Faustus Performance Analysis

Faustus Performance Analysis

Following to mine and Magic's performance of Faustus I now need to do a performance evaluation on how I did and comment on the rest of the class.

The criteria for the performance to evaluate myself and others on is the following:

• Confidence in performance
• Clarity
• Strong vocal
• Use of space
• Self directed
• Movement
• Understanding
• Voice + Movement = Characterisation

Prior to my performance I was very nervous as I was extremely worried about forgetting my lines or messing them up and as it is written in old language it is more difficult to improvised if I was to forget any words to my dialogue. Before we went in to do our assessment, Magic was feeling the same and we were both struggling to get the words into our head. So we kept on going over and over the scene alternating doing it once with the script and then without and so on. This really helped me as it got the dialogue into my head and i felt a lot more confident to do my assessment. 

When we watched back on the performance I felt that I had a good strong clarity to my voice and when watching back I could clearly hear every word that I said. I felt this was a good thing to pick out and realize because I wanted to have this well spoken and clearly heard voice because the character that I was playing was very mysterious and I wanted to have a strong vocal come across which then lead to a change in volume when appropriate when i spoke. There was a moment where I shouted and got a bit angry and there was a distinctive change in volume which was appropriate to the text and characterisation. 
A weakness to my performance was that I did forget some of the lines and I did have to use improvisation to keep myself on track and stay in character. I managed to get the general gist of some of my lines as I was trying to visually seem my script and remember what it said which did work as I didn't lose focus and I was able to carry on and not come out of character and managed to cover it well. 
A bit more movement and contact could have been use in our scene, there was some but more could have been used however I was worried about my lines being forgotten.
It looked effective when I started to circle Magic when he was saying his last bit of dialogue as it gave a sinister feel to the piece and reinforced our self direction of wanting my circling around him to be seen as his thoughts circling and going round his head. 

When watching other people's scenes back I really liked Beth and Catrina's scene and their use of physical theatre when they used John and Josh as a chair and a desk. The reason why I liked this is because it have the whole class performance a different dimension and direction to the piece as it created a new level of interest which I felt worked really well and was really interesting to watch.

I also really liked Ellie and Josh's piece as they used the idea of split personality and they shared the part of Faustus and used the idea of almost the good and bad side to him talking and they had very strong use of characterisation and the frantic thoughts and feelings of Faustus. There was very minimal movement in their scene, but I feel it really worked as I don't think it needed to have lots of movement as it would have taken it away from their scene and their dialogue. 

A weakness that I picked up was that Saxona forgot some of her lines, however she still stayed in character and Cherkanah also stayed in character and was able to cover it well and carry on as normal. Cherkanah took the initiative to keep going with her lines when sax forgot which was fine because they both stayed in character and if you didn't know the piece and what their scene should have been like from an audience point of view I don't think you would have noticed. 

Grace in her scene did forget some of her lines, however instead of trying to carrying on she did say 'no' in the middle of her scene as if she couldn't carry on which was a shame for her to have done that because she could have got herself out of the situation by taking her time instead of saying no and coming out of her character. John who she was partnered with did extremely well by digging her out of a few holes and helping her get on track with his brilliant character skills. John really did well in his scene because he had great clarity to his voice and his characterisation skills were on point.

As a class I feel we all managed to do well in this performance because there were no real big mistakes that happened and if they did they all were covered really well. I believe that we all had strong clarity to our voice and all portrayed good scenes and was able to respond to our task well. Visually watching back the video of our performance it looked well spaced and the lighting was very good too having the red colour which gave a menacing feel to the performance which went well with the performance as it touches on themes of hell and the devil and overall i feel visually it all worked. As a whole we should all be happy as it came across well presented and everyone worked hard in their scenes. 

The way in which the original performances back in Elizabethan times is compared to our performance was that back at the original the performances would have been performed outside at the Globe theatre whereas in our performance we performed it in our studio theatre inside. Originally performers would all have been men, now we have women in performances and we have the ability to have women and men cross play genders which originally it woud just be men doing both.

Dr Faustus Performance Assesment