The Goal
Our original idea was to create a performance that impressed the audience and thought them the troubles of poverty in India. We wanted to recreate real stories that happened recently in India, such as a school beating or a sexist conversation at school. We would use circus skills as symbols of rolls and status symbols and all in all it was a pretty good idea.
The Problem
After several weeks of practicing, researching and rehearsing it was clear we would never make the performance we wanted. People were confused about the complicated was of performing, and while some found it simple, other newer students were struggling. We did not have enough time to get the performance back on track, and students were losing the original enthusiasm.
The Solution
When the performance was barely a week away I decided to talk to the teacher about our problem. I told him that we were not going to get our original idea done, and instead of wasting what little time we had left trying, we should try to salvage the skills that people learnt. I said that everyone had a skill that an audience would be impressed by, so we should use that. We ended up doing a much simpler performance that involved people performing their skills while a narrator read information about the problem in India. The class agreed on this, and we got to work.
The Performance
Sadly on the day of the performance I was unwell. My unique yoyo skill that no one could replace was removed from the production because of my absence. However, I managed to see a recorded version of the performance so I can still say how it went. There were very few mess ups and it flowed well with the music. Everyone that wanted to got to perform their trick, and they were performed well. The audience was not very engaged but I think that this was due to the lack of circus experience. It takes a specific skill set to bring the noise and emotion out of an audience, and I do not think that we had that quite covered. I think that in the end, we were smart to choose our simple but clean performance over the ambitious one that cost us most of our time. I think that in the beginning we were to bold with what we wanted, and that if we had met a middle group between ambition and realism, combined with the full extent of our given time, the performance could have gone better. But nevertheless we did a good job deliver what I thought was a well performed piece.
