Arabian Nights Performance

This performance took place in Coombe Abbey, mid May time and was definitely an experience! Included in this post is the URL for the video for the first video of our performance: 

The rehearsal process for this began with us looking at the stories we had already created in our individual groups and splitting them up into the main points so that we could manage each different section easily as an ensemble. We created tableaus for these points so that it was embedded in our minds physically what the order was.

 

After we had created the order for the scenes, we then separated off into our original groups to work on the feedback we had been given in order to fit each individual story into the bigger picture. Because we were the frame group, we found this hard to do in the beginning as we didn’t know what was expected of us. We still worked on the three scenes as we originally had planned but felt that as if every rehearsal was new to us. In the start, there was a lot of negativity clouding our group rehearsals but once we had had some work with the lecturers on script and animating the scenes, we all seemed a lot happier with the scenes.

We had lost the individuality of our characters in the end, which I thought was an improvement as it meant we were all a chorus rather than thinking in depth about our characters motives and fighting for the lime-light. I found I resorted to being a present chorus member throughout the piece, much like I did when working with The Twelve Dancing Princesses, focusing intently on the action at hand, and directing the audience to what they were meant to be watching. During the Sinbad moments, I felt that we were still working more as an ensemble as opposed to individual actors wanting to have a moment to shine, we all worked towards the same goal in telling the stories. In a complete contradiction, there were some moments were I found we drew attention to ourselves when it was not necessary, but the situation couldn’t be rectified without drawing even more attention to ourselves!

Anyway, back to the bigger picture-

When it came to the actual performances and placing ourselves within the park, I found it extremely different to anything we’d done before, which is to be expected. We weren’t blessed with beautiful weather, average at best, but most days I found that there was a nip in the air that made me more on edge and alert, obviously an advantageous prospect. I enjoyed the vocal side of being an ensemble member, I’ve not had a chance to have a go at harmonies and solo melody work properly this year so to have more of a musical responsibility was really nice. I found that I adapted to it a lot easier than I thought I would, especially as harmonies are something that I’ve needed to work on. Singing the desert song was my favourite as I rarely get to use my lower register, but was thankful for the chance to use it as it is the louder part of my voice and therefore suitable for an outdoor performance. This song, however, was always difficult to perform as it relied on everyone being in time with each other for the harmonies to be really effective. This was made difficult though as we were spread a distance away from the other cast members who were singing the higher parts and occasionally we lost the rhythm with each other. I made sure that I was making eye contact with the people who had the stronger voices and made subtle head gestures in an attempt to keep the beat together, it worked for the most part, but was always a tad difficult to achieve at first.

Walking in between the scenes was something I was always cautious of. The other sailors seemed to embrace it and talk to the kids and play on the comical elements of their characters, but after my basket broke in front of the audience during the dress rehearsal, I was always a tiny bit nervous and just wanted to get them to their destination. This part of the performance was also something that we hadn’t looked at before which is another reason I was worried, however, the rest of my group seemed to dive straight in with it. The moment that we were stood still and about to perform, I returned to my character which I was more confident with.

The Cyclops story was a difficult one to perform, I found, as the moment Oli came out in costume and on his stilts, the attention was on him entirely! We lost focus, which is completely understandable as he was a shock to see, but a brilliant one at that. The problem was, we didn’t allow a few moments for the audience to take him in before continuing with the narration, we left no gap so the audience missed out on what we were saying and returned their attention back to us right at the end when Sinbad was saving us. I would have liked to have looked at that moment in detail more to see what would be the most appropriate course of action, whether it would have been to leave it a while before we began our narration again, or whether we worked in something physical for us to do that took the attention away from him?

The next part I was involved in was being the Genie in Aladdin, again, a moment that I thoroughly enjoyed as I got to wear my stilts again. I loved the costume as well, I felt that it helped me become even more etherial and floaty, a nice contrast to the load clinking and clanking of my stilts. I attempted to be graceful, which is not easy on stilts, so I wasn’t surprised when I watched the footage and saw that I looked a lot clumsier than I wanted to be.

