This weekend our musical theatre class gave its end-of-year performance for family and friends. In the month since the Vocal Aid concert, three weeks ago, we haven't done any singing or dancing, only drama. I'd prefer to be singing and dancing myself, but it's good to occasionally focus on just one discipline because it helps hone one's skills and stops one getting too lazy, especially if one is not a great fan of this particular discipline.
This term, our drama lessons were about doing text-based work, i.e. taking a script and performing it. In the past we've done character-building (both physical and emotion-based techniques), chorus work, contact theatre and similar, so working from text is a bit of a change.
Instead of giving us one big play to do as a class, our drama teacher (Toni Attard) had us pair up and each pair got a ten-minute two-hander, with the exception that one play was performed by five people. Some people weren't around because of exams and going abroad, but there were still fifteen of us left.
I had the choice of a comedy or a straight play, and at first I was going to go for a comedy because I find that a lot easier to do (straight plays require more work in my opinion). But Mr. Director said it would be a shame if I copped out of what he had in mind, so I bit the bullet tried my hand at something serious.
It turned out to be a play about a mother and a daughter, and I got to be the daughter. My co-performer was a good friend of mine, which was nice and made the whole thing more fun, and probably helped us because we had to portray a close relationship.
My character was a woman about my age, just come from a New Year's Eve party, while my partner played an ill woman twenty years older, just absconded from hospital. We both were barefoot for the scene, and I found it hilarious that to get into character she had to take nailpolish off her toes and I had put nailpolish on mine. I also had to wear makeup, managed to dig some up, but don't think I've seen my mascara since I got married.

I haven't been in that many performances, but I'm finding that the part I like the least is the bit at the beginning when you're not really sure what to do with yourself and you spend most of your time blocking. Should I sit down? Should I stand up? Does this look OK? Does this look silly? Um, what's my line?
Our drama teacher always says that you can't really start to work on a piece until you KNOW YOUR LINES, and I think this is more or less true. I only started to enjoy the whole thing when we got to the point where we both knew our lines (sort of) and could do the thing without having one hand full of script, because that's when you can start to find the little things to do with your body, like how to fidget in character. And when I'm not frantically thinking, urgh, what's my next line?, then I can think instead of how to say it, which is pretty much the point, no?
We got to perform in the music room at St. James Cavalier, and on Saturday our call time was a whole five hours before performance, but this was because it included final tweakings for six ten-minute plays, dress rehearsal, preparing all the stage-managing and so on. There was also plenty of time for hanging out in the cafe while other people rehearsed, and I really enjoying just chatting with my classmates.
I enjoyed the whole thing actually, because I wasn't nervous about performing (for once). That's the nice thing about informal shows, you get the experience without necessarily the pressure!
Watching everyone else's pieces was cool, seeing people do their thing and thinking, wow, that looks really good. Mike was in a different play to mine, so I got to watch him act, which I rarely get to do. He did really well - he was in a comedy, and he's got a gift for comic improvisation, so watching him and his partner (who also did a great job) was hilarious.

The actual performance went very well, no-one bombed terribly. One cast needed a couple of prompts, one cast accidentally skipped half a page of script, and we skipped a bit in ours too, but only one line, and it's not like it was crucial to the plot *grin*.

So that was a great end to the year, and now I have a summer of unoccupied Monday evenings to look forward to.