All in all, making the final work – presentation – was very
successful experience and I learnt a lot during doing it with my classmates.
Because the whole presentation was long, we had to really create good and
interesting idea, plot and theme for the presentation, that it would be
compelling for the audience. I think we succeed in this goal and the
presentation was diverse and it showed different sides of wide range of
improvisation field.
We started this process by thinking and creating the theme/idea
for the work. Because the major part of my classmates are doing their final
year in their studies, we wanted to create a theme, which would gather their
experiences and important moments together. Finally we decide to choose a
theme, which would describe persons and special moments, as classes in the
faculty, which have had effect during their studies. After creating the idea,
we started to think place and time for carry out this presentation. First we
wanted to do it in center of Lisboa, but after a while thinking this, we
decided to do it in the garden of the dance buildings. This was because we
wanted people to see our final presentation and in the garden it would be easy
to present for students in the faculty. The time was set based on everyone’s
schedule and also other classes timetables.
After this part, we wrote some concrete about what we are
going to create during this process. We divided our group in three smaller
groups, so that responsibility of every scene would be shared equally. Then we
also wrote special characteristics of every scene (movement, who participate in
the scene, the needed things – props etc.). This helped us a lot for continue
the project, when we had something concrete written down and to follow, even
though the presentation could change from this plan. At the same time we went
to see the places where every scene would be presented concrete in the garden.
This project continue by going out and deciding more closely
what we would do in every scenery and how everyone would participate to them.
Additionally we decide even clearly, how every scene would connect together. After
this part, we divided in the smaller groups, which were responsible of specific
scenes. Working like this, we would be more effective and create scenes
much faster.
I was responsible of two scenes with my group. I have to
admit, that my responsibility part wasn’t that big, because my language skills
are not so good and even though I understood the major part of the
conversation, I missed lots of small details and that affected a lot of my
paricipation. I wasn’t always sure, what was the specific goal and idea of our
scene, so it was for me hard to lead the group and give instructions. So my
role and active leading part stayed really small, because of the language
barrier.
After three meetings in smaller groups was time to start
teach these scenes for other groups. We had more or less two weeks before the
presentation, so it was very important to do a plan how we would continue and
what kinds of things we would do in everytime we had classes. Progressing was
very important at this moment, that we could connect every part together and
get the presentation well done before the actual ”show”.
It was also very important that every scene had some leader,
who would take the responsibility of how the scene would look overall, when
everyone was participating in it. This kind of working would save time, becauce
there wasn’t still time to loose, even though we were in good schedule.
Teaching scenes to others worked well and we could pretty fast see the whole
picture of the presentation.
The most difficult part was sharper every scene to its
perfect and final form. At the same time there should be different levels,
dynamics and all the time happening something, that all the scenes would be
interesting for the audience. Additionally the theme and plot of the
presentation should be continuous and some way easy to follow. This took the
most of the time finally in the end. Luckily we had clear schedule for the final
work and one week before the final presentation we had first real practices
with all the materials etc. This helped us lot to see, what is still missing
and in which kinds of things we should pay attention. The rest of the classes
we clean the choreography with help of the ideas of teacher and changed also
some order of the scenes and their contents. We didn’t have that much different
dynamics in final work, so we also try to do some changes inside the scenes. We
also decided clothes which we would use in performance.
The day of peformance finally arrived and we prepared
everything before the presentation. We were little bit scared would it rain
that day, because all the performance was outside, but luckily the weather
favored us and just in that moment didn’t rain. Anyway our start of the
performance was little bit late, because about 10 minutes before tha rain
stopped and we really had to hurry to put clothes on etc., because we were
pretty sure that we would present it next day due to rain.
It was really nice that we had pretty much audience to
follow the presentation and everything went according to the plans and there
weren’t any suprises, which we weren’t prepared for. Everyone knew well their
role in every scene and put everything to those; everyone really threw oneself
to improvise. We were happy for the whole presentation afterwards.
After the presentation, next day, we saw the film, which
teacher had filmed of our presentation. It was really happy and full of humor
and I think that we succeed to bring important moments in FMH to the
presentation, which was the goal of the work. There were also many
improvisation tecniques included to the presentation, even though they weren’t
that obvious always. All in all final work was succesful and I learnt a lot.
