PLTS: Effective Participator

Discuss and resolve concerns:

I’ve argued a bit when Olly didn’t pull his weight or learn his lines.  We were also worried we wouldn’t meet the deadline and wished we could just have had a block of rehearsals.  We tried to rectify this by arranging after school rehearsals and staying in at lunch and break times.  Also, when discussing when we could rehearse after school, Frankie, Jack and Olly all gave the days they were available and the days they were busy so that we could come up with a date suitable for everybody.

Present a persuasive case for action:

We had to persuade each other on the topics to do in the first place.  Frankie wanted to gender equality but I wanted to do political correctness with a fairy tale theme so we combined the ideas and did gender equality with a fairy tale theme.  When trying to talk us into doing her idea, Frankie pointed out that it was a unique idea, totally different to the other groups and we could make it different and our own.

Propose practical ways forward, breaking these down into manageable steps:

We broke down the process of creating the song.  We wrote it, came up with the chord pattern, identified which instruments we were going to play, learnt our parts and rehearsed them individually then we rehearsed as a group and identified where things didn’t work and changed and adjusted when we were playing, when we weren’t and made sure we had all our cues down.  We then practiced the final piece until we were ready to record it.  We also planned ahead as to what we were going to do in the after school rehearsals and gave time slots for each task or activity we were going to do.  We were going to run through the scene changes and lines, have a draft run through and allow for pauses and corrections to be made then get into costume and have a full uninterrupted run through with no stopping, even if something went wrong.

Identify Improvements:

We improved our piece towards the end of the process by adding a scene which included audience participation.  We wanted to do a proper workshop and have a hot seating session and maybe a forum theatre activity but we were struggling to get the drama finished, never mind a workshop so the additional scene acted as our workshop kind of as it included audience participation.  After watching the video of our after school rehearsal on 9^th June, Frankie and I discussed our concerns and all the things that could have gone better and what we should improve on.  We then presented these concerns to the boys who worked with us to improve the piece.

Influence others, balancing diverse views:

We didn’t really have much of a problem with diverse views but when there was a disagreement, which happened rarely, we discussed as a group the more practical option as we were on quite a tight schedule and racing against time to get the piece done.  If we had longer, then i think that some of the ideas we dismissed would have been considered more.  Olly expressed his opinion of the additional scene when we first set it and convinced us to go ahead with it as I was a bit dubious about adding another scene when the rest of it still needed to be worked on however, he convinced us to make it a permanent part of the performance and I’m glad we did as it served as our workshop and was the most successful part of the performance in my opinion as we got the audience thinking.

Act as an advocate for views and beliefs that may differ from their own:

My character’s views were pretty similar to my own thought maybe at little bit stronger than mine as he was fussier than I am about Olly’s characters comments, views and actions.  Olly’s character however, was very different to himself as was Jack’s as they both made really obvious, deliberate sexist comments which they wouldn’t normally do.