On Wednesday 11th May 2011, the Cloudbusting gang went to The West Yorkshire Playhouse to perform the fantastic play by Helen Blakeman. We got there at 10:45am, to be greeted by the other school Castleford High and Chris from the National Theatre in London. We were told the itinerary for the day and then departed for the rehearsal room in the First Floor building which is where we were going to start the day. Here we spent 2hours rehearsing which was a lot of help as we had changed a tremendous amount since the last productions and speaking for the stage crew, we needed a bit more practice as to what we were doing and when. Obviously we had no props and so we had to improvise, for example using a bench, a bin and 2 chairs for the 4 stairs, a chair for the table etc... This was quite amusing but also a bit annoying as the actors couldn't interact and act as they would have been doing with our proper props.
Once we had finished this, we Had lunch and went to do the lighting and tech rehearsal. This is so the tech guys knew what their cues were and the same for Miss Wallbank and Liam Gibson (our sound and light techs. This was quite laborious as it was stop start all the time but that gave the play a real sense of life. At this point we knew the play was coming to life and happening. Especially when the set went up. This, although stressed and hectic made everybody smile. Seeing our set up in the West Yorkshire Playhouse made us feel special.
After we had dinner, we changed into our costumes and went for the voice call. This is where Chris set us all out on stage and warmed up our voices with us by doing a number of different vocal and confidence building activities. We made silly faces to warm up our muscles in our face and then massaged our face. We also put our thumbs on our belly buttons to feel the muscles relaxing and contracting when we exhaled a letter or digraph. These consisted of p, d, s, c, o, t, g, h and b and digraphs of sh, ch, th and gr. Then we said words with the clusters involved. These were words like cougar etc...
Then Chris split the two schools so that half of the two were in the audience and the other half were on stage. Then we had to shout lines from the two scripts to the other group loud. He would then individually work on our diction and volume. As I don't have a line in the play, I used Megan's line: "Got it, Sparkle the dog, my dog sir!" I was told to make sure I pronounce the D's on both the dogs.
Then at 7:00pm we were up! It was time and there was no turning back (of course none of us wanted to!) and we were all excited and nervous all at the same time. Many people became paranoid about forgetting lines and cues etc... but overall it was a fantastic performance. We made one mistake that I noticed and that was that I was the only member of the crew that remembered to take the stairs off and so Tommy and Seb had to help me. The other set crew should have done it but they forgot and by the time they remembered it, it was too late. This didn't matter though because nobody noticed and the fabulous performance and everybodys excitement overruled this error.
We then had a 10 minute interval, then went to watch Castleford High with their performance of 'Too Fast'. I have to admit that 2 actors and their characters carried the perfromance and if it hadn't been for them, the play would have been extremely dull.
Either way everybody had a great time and we were all buzzing all night. This week we get the results back as to who has won the competition and which school is performing at the National Theatre in London. May the best school win... (I hope that's us!!!)
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