During most of the performances I was fine walking on them, but on the last one when we changed location, the wind picked up massively and as you can see, my costume is a giant sail. I spent most of my time back stage fearing that I’d loose my balance and ruin my last performance as the Genie. Luckily, I had a few moments to have some emergency conferring with Lydia, who I was on stage with at the time, and I asked her to help me if anything went wrong. Nothing like being prepared. What was even luckier was that just for my small time on stage the wind died down long enough for me to get comfortable and balanced.

The final part Arabian Nights, I spent again, as an active chorus member, watching the story as well as singing when necessary. Again, the vocals in this story were difficult as the musicians were on the other side of the stage and weren’t loud enough to hear the beginning of phrases. I attempted to act as support for my side of the stage and raise the volume to keep up in time. Like before, I made eye contact with the singers from the other side of the stage and read their lips and head movements in order to tell which phrase they were on and keep us in time.

All five of the performances went well, I thought, nothing drastically happened that wasn’t immediately fixed with line recovery or common sense and the weather wasn’t terrible enough to effect any of the performances (that we did manage to put on).

Another part of the routine was the prop moving at the start and end of each day. I am glad to say that I didn’t complain during this bit, especially seeing as I have the upper body strength of a daisy. I considered it a necessary part of the day, and was too enthused about performing to complain. On the Thursday, I thought we had managed to get it down to a fine art, and condense the work load into one trip, I had only just realised that the magic carpet could be used to carry things as well.

Overall, I enjoyed the experience thoroughly. It was something new that I had never done before but hope very much to do again. After watching the previous year perform “Alice in Wonderland”, I had been excited to be involved in this module all year.

I like to think I have a flare for artistic areas and because of that I would have liked to have made more props. I did make the orange bird/ phoenix puppet for the Sailor’s whale story and was very proud of him, even though he was used for a very short period of time. Again, after watching “Alice” and seeing their large props such as the Jabber-wocky and the mushroom, I wanted to be involved in a project like that. Sadly, when it comes to art, I become very protective and probably would have insisted on taking up the entire job myself.

Other than missing out on the opportunity to create more props, I was entirely content with the characters and stage time that I was given. To avoid sounding cliched, I shall avoid the ‘small actors’ quote, and instead will say that after performing in Twelve Dancing Princesses, I found that you can make even the smallest role fun to play if you just dive into it, much like I like to think I did as a spectator of the stories, always alert and reacting just enough to enhance rather than distract.

Directed Performance Diary

This is our first module of the second year- directed performances. I’ve been cast as Mrs Webb in “Our Town” and we are performing first out of the other casts. I read the other two over the holidays and saw how different “Our Town” was to them. The other two plays were russian comedies that were lively and eccentric, a complete contrast to this calm, heart-warming American classic. When it came to auditions, I put myself forward for all of the plays  as I was more concerned about finding the right part for me, rather than being in a cast with all of my friends. Because of that, I didn’t mind which director I was working with or which play I was in.

For this module I kept a hand written account of the rehearsal process and wrote in it every so often as a brief reminder of what we had achieved so far, whether it were scenes or songs. Here are a selection of entries to show our research and production process:

October 16th- We spent today doing research and watched clips of “Theatre Talks” featuring Widler’s nephew, Tappan, writer Jeremy McCarter of “Newsweek” and David Cromer, who directed the 2009 revival. McCarter discusses Wilder’s writing and his ideas being so different to a broadway audience back then. Tappan Wilder talks about his uncle’s process of writing and Cromer reveals how he put the play together with the modern dress and a cast of people he had worked with before. Finally Tappan reads a letter from his uncle about the debut of “Our Town”.

Another part of our research was watching “Meet Me In St. Louis”, a film musical featuring Judy Garland that is set in 1904. We watched this as a company as part of our research into the lives of American people in the 1900’s. The characters are all of a higher class than the ones that we were portraying in “Our Town”, but we still saw how the society worked, how relationships started, the layout of a house and of course, the fashion. From watching the movie, I wanted to be able to base my character around the mother in the film, as then I’d feel as if I were playing a more accurate portrayal of a mother from that era. However, the mother in the film was a lot more kind hearted and supportive of her children, especially when the father brought up the subject of uprooting the family and moving to New York. I felt that Mrs Webb was a little bit colder, so to base my character on her would have juxtaposed my portrayal and Wilder’s writing.

