Research - 10 Facts about the East End

10 Facts about the East End

1. Given that London is notorious for its traffic it only seems fitting that the first traffic light in the world was erected in the East End. It was put up in 1868 outside the House of Commons; unfortunately it exploded the following year.
2. Captain James Cook first met Elizabeth Batts when she was a young child in Wapping; they married in 1762 and lived in Mile End, the East End of London.
3. The first ship to ever be built and launched was in the East End, it was called The Greyhound.
4. One of the first people to sight Australia was Zachariah Hicks and he was from the East End.
5. Such excellent peppermints were created by a company in the East End, called C & E Mortons that Madagascar used them as a form of money.
6. The first ever British female to qualify as a doctor was born in the East End; due to Britain’s refusal for women to study she had to study in Paris.
7. Slavery was finally abolished in 1833, around 15,000 people were freed and most of these were found living in the East End.
8. Many of whom set foot in Britain for the first time in the local docks. In the 17th century the East End became the home of many Huguenot refugees who fled from persecution in France.
9. A bell tower marks the radius of the East End, if you can hear it your in this part of London, if you cannot then you are not.
10. Fish and chips were the East End of London's signature meal and over half the population ate it.

Evaluation of East End Tales

Evaluation of East End Tales
As the end of the term nears our class looked back on the rest of the term and talked about the play itself. Fin Kennedy created a aura of shock and a huge emotional state towards the readers and I feel that during the performance our group relayed that same emotional state.

We did this by using the sounds we produced with the bond of silent movement. These two effects helped give our piece the shock we needed and the negative emotion to the audience. Furthermore, by using the way we performed the play through physical theatre we created a higher level and more complex piece rather than a simple literal piece. However, this type of performance comes at a huge cost. Sometimes, the audience were confused about the plot and what we were acting out. For example, my parents had no idea what the shopping tale with the old women ordering bread and beans was about as they couldn't follow it clearly. In addition, some of the scenes were very long, almost 3 to 4 pages so we would have to cut them to make sure we could fit the length of the performance on schedule, by doing this we would also cut quite important parts of the play of which the audience would have needed to fully understand the plots.

The play itself is set in, of course, the East End in London, many of us from the school actually live in the East End so it was simple to try and describe it, for example Ms Lee said that she hears sirens during the night. Some people in our class went a step further to try and produce and East End accent which, to describe it simple, is very relaxed and low pitched. My character in particular was Caribbean and is described as sly, with a storm brewing in his eyes. To make this emotion visible to the audience I had a slight clench in one of my fists to imitate anger.

Though we worked on our individual scene for weeks we still had a lot of lines to learn for the show. The entire ending had to be learned by someone to perform and with only 2 hours left until the shows began I took up the lines and began learning them I added actions on the way to make sure the characters thoughts were clear to the audience and when the final show came about we were ready for the performance. My favourite scene from the play has got to be the boys tale, I feel during this scene we really used the physical theatre to describe the men of the East End such as drinking beer in the bar or smoking a cigar etc.

In conclusion, I have learned a lot about physical theatre during this term. I had a ruff idea that it was to do with sounds and physically using your body to convey emotions but I didn't realise that vocals could also be used to a high extent too with the combination of sounds, vocal and physical movement the East End Tales play by Fin Kennedy was a perfect pick to use the unique type of theatre.    

Lesson 8 + 9

Lesson 8 + 9
In this lesson we finally finished off more or less all of our tales for the East End Tales play. Furthermore, another teacher came in the lesson to learn a little about us as she is going to cover Mondays lesson.

As always we started off the session with a warm up between both classes and also talked about the common group performances of which I have a ticket for next week. When we separated into two classes the first thing we did was get straight to our taxi driver scenes. These scenes are when we introduce the play by being a taxi driver who sees lots of people and events everyday. In our piece in particular we showed the driver character with the actions tired and worn out. However, we showed how sometimes he enjoyed his job and the different people he meets everyday with positive sentences and by also the emotion he is saying the line in.

As always we performed our scenes to the class and practised to refine them even more. We used articulation and physical movement mostly during performing as they would help us achieve a higher grade which would make the piece better. We finally finished the boys and girl tales (tales 1 + 2) and they came out very well. The physical theatre that we did had sound effects, character and was easy to follow. However, the girl's group also included smooth transactions of which we need to improve on. To do this I will rehearse in my own time the order of the tale for example which line comes first etc.

Our individual scenes have also went well during these two lessons as we finally can run it through from start to finish. However we still need to polish up the order and memorise it because we sometimes have trouble remember which part of the scene we are in and where we are supposed to be.

In conclusion, these two lesson we have completed two out of the three scenes I am performing and the third just needs a little more finalizing and then we would be completely ready for the performance.

My targets for these weeks are:

1. Finalize my final scene
2. Keep in focus
3. Use more vocal techniques rather than physical

Lesson 7

Lesson 7
In this lesson we made astounding progress with out East End Tales piece in not just one of the groups but all of them. In our class 2 groups have already finished the outline of their tales and are working on polishing and finalizing them. Although, our group alongside the other 2 have one more week to finish our tales I feel that we can still create a distinction level piece of theatre.

A number of changes were made this week regarding the usually warm up, firstly the 2 classes will now warm up together in one room instead of being split into 2 separate rooms. However, as soon as the warm up is finished we will still return to the usually classes. Our first activity was to improvise a scene where four people would be placed in the shape of a diamond and perform various actions with a word. As we continued more people stood up and joined the diamond until the whole group was together chanting and copying the actions that the person at the front of the diamond was doing. The leaders were rotated until more or less every person in the room had an opportunity to improvise some moves.

