerated body movements to show my character in new ways, instead of going for a naturalistic approach. I also changed my pace a lot. When I'm doing a piece of theatre for a much older audience, you become more naturalistic and have subtleties to your acting which also comes from slowing down the pace. But in children's theatre I speed my pace up so that I keep the attention of my audience as they have a shorter attention span than that of an adult.