October 18th- Today was another day that we spent doing research together. We discovered that the women of the time would spend all day carrying out the same routines as the day before. Everything was picked by hand as they were limited by lack of technology, and all foods for meals were prepared throughout the day. The women were essentially the back bone of the family as they would keep the house in order and keep her family presentable to society whilst the men were at work. This is especially true for, my character, Mrs Webb, as her husband is a little bit scatter brained and unorganised. He is also the editor of the Grover’s Corners Sentinel, so would be at work for a large portion of the day.

From this research, we were all able to get a better look in to our characters and figure out what would be an accurate portrayal of the people of that time. The first thing I became aware of when reading the script was that Mrs Webb is almost an unemotional character when dealing with her children, she just wants to move through her routine with efficiency. Whilst trying to figure out the level of sharpness and strictness to give my character, I used  Mrs Gibbs as a comparison, to make our differences seem almost caricatured and extreme. She is a “plump, pleasant woman” and Mrs Webb is “a thin, serious, crisp woman.” Already our physical appearances are quite different, which meant that our attitudes should be as well. In our first scenes with our families, we see that my character is very bothered about appearances as the last thing she tells her daughter as she leaves is “Stand up straight, Emily” whereas Mrs Gibbs asks her daughter to wish their teacher congratulations on her engagement.

Mrs Webb is very concerned about bringing healthy and attractive children into the world: “I’d rather my children healthy than bright…All my children have good features, I’d be ashamed if they hadn’t.”

October 23rd- Friday was production day in which we got measured for costumes as well as searched charity shops in coventry for props and set that we required. During the weekend we all searched for images and descriptions of what we thought our characters should wear in the piece and then posted all of the images on our group on Facebook. Everybody found similar images of newspaper delivery boys, pictures from previous shows, or illustrations from fashion magazines, together they fitted together nicely. I found from my research that women of that period were concerned with having very tiny waists. To do this they would wear shirts with puffy shoulders and long skirts that would accentuate their small waists.

Later- Sonia came up to help us with our New Hampshire accents. She had recorded a friend of hers discussing everyday things like the country side and her general home life. Sonia would point out the differences in the way she spoke and how much softer and lyrical her accent was. She listened to us read some of our lines and then corrected us on diction and accent, and for me, speed.

We then moved on to discuss the basic american lifestyle of the time.

Autumn was spent pickling, jellying food to store over winter and fixing up clothes to keep you warm. Winter consisted of long nights and the days were spent trying to prevent illnesses. Spring was warm and pleasant, the first grass was a lot more exciting than it is now.

Oct 24th- Because of absences today our main rehearsal was canceled and the rest of us went away and had our first choir practise. Other people had been given jobs as costume mistress or stage manager, I was given the role of Music Director, well singing teacher. I was nervous for the rehearsal today as I’ve only ever held classes one on one before, I’ve never taught a large group of people, not to mention my friends. We began by going through the warm-ups as I do in my private lessons. First breathing which consisted of exercises that help enhance lung capacity and diaphragm strength, then tensing of the shoulders and releasing to relax the body and leave it in the correct stance for singing. We then moved on to a few scale exercises to gently warm up the vocal chords, melodic exercises to introduce the head voice and then tongue twisters to encourage good diction. Finally, we would sing a quick song that was in parts so that everyone was comfortable with singing in front of each other, this would usually be a hymn or Bella Mamma that one of the third years taught us.

We moved on to the song itself and learnt the main melody of “Blessed Be The Ties That Bind”, which we then sang over the scene that it is mentioned in. My main goal was to get people confident with the melody so I made them sing it without looking at each other for support and then at different volumes as the script suggests.

November 1st- Our first full run of the show was today and we’re just being given notes on it now. I thought it went well, but here are the notes that specifically applied to me:

Act 1: During my duologue with Mrs Gibbs, we occasionally milked the comedy and were not acting like the wise women that we would have been in that era. We need to tone it down.

Act 2: We had less rehearsal than the first act so the drop was to be expected. The wedding scene needs more preparation as we are still unsure of certain aspects of it. Whilst sat down though, we all need to have excellent posture, sat up right and stiff. The setting up of the chairs during Connor’s monologue needs to be slicker as well.

