Personal Statement

Michaela Spinks-Personal Statement

My inspiration for going into event management stems from my love of organising the theatre productions I have taken part in. I knew this was a keen path for me after I did my first performance at GCSE, and after taking two art subjects at A level, I learned how to structure my time management and balance out my work. Also, taking Drama at GCSE and Theatre at A level, has allowed me to express my inner capability to take on independent challenges such as organising outside rehearsals and creating our own scripts.

I have learnt and developed many techniques throughout working with a number of people in my classes, ranging from learning to compromise our ideas and allowing them to proceed forward. Being involved in performing arts has allowed me to develop confidence within myself when it comes to talking to new people and being put on the spot. Constructive critiques to my work helps me become more versatile, and more willing to put myself out for a challenge.

Throughout my education I have participated in numerous activities, including a solo performance for me theatre exam, which highlighted my independence when it comes to working by myself. I am currently devising a contemporary Shakespeare piece with my classmates working towards our A2 production. This has been a challenge because we had to take charge ourselves, and complete our performance within a given deadline.

I also used to be part of gymnastic club and cheerleading club for a few years, and also took part in horse riding lessons. Participating in these experiences has helped me build on my skills of becoming more expressive and confident. Cheerleading in particular has helped me improve my teamwork and trust in other people. This would help me as I am diverse and capable of arranging organisations for different events.

My photography and graphics course at A level is very time consuming due to the amount of coursework I get from them. Even though both deadlines tend to be close together, I keep myself organised by keeping folders and files for each project so they do not get mixed up. I feel organisation is a key skill as an events manager would need them, incase they have one or more projects on at once, I feel I could cope with this pressure.

I think events management is the right course for me to take as I can take control of my time management, allowing equal time to all my subjects. I am reliable and creative, this is also some key features I think an events manager would need. This highlights my versatility, and capability for becoming an events manager.

Michaela Spinks-SWED 2

Michaela Spinks-SWED 2

Our stimulus for our devised piece this year was a Shakespearean text. With this, we were to devise a play using Shakespeare.

Research:

Each person in my group had an area to research within the Elizabethan period. The topic I researched was “Punishments and Crime”. All crimes were met with violent, cruel punishments, resulting in being witnessed by hundreds of other people. Some of these executions were seen as exciting days out for the lower class.  The most common crimes ranged from High Treason, Sedition, Rebellion, Murder and also witchcraft. For those people who were in sheer desperation and abject poverty (otherwise known as commoners) were known to crimes such as Theft, Poaching, Forgers, Adultery and Fraud. Those who were the most hated prisoners who had usually been convicted of treason, was given the most barbaric and dreadful punishment of being Hung, Drawn and Quartered. This showed the fear amongst the society in Elizabethan England, as stepping one foot out of line would result in them being severely punished for something that may not even be their fault. To incorporate this into our group performance, depending on the play we choose, we can show this fear from the characters, as crime or rebellion is apparent throughout a lot of Shakespeare’s plays.

Another form of research was looking into various practitioners and seeing if their style of work would be appropriate for our play. We were put into pairs and given a practitioner to research between us. My pair and me were to look at Berkof, whom I found was a good choice for my group. Berkof is a British practitioner, who’s known for his productions in the west end to include Shakespearean slang to create a complexity nut pairing it with “low” cockney slang and swearing. Berkof depends on a lot of physical movement to highlight to the audience that they can focus on the actions to understand the plot. Berkoffian actors tend to use techniques such as background movement, repetitive action and mime to explore further the way in which Berkof approaches exchanges between two characters. I thought the use of repetitive actions or speech would be a good way to highlight certain words of certain movements, as the audience would realise they have been repeated and then question it, which allows them to begin a thought process. Another pair in the class looked at Artuad, and again his style of unnatural style of work was represented through the use of words replaced by sounds. This would be effective by allowing the audience to think deeper into what’s happening. When more than one actor plays the same character, it highlights that’s particular scene by emphasizing what the character is doing. When trying out the style of Artuad in my group, we thought it worked well with highlighting and showing the significance of certain characters e.g. The Witches.

Once my group had decided on the play Macbeth, we allocated each other with certain themes to look into that were apparent in the chosen play. I was given the theme “loyalty and guilt”, which I believe is apparent throughout the whole play. I found that loyalty linked to the friendship between Macbeth and Banquo and Macbeth and Duncan, and guilt comes in through Macbeth destroying that loyalty between them by killing them both to get him what he wants. To further my research, I looked into the theme of manipulation, and thought this clearly linked in with Lady Macbeth encouraging Macbeth to commit the famous murder of King Duncan. Using her authority as his wife, she persuades him to do the deed with her true intentions uncovered. I then started questioning whether Macbeth would have gone through with the murder without his wife’s encouragement, whether he had done it out if love to please her or even show he has his own mind and is in control of his own actions. The theme of power also linked in because I feel that without this vision of how having power would be, would Lady Macbeth be so willing to go ahead with this crime knowing what the punishments were. I also think it shows cowardice from her as if she thinks becoming king and queen would be so goof, why wouldn’t she just do it herself? 

