introduction

this project is to create a external live performance for the Bradford police museum and and write a monologue.this will be for the people who are touring the museum. the skills I will be bringing to this will be characterisation, improv and creative skills.

Bradford Police Museum research.

The Bradford Police Museum was originally a Police Station in city hall and was in operation between 1874 and 1974. It was eventually renovated and transformed into the now museum which holds documents and memorabilia of the past and how crimes were dealt with in the past and what the police force was like back then. They host tours of the museum which also include tours of the original Victorian cells and the courtroom.

In the 1800’s, children were expected to work if over the age of 9 and lived in poverty. their jobs would be at factories, and in Bradford they would be working in the wool mills. Some of their roles in the industry were being scavenger, lap jointers and piecers.

this is important for research as it shows how poor the living conditions were even for children and that they would have to commit crimes such as theft in order to survive.

Monologue Research:

For this project, we were tasked with writing a monologue from the eyes of a criminal from the 1800’s. In order to prepare for writing this i researched about crime rates for the 1800’s and in doing so i found that while pickpocketing was really common, other things such as house-breaking and even murder were also quite as common. Punishments for commiting these crimes could be anything fron spending time jn jail to being hung. So for the monologue i decided to write from the eyes of a murderer who had been convicted and sentenced to be hung.

planning and production:

during one of our ambition hub sessions we didn’t set ourselves enough time for the tasks we needed to do. we solved this by instead of making a model bridge and improving upon it by making a second better bridge, we just made one bridge and added small improvements to it. the next problem we faced in this session was lack of communication as we didn’t talk to each other to figure out what the distance between the chairs we were using to support the bridge was going to be so the groups made 2 different sized bridges to suite their desired chair distance. the final problem we faced was that not everyone was included in their groups or were not participating. if they didn’t know or didnt have anything to do we would ask them to go around and see if anyone in the group needed help with anything.

for our small performance t the police museum, we encountered some problems. one of them was that we didn’t have appropriate costume for the time it was set. we overcame this by wearing our usual black clothes. for example, my role as the matron, matrons would wear these old maiden clothes however, since I don’t have an 1800’s maid outfit I had to improvise with what I had and ended up wearing a plain black shirt and skirt to show I was playing a female character and had to portray it. another issue we had to overcome was the we didn’t have any wigs for the judges so we had to improvise by using a white wig that the judges would have to wear when it was their turn to be performing.

the set for our performance was the courtroom in the Bradford police museum because we were doing a courtcase. for the props we only used a hammer which was used as evidence as murder. the lighting we used was natural lighting from the museum however, there were some lights but they kept Turing on and off which was weird because we didn’t know why they kept turning on.

rehearsal pictures and videos:

risk assesment

one of the risks we faced in the police museum were the stairs. for one, they had no railings so if you were to fall or trip, you only had the smooth wall to catch yourself so you would injure yourself either mildly or severely. one thing we could do to avoid slipping, falling or tripping on the stairs would be to tell the staff or building management that it is severely unsafe and railings are required.

another risk we faced at the police museum was the accessibility to the judges bench. there were no access point to the seat so the “judges” had to climb over a wall/barrier to get to the bench which could cause injury if they were to fall off of it while climbing to get over to the judge’s bench. one way to avoid this would be to add stairs or a little door in case in the future someone needed to get access in or out of the little place in emergencies such as fire.

one last risk i am going to mention is the risk of food and drink spillages. if someone were to have a drink in the room and spill it on the floor, the floor is quite slippy in some areas and liquid added to that would make it worse and a higher chance of slipping would cause injuries. one way to prevent this is to ban food and drink from entering the room with the person.

REFLECTION:

week 1: On our first day back we were doing dance and learning about a choreographer by the name of jonathan barlow. His style is very simplistic and is mostly used to show that you don’t have to be a “professional” dancer to tell a story. We were to create our own choreographed routine with a small group about the habits we have. this could include bad or good habits however most of us ended up coming out bad habits. some examples of the habits people displayed were nail biting, hair pulling, vaping/smoking and movements such as leg shaking and being unable to sit still and having to move around. I partnered up with jack and ollie where we portrayed our habit of smoking or vaping in a setting of being with strangers at a bus stop who are nervous but all secretly share the same habits. then we sat down and each of us and pointed out one of the habits someone has. on the Friday, we were told about our project and what we were doing. we were told about the monologues and what they were going to be about but it was our job to write it and learn it. we brainstormed ideas and then we went to the library to select some books about monologues to see how they are written and give us a general idea on how to write one. in the afternoon there was someone from a company called Open Door who came to talk to us about their free 8 month which gives opportunities to people aged between 18 and 30 which teaches them about different acting techniques. when they had finished we all went back to focusing on our monologues.

week 2: This week I was only in on the Friday. We researched our monologues and what we wanted to include in the monologues we were going to create and how to write them. we then went over to the police museum and had a tour around. we did a little bit of role play involving a court case and another tour member. during the tour, we learnt about the history of the building and what had happened. we also got a bit of information on one particular prisoner who was held there who we were going to be doing our own research on and create a performance surrounding a court case involving him. we learnt about some of the equipment they used back when it was a police station. in the afternoon we looked into the prisoner case, his name was John Jackson who was convicted of burglary and the murder of a warden he had killed in order to escape prison. we finally looked at some court cases that took place the 1800’s and 1900’s and what happened, and what their punishments were.

week 3: Again, I was only in on the Friday of this week where we looked at the names, dates and places that were important for John Jacksons case. this prompted us into doing further research into his case and what really happened because as we were looking at the evidence compiled against him we noticed a few missing things that made things look suspicious and convinced us he might have been more innocent than we originally thought. in the afternoon we decided we would do some research and improv on the case In question. we needed to research behaviour court and also what kind of manner of speaking we should use while in a court scenario. we all then sat down and gave each other feedback as to what could have been improved or what they did well.

week 5: on Thursday we worked on our monologues which I was grateful for as I hadn’t really worked on it and needed some tips on how to improve it and how to write more. I performed it for the class who then gave me some feedback on what I need to do to improve it more. in the afternoon we had somebody from a part of college called further hub come to talk to us about UCAS and how to apply. we then in the second half of the afternoon we had a little lesson on photoshop and font in photoshop to create our business cards. The next day we looked at feedback from our tutor. and in the afternoon we learned our monologues before we were going to be assessed for them and then after we were done I worked on my scrap book for a while before discussing the plans for the police museum performance.

28th October: in the morning we had to arrive at college for 8am in order to get our makeup done in order to make us look more ghost like for the performance. we then made our way to the police museum at 10am where we settled down in the room, did a few run-throughs of our performance while we waited fr our first tour group to come in and watch. we had unfortunately forgotten the bible for the usher role where they had to turn their back to the people watching and mime holding the bible.

evaluation:

since the beginning of the project I have developed my skills in monologue writing and further developed skills in characterisation. the desired objectives for this project were achieved although we had some small setback which we had to work through. I believe all the team members are satisfied with the results. one of the things i could improve on is my focus and my attention to complete tasks. one of the things I could do better next time would be to ensure I’m in every lesson so as to not miss any key information and rely on someone else to tell me what I missed.

My target for the next project will be to complete my scrapbook in time.

Viva