Act 3: Lines need to be learnt as this was the worst act for queues and such. Again, this is to be expected as we practised this even less than Act 2.

November 12th- We did a run on Friday in only the necessary costume such as skirts to practise walking in and any quick changes. The notes we were given are as follows:

We all need to wear white underwear as the ladies shirts are very thin. No nail varnish, obviously. We need to work on the wedding again. Personally, I need to down play the line about Mammie Cartwright as I’m trying to milk it again. Finally, we all need to be aware of our walking as our footsteps are just a tad too heavy.

November 15th- We had another run today but because I had work last night at the litten tree I lost my voice which made saying my lines a bit difficult, instead Becci dubbed me and I still did all the action I was meant to. This brought to my attention all the lines I had been saying wrong by adding in different words or changing the order of sentences as Becci was reading everything from the script. The notes to the cast were that todays performance was not as good as our run on friday and that lines still needed to be learnt .

December 28th- Today we performed in front of an audience for the first time. We got some good feedback from them on the whole piece and even personally on my projection. I found everything that we did yesterday extremely helpful with Cath’s lighting workshop in which we focused on where we needed to be in order to be lit. However, I did forget this in Act 3 as nerves took over, this was the scene that I got wrong the most in rehearsals so was worried about delivering the lines correctly rather than staying lit.

Working on Approaches to Character last year was obviously going to be important this term, and I managed to utilise all of the questions and create a profile on my character.

Backstory: The mother of two children and wife of the editor of the Grover’s corners sentinel. Middle class family

When: The play opens in Spring 1901, ends in a rainy summers evening in 1913, but travels back to the winter of 1899.

Where: We know that the play is set in the small town in New Hampshire called Grover’s Corners. It varies between inside the Webb’s/ Gibbs house and outside on main street.

What: My character wants to bring up healthy, good looking children that can grow up to have a family of their own. This will be almost like a legacy to her of parenting. Her obstacles are the weather and the seasons which she has to work around when going through her routine.

Why Now: As I mentioned before, the weather and seasons drive her to complete her chores. Why is she pickling food now? Because in the winter she can’t grow things to feed her family with.

Now: My first line is yelling at the children to get ready for school. I am around middle age, it is never specified in the play exactly. My voice is deep for a woman to emphasise my sharp yet motherly personality. Make-up wise we kept it to the minimum as women of that time would not wear any.

Sinbad Scratch Performance Feedback

After our performance we had group feedback on our performance as well as how it would fit into the Arabian Nights show at the end of term.

The lecturers said that we had a great balance of music and action and performed with Gusto! They thought we had great spacial awareness but needed to consider our audience as I mentioned in my previous entry. The painted cloth was a nice touch as well.

For future references they said we needed to make a big physical queue before a line was delivered in order to pull focus. We needed to work on projection in some stories.

However, due to how different our performance was compared to the other groups, it was being cut. Instead, we will be playing the sailors and the narrators that lead the audience through their journey across Coombe Abbey. I was happy with this decision, during our scratch performance my role was only minor anyway as I wasn’t a sailor.

In order to fit into the rest of the project with the other groups, we had to choose three stories that we wanted to keep. Because of this we picked the Cannibals, Cyclops and the Whale. All stories that we enjoyed performing and each with different elements within them that would keep an audience interested.

Sinbad Scratch Performance

As part of our New Landscapes module, the year was split into groups with a different story to tell. Ours was “Sinbad and his Seven Voyages”. The other groups were given more straight forward stories with a beginning, middle and end, such as “Aladdin”. In our attempt to make “Sinbad” more of a flowing story, we looked at all seven of the journeys and managed to splice them together to make one epic adventure. Personally, I found this easier to work with, especially as we had managed to cut so much out of the voyages that wouldn’t have been missed by an audience. Sadly, after our first rough performance, it appeared that we had cut too much and the audience had expected to see different voyages, rather than one big one. They also thought that even though the piece was named after our main character, we didn’t make the most of him and needed to define him more.

In our next rehearsal we began looking at the original story, plus the smaller version we had created and decided which of the voyages would be most interesting for an audience to watch, as well as which ones would be most effective in an outdoor space. In the end, we decided to portray all seven but using different theatrical techniques to create them so that the audience wouldn’t get bored.

