100 YEARS EVALUATION

100 years was an amazing experience to be a part of. I don't understand why most of Y13 theatre were selling it short to potential audience members. The amount of time I heard someone say "it's shit" was ridiculous, and I had a friend actually say "why did you guys say it was shit, it was really good" after watching the show. I think the reason for everyones hesitance to be proud of our work was because we had not seen the whole show put together ourselves, and therefore only had opinions on the bits that we had already seen. Also it is an obvious assumption that the ensemble of a play will have a much more critical opinion of the show than audience members because the ensemble has seen the work in its creation and development stages, as well as the final product. 


I believe that the way we put together the show was very efficient and beneficial way to get a lot of high quality physical theatre work created in a very small amount of time. At the beginning of the process to create our final piece 100 years, all of the duet partners and solo artists were placed into one of three separate groups with separate directors depending on which one was most relevant to the work we had already created. Jacks group were the soldiers, Tim's group were the couples, and Simon's group were the wives. We then spent several weeks in these groups creating physical theatre work by using stimulus from  A LOT OF POETRY (which I loved because I am a poetry fanatic) and also letters and account of war veterans, and using sections or moments within some of the duets and solos created to expand upon and develop into whole group pieces. One example of this was Immie's work: myself and Imogen were both in the 'wives' group with Simon as our director. As a class all the wives watched back Imogens solo performance from last term and then we all discussed the good bits and not so good bits within the piece, the inspiration for some of the movements, and how we could develop and extend on moments within Immie's solo. Over the course of a few weeks we used her work as our main stimulus to create "the bit with the boxes" which was my personal favourite moment in the show. We also read several poems and war veteran letters to use as lines in this section of the piece.



Overall I really enjoyed working on this project and I think it was very important for us as young active theatre makers in london to look back on the first world war and to remember the brave men who fought and died and educate ourselves even more on the facts of the war. Also I think it was even more important to create some theatre inspired by the events of the first world war, and then to combine that historical context with modern values and attributes so that we could show our modern audience that despite the first world war happening 100 years ago it is still as relevant as ever in today's society. I think the show went really really well, and I am so proud of every member of the ensemble. I think the atmosphere created was so tangible and palpable to not only the audience but us as performers as well. I believe this was because each ensemble member was emotionally connected to the moment and emotionally connected to the stimulus of our piece.