Final work

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.