While we did not work on the tales where the boys and girls were split up we made huge progress on our individual group tales. Our group in particular managed to create a well thought out scene with only 1/4 left from completion. My targets from the start of the lesson was to cooperate more with the group instead of hanging back where the decisions were already made for me and by the time it was the end of the lesson I was already speaking and putting out some of my ideas to the group. Furthermore, from this I have learned to never hold yourself back when there is a clear opportunity for you. However, I had also learned that I need to clearly explain some of my ideas as my group thought they wouldn't work, of which I have to agree with them.

Nevertheless, this lesson we made more progress than any other lesson before and I hope we continue to do so in the future. However, although I have learned many techniques and such from these lessons I have discovered I have a lot to work on some of these issues are.

1. Staying In Focus
2. Cooperating with my group further
3. Articulating and projecting my lines

Lesson 6

Lesson 6
In this lesson we continued with our progression with the play "East End Tales". Ms Lee, our normal teacher for Thursday lessons, was absent so with had Mr Crowther as a cover. Nevertheless, we started the lesson with two warm ups: Splat, the reaction and focus based game and a new exercise called "Honey I love you". This game involves a main person who selects a target from the middle of a circle the rest of the group has created. He/She then walks over to their chosen target and says "Honey I love you". The aim of the game is to make the target laugh or giggle by actions or the words. However, if the other person doesn't laugh or giggle then they would have to say back to the approaching person, "Honey I love you too but I just can't laugh.". If they do laugh then they are simply out of the game and watch the duration of the warm up.

As we were told last lesson, the boys and girls from our class would be split up in two large groups. I was part of the boys which were performing tale 2 from the play and the girls tale 1. These tales both had a resemblance in that the main purpose of it was to describe another character, one a 18 year old boy and one a 21 year old women. The boys were chosen to perform the scene with the women, the girls the opposite. We used the physical theatre we had been practised in previous lessons as separate groups and combined our ideas and techniques as one. Some of these techniques were narration, timing and the wave. For example, during the beginning of the scene we set the background as a pub, we incorporated the wave through raising our glasses as though we were drinking in a consistent timing from right to left.

After this we split up into our individual tales, of which my group made great progress on. Though the performance was a little ruff we finally had a secure start for the rest of the tale as we worked though 3 entire paragraphs. We obtained helpful feedback from the rest as the finish of our scene most of which was to do with "polishing" the timing of our actions and other related things.

In conclusion, I feel that we have made huge progress this week through our individual tales and the start of the group tales and I'm positive that we will continue that same progress next term.         

Lesson 5 - Monologues

Lesson 5 - Monologues
In this lesson we performed our monologues to the whole class. As usual, we started with two warm ups which got us into the mood of theatre. Splat and the improvisation game were our two picks for today, of which the improvisation game helped me the most because our Monday lessons are based on the topic improvisation. It also helps actors react to any situation they come across. For example, I was in a situation where my character jumped off a building on a burning trampoline. This kind of scenario is extremely different from what we are studying in class. This shows that acting isn't always the same character types: sad, happy or angry. It shows that there are so many different personalities in the world and to be able to portray the effectively we first need to know how they act and what they sense.

After we moved onto the monologues and I especially liked Amiya's performance. She built her monologue up with her character, not her. She used what she learned in class to accurately perform, in my opinion, the best monologue. The emotion that ran through her body clearly showed her character that she was acted which is very important in performing a monologue.

On the other hand, what I feel that most people, including myself, did while performing was trying to show emotion by using big actions. Although this can be effective while showing emotions related to happiness, most were sad or angry. To make the scenes better we need to be more subtle in our actions when showing sadness especially anger. A lot of people were throwing down chairs when the scene they were doing didn't have enough emotion in it for them to do this action. In reality, the characters would be more still and silent during sadness and if they were angry they would build up their feelings in the scene leading up to the final climax to release the emotion and return to a calmer state.

In conclusion, looking at other people's scenes has really made me think that acting appears like animals, in all different shapes and sizes. You make acting what you want it to be, if you want happiness in your scene then act happy, vice versa if you want anger as the emotion.         

Lesson 4

Lesson 4
In this lesson we began to cover the scenes that we are going to focus on over the next weeks to come and the same scene we are going to perform to our friends and family. We started with two warm ups; the simple reaction game, "splat"; and an improvisation game that our group calls "the bench game". Although these games do not seem very significant to us, I believe they serve the purpose of getting the whole group ready for the time ahead.

As soon as we were finished with splat and the bench game, we set forth to our next event. Splitting into groups of 4 we were told to perform an event that had happened in the East End. Analysing the news we were given in the form of a report, we identified that 15 gang members, the gang name not mentioned, were captured by CCTV lighting rockets; firing them at nearby police cars. Straight away my first emotion of the event was surprised, and it seemed the rest of the group had agreed with me so we went forward with the idea to mould our re-enactment with the objective to capture the aspect of surprise and shock to the audience as the report had to us.

After performing to the rest of the group we heard both positive and negative reviews. Most positive comments noticed our efforts to create the surprise in the scene and praised us for it. On the other hand, the negatives were the result of us spending too much time on one aspect, this being surprise. I have learned from this activity that spending too much time on one emotion in a scene can actually reflect back on the ways to improve it. If we aim to make a distinction scene then we need to cover all emotions to the same level that we did for the emotion surprise.

Using the knowledge from our previous scene, we had the opportunity to create a higher level one. Tale 6 from the play was our chosen act to use our skills on and we had just about every emotion there was to have about this crossing our minds while planning. With little time we figured that it would be nearly impossible to cram every single emotion into one scene so we focused on majors instead. Giving the best performance we could possibly give we earned a round of a applause signalling the lesson coming to a close. Today I learned many things such as focusing on individual emotions and hope to use these skills in the future ahead.