Theatre A2: SWED

Our stimulus for our devised piece this year was a Shakespearean text. With this, we were to devise a piece of Shakespearean text, documenting our thought process along the way, with our research as evidence. The class was then split into two groups of 5, and then went through research and putting our idea together.

My first bit of indivual research was looking into society within the Elizabethan period. I looked into how bad the punishments were back then (hanging was most common), and also looked into the two main religions which were around at that time (Catholic and Protestant).

As a class, we were put into pairs and given a practitioner to evaluate. I looked into Burkof, whom is known for his use of relying on actions and movement to tell the story. If accents were used, or difficult or intense scenes were apparent, Burkoff would limit the speech, but increase the moves to allow the body to explain the story, or show a certain characters emotions. Another practitioner I was interested in was Arto. His use of no words, just sounds was very interesting, as it was quite unnatural and difficult to show. However I did like how he made more than one person play a character at the same time. This specifically emphasised a particular scene, which helped highlight certain parts of the play. When doing a task on Arto, we were given a piece of paper which had an action, an impossible action, to had to complete this action as if it was completely normal and was accomplishable. I found this very difficult as my action was to crawl into the floor. I found this not only physically challenging but also mentally challenging, as it didn't feel natural, and because I knew it was impossible, I had already got this idea in my head that I couldn't do it so there wasn't much point in trying. I feel I let my thoughts get the better of me and I didn't take it seriously when it could have been more helpful than I thought at the time.

My group decided on the play "Macbeth", as we thought this covered many different themes which we could show amongst our performances, and also thought the characters had a lot of depth to them. I looked at the website "BBC Bitesize" and they explained all the themes in Macbeth and showed how each character links in with these themes. I particularly looked into the theme of "loyalty and guilt" and found that this triggered in with the main plot on the play (Macbeth killing Duncan along with his wife's encouragement). I then got onto the theme of manipulation, which is apparent through Lady Macbeth to Macbeth, showing her persuasion and her status as his wife to get into his head and influence an idea. This could then continue on to how some men are mentally quite feminine, and some women mentally quite masculine. Another theme I looked into was power, but I wanted to dig deeper into the real power of the play as i felt the power of becoming King or Queen wasn't the only power apparent. One form of power that I think is important is this power of love, the way it can be used as an excuse for some people's actions, but also shows how some people use it to their advantage, as a way to get what they want.

We also came up with the overall scenario of the play, and we settled on the idea of a court room, with it being the trail of Duncan's murder. We thought this would be a great way to show Macbeth's side of the story, allowing us to do flash backs to show the influence from the witches and the encouragement and manipulation from his wife. This would then result to the audience becoming the jury, and using plaque cards deciding whether they think it's Macbeth or Lady Macbeth to declare guilty for the murder. This would then include forum theatre and allow the audience to become part of the play. However when talking to our teachers about this idea, they mentioned that seeing as our ruling idea is illusion, will the court take away this theme and allow the play play to be remembered for the trial. I understand what they are saying as when people think back to the play, the main memory will be the trail and the end result. Therefore we would have to find a way to highlight the illusion a lot more than the trial, maybe changing the set, still having it remain as a courtroom however not having it set out like one.

One lesson in which we had both teachers input into our group work, became very practical resulting in us getting a lot more ideas and an outside view of the audiences opinion. I feel this helped because it allowed us to strategically think about our staging and how it was going to come across to others. As our ideas got shared, we started bouncing off each others energy, and this aloud our ideas to flow and come together more than they have done previously. Also, the teachers weren't afraid to tell us if our ideas wouldn't work, or if they think they could be changed in some way, and this was good because when our groups or our own, I personally fell mean saying no to someones idea if I don't think it'll work or if i don't think it's necessary, as they may have a different view on how it would work. As a result of this, I had mentioned to my group, that if someone has an idea we should just act it out, try it and see if it could work, whether we have an idea of speech or characters, still just go along with it because sometimes the spontaneous work turns out to be the best.

We also spent one lesson going through the script together highlighting all the words and lines we think were appropriate and would work well in our piece. I do think this took up a lot of time, however it did allow us to come up with more ideas along the way e.g. certain phrases or words that were not so important in their original scene, however could be used more efficiently in another.