Performing Arts

Around May 2007, I was in Year 9 and choosing my GCSE's that I would study during years 10 & 11. Me and 14 other people in my year out of 150 were offered a Performing Arts A.S Level Applied course to do two years early. I happily agreed, not realising that the teachers who would teach us through the 6 A level units knew as much about this course as the students. The first year went well. It was all about personal skill analysis and improvement and nothing to do with achieving higher than the next person. For example, improving from skill 1 to 4 for flexibility is better than improving from skill 2 to 4 for posture. We then dropped either Dance, Drama or Music and focus on the two subjects that we had left. After doing 2 assessments in Music, I dropped it and focused on improving the two I had chosen to keep to finish off the unit.
The next unit was about applying these skills that we had improved on to form our own company, distribute jobs (e.g. Artistic Director, Set Designer) and plan for an event/a show that would be organsied completely by the students with little guidance from our teachers. We were given an imaginary budget for things like hiring the venue and band, and a real budget of around £200. After a few lessons of discussion, we decided that we would not use a piece already made because along with songs that we would add in, this could go over our budget as we needed rights. We chose the theme of a boot/brat camp called 'And That's Why I'm Here' in which we would be in the camp for our own reasons, hopefully conveying this to the audience. A girl in the camp is there for burning down her 3 of her past schools and attempts to set the camp's tents on fire, most of us escape but 3 die: the girl who started the fire; a girl who found true love at the camp and a girl who was innocent all along. The show did not go according to plan and we received plenty of negative feedback from our teachers and needed to sort it out. We have been doing so for the past 2 weeks and have our performances on Thursday 11th & Friday 12th December.

Why am I telling you this? Because I've been more patient than I ever thought I could be. The boy whose role is Artistic Director is very controlling and fails to see when him and his closest friends are incorrect. If there is anything wrong with the show then the blame gets passed on to my friends and I which I find unfair and ridiculous, especially as him and his friends are the main problem. He is very popular in the Performing Arts area of my school. I admit he is a very good dancer and can act, but I feel that his abilities and character & dance vocabulary is limited. When I see him act, well, I don't. I still see him saying lines of a story he is pretending is his. I'm not saying I'm a fantastic actress, but I feel I am trying harder and doing a better job than he is. When he has the cheek to tell the rest of us apart from his precious friends that we need to act more and the next runthrough he is pissing about, that is where I draw the line. He can't sing a note in tune but I don't want anybody to tell him this. I'd rather he embarrass himself on stage next week. This will sound harsh I know, but his personality is awful (and his singing).

Anyway, we had an all day rehearsal today and apart from that fool, the show is pulling together and we actually received mostly positive feedback!

Hope you're all doing well. <3