Double - Children's Theatre (FMF) - Blog 1 - 05/10/15

Today, we started our Children's Theatre Unit! We looked over the specification of the unit in order to get a full overview of this unit.

We first began brainstorming ideas for which children's story we would do! To the right are our initial generic ideas. We, first, listed a few of our own favourites stories from our own childhood; we figured if we enjoyed them while we were young, then the children of today might! These ideas included Horrid Henry, Gruffalo, Winnie The Pooh, Flat Stanley and Keeper and Golden Key.

Next we took into account when we would be performing our production: Christmas! We all thought it would be great for children if we could supply them with a Christmas themed show when the big day is only right around the corner from the date of our production. Our ideas for a Christmas themed story were Rudolph, A Christmas Carol, The Grinch and Frozen (although it's not technically a Christmas movie, it is still associated with Christmas by children).

Following this we led onto the idea of superheroes; from us who had younger siblings, we confirmed that superheroes are very popular with young children so we decided to keep in mind Batman and Superman as they're the most well-known superheroes and also Spiderman as he is easily the most child friendly superhero.

Furthermore, we studied the idea of nursery rhymes as they are always popular with children of an infant school. The lighthearted nature and morals conducted are reasons why they're perfect for children's theatre. Our only speed bump with that idea is that nursery rhymes tend to be very short so we would have to perform a compilation of them. This would mean a lot of costume changing which could alter the entertainment value of the performance and we preferably didn't want to deal with.

We also focused on Pantomimes, once it was suggested, for quite a while. We were still keeping in mind the Christmas theme and how some families can't afford to pay to see a pantomime at their local theatre, so we thought it would help break the wealth barrier between children. To the right were our ideas for pantomimes with our favourites highlighted.

Additionally, we wanted to analyse two of the biggest names in children's stories, Roald Dahl and Dr Seuss. We wanted to perform a story which children would be familiar with and is iconic in the world of children's stories! To the right are our ideas on which stories we could do with our favourites highlighted.

After assessing all the areas of children's stories we wanted we decided to eliminate some options from our favourites. We wanted to be down to one pantomime, one Dr Seuss story and one Roald Dahl story.

For pantomimes, we decided that Peter Pan would be the best story to go with as it's well known story and there's plenty of techniques we can use including Round-By-Through and lifts to create the illusion of flying and stage combat and contact improvisation.

For Dr Seuss, we agreed on The Grinch as our favourite option. Not only is it very popular with children of an infant school age and a staple character in any childhood, but it's also coming up to Christmas and what with it being Christmas themed, it would be a great match.

For Roald Dahl, we were very unsure with which story to go for. With Matilda we could potentially include multiple songs to have the children sing along to, but with some of us lacking confidence in singing, this would restrict us on how we would perform the songs. With Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we had the potential to dedicate ourselves to each child with the golden ticket and we can use lots of dancing and physical theatre with disappearance of each one, but we felt that this story was far too overdone so our audience would be not as captivated. With Fantastic Mr Fox, we have the potential to have a motif with all of the farm raids and although the story is familiar with children, they may not actually know everything about it which will give us the opportunity to introduce them to something new.

Upon analysing our choices, we made a shortlist of our top 3 favourites. This list consisted of The Grinch, Peter Pan and Fantastic Mr Fox. We decided to write a chart to analyse which would be the best choice and weigh out the pros and cons. To the right is the chart.

After analysing this chart we decided to go with Fantastic Mr Fox. Next lesson we will get down to business with Mr Fox and decide what we want to happen with it.