8 Year Old Self – Children’s Party

To increase our understanding of the characteristics and behaviours of children (so that we can improve our acting during our performances), we had to be in the role of our 8 year old selves at a children’s party. During this party, there were a lot of games, such as musical chairs, musical statues, pass the parcel and other traditional children’s games. The purpose of this was to understand how energetic young children are and that they find it very difficult to sit still, and they have a shorter attention span. This also helped us explore how we felt we acted as a child and remember the interests that we had, so that we can use this in our performances to keep the audience interested and entertained. To get into character and get fully immersed into being in a children’s party, we had to arrive in costume – we were told to dress up as our favourite superhero or cartoon character. This was because children, generally, really like to dress up and dressing up as who they admire makes them feel better about themselves and brings their mindsets out of the real world temporarily as a form of escapism for fun. I dressed up as Iron Man because I really liked and admired the character growing up and I feel that it would be a costume that my 8 year old self would really like to wear.

Interview with my 8 year old self – https://youtu.be/9yduotolRTI

Vlog after the party – https://youtu.be/gpZ0Ajwf1zU

Notes:

• Emotional memory – bringing back memories as a child and how you felt at that time improves the delivery of the performance to make it more realistic for the audience.
• Energy – children have a lot of energy so it is important to match them so that the performance is more interesting and they pay attention at all times.
• Don’t be patronising or aggressive towards them – they may be smarter than you initially think and you don’t want to upset them as this should be an enjoyable experience for them.
• Most children don’t have good attention spans, so keep things interesting, difficult and full of energy every minute that you are on stage. They have a big sense of wonder, so keeping things different is key.
• Some of them may not have access to theatre, so we may be the influencer and catalyst for them to study drama or just be there to give them an experience that they haven’t had before that could be important for the future.