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