Watford Palace Theatre

Watford Palace Theatre work experience

I have chosen to take on the role of being an actor because I enjoy doing this and I would like to have a career in being an actor as it is my passion. At Watford Palace Theatre we did many different workshops and we had a choice in what job role we would like to take on for our end performance. These were things such as, lighting, sound, and costume, set design, acting, directing, and stage management.  We had about 1-2 hours for each workshop and did this through-out the whole week on our work experience. This gave us an idea on what to do for a role for us individually focus on.

There were two groups within the group of 11 of us. There were 5 actors’ altogether, 3 in one scene and 2 in the other. I chose to play Alice from Alice in Wonderland for a scene with Chloe who played the white rabbit. This was great to work on because instead of me and Chloe deciding how to perform it and how to set the scene. We got advice and were directed by the other students from the group which I was not used to and it was different and made me realise that in a career of being an actor, this would be normal.

Thursday morning was the first workshop for the actors. As the other days had been workshops for stage management and lighting ect. I was looking forward to this the most because I enjoy acting the most. We did warm ups and were explained why we need to warm up in certain ways. I found that these were good tips as an individual because if I perform in a show later on in life then I know I can do these before the show by myself or share the tips with the other actors. If I get in to teaching then I can also use these warm up techniques in classes.

We played interaction games so that we became familiar with our surroundings and the people and props that were by us. We did things like memory games and awareness games and we joined in games that were played for us to be able to use all our senses.

After we completed the warm ups and interactive games we started to look at the scripts and get to know it a bit better by reading through and understanding the aim for the characters and where the scene is. This included thinking about how the characters are reacting with each other and their surroundings. Chloe and I discussed about the reaction our characters should have with each other and how the scene should go whether it be a calm or relaxing atmosphere. We were directed by one of the other student’s from our group and from there we improvised to see what we could work on to make the scene better or more convincing to the audience.

On Friday morning I went through my scene with Chloe and we went over our scene many times so that we could not get it wrong. At the end of the day the staff from Watford Palace Theatre came to watch our performance and so did a few parents of the students. I think that every student successfully took on the role that they decided to do and it made both scenes successful and entertaining. If I could do it again I would switch scenes as I would like to get to play a different character and act completely opposite to what I played on Friday.

I have chosen to focus on being the wardrobe supervisor for the show that the students of our work experience class are doing. The performance is based on two scenes from Alice in Wonderland. I contributed towards picking out costumes for the characters to wear for their scenes. The reason why I chose this role to take on from the performing arts industry is because I am a media student at school and I understand that representation is important for a character because then it is easier for the audience to understand more about what the character is like by the clothes that they are wearing. For example, for tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum, we wanted them to be like young rebels from London that are identical twins therefore we made sure that we picked out costumes that were the same and used a shirt and tie to help the stereotypical view of young teenage boys at school come across to the audience.

At work experience we did a workshop on costume design and I drew tweedle-dum and what my ideas of what a stereotypical teenage gangster would wear in London. As tweedle-dum is a trouble maker I drew on baseball hat, a puffer jacket and some dog tags to show a bit of ‘bling’. I thought that the character should also be wearing grey tracksuit bottoms and a pair of blue pastry’s to match his blue jacket.

Obviously we had no budget to buy any costumes from the shops to get the clothes that are similar to what I drew, however we did chose some clothes that would represent the characters personalities.

For the white rabbit character, we chose a waistcoat for Chloe to wear because in the film the rabbit is wearing a waistcoat, therefore it would be easier for the audience to figure out that Chloe is the white rabbit in the scene.

For Alice we picked out a jacket for the character to wear. As Kelly and I played Alice in the two scenes we shared the jacket to show that we were both Alice. The jacket was girly and simple to show that Alice is girly and innocent and when the scene changed I gave Kelly the jacket to show the switch between scenes.