Voyage One: This was the introduction to the piece and because of that, we used this time to introduce Sinbad as the main character and establish him more than we did in our original performance. We also included songs, written by James, Alex and Emma C as we knew that this would be a large part of the Arabian Nights performance at the end of the module. This voyage consisted of the whale story in which Sinbad lands on an island that is in fact the back of a giant whale. Originally we wanted to make this part very acrobatic based, as Sinbad is flung in the air via the whale’s blowhole, and in our shortened version of the story we had him summersault over someones back to give him the height he needed. In the rest of this story, the crew tie themselves on to the leg of a bird and then land on a different island, leading in to voyage two much like we did in our rough performance.

Voyage Two: This was the Cyclops story, but for convenience purposes, the Giant story as we didn’t have the appropriate one-eyed mask. In this story, Sinbad and the crew enter a creepy castle that is inhabited by a carnivorous giant that captures the crew and eats the captain.

I played the Giant and was quite happy to as it allowed me to take my new stilts out for a test drive!

This was the first performance I’d used them for since the Fabularium project in 2012 and because of this I spent a lot of time practising on them in different weather conditions

and landscapes as at this point we hadn’t chosen a location to set the piece. I found walking around in the woods very useful as the ground was so unsteady and I had to practise keeping my balance a lot more than I would have when I was on a flat surface.

The location for this scene was between two trees that were slightly raised so the ground sloped more than usual. This, mixed with nerves, made me a little wobbly and I wasn’t as steady as I could have been.

Voyage Three: This was the cannibal story in which Sinbad’s crew are eaten alive after being drugged. This was one of the stronger stories, I found as we all seemed to have fun with it. We made it a bit more cartoon-y than the others so the cannibals were more like the Hyenas from “The Lion King” rather than sinister villains. I spent most of this story behind a tree getting my stilts off and changing in to my next costume so unfortunately can’t comment on what was done.

Voyage Four: Again, I found this to be another one of our stronger performances. Sinbad is offered the hand of a Princess and then accepts without hearing the consequences. For this, I choreographed a little dance routine for the girls to do that was simple yet did the job of establishing them as the Kings beautiful daughters. We also included more acrobatics in this scene to show Sinbad’s escape from his cruel fate.

Voyage Five: This story was mainly a duologue between Sinbad and an Old man but throughout it, the rest of the cast accidentally ended up acting as a present chorus, we all watched the action intently ready for the next voyage.

Voyage Six: This was not an theatrical voyage, instead, I had created a mural on cloth that was inspired by this depiction of the hobbit by ‘breathing2004’

I used the same shape and method of colours fading into each other. Unfortunately it wasn’t as detailed as this but each image was clear and large within the piece. This was accompanied by Alex narrating the adventures as if he were deciphering a ruin. This painting was definitely a different element in not only our piece, but throughout the performances and hopefully the audience enjoyed the change.

Voyage Seven: This was the final journey and consisted mainly of an acrobatic fight scene that was a group effort to choreograph. Because our Sinbad (Radu) was a flyer, it was easy to create effective scenes with him leaping and bounding off different pirates, taking them all out. I am a base and once Sinbad had defeated several of the pirates, we were left to battle two on our own. This was one of my favourite points within the piece as it was energetic and just fun to be involved in.

The location we chose was a grassy square lined with trees that were thick enough to use as “off-stage”. The audience were meant to stay central as each scene was laid out in a circle around them, this didn’t really work as the audience gathered around each scene. We didn’t anticipate that they would move as much as they did. If we were to do it again, I would have prefered to make it a definite promenade performance rather than the audience merely having to turn 360 degrees around one spot.

Because we had to make several different short scenes, our piece was longer than everyone else’s but was still entertaining enough that we got away with it!

Experimental Performance

After the few scratch performances that we were working on, we were given larger groups to work in in order to create an experimental piece of theatre based on what we had created in the last few weeks. I was in Red group. This was a group in which each individual had specified that they would like to work towards a promenade piece, and that’s just what we did. We performed in the War Memorial park in Coventry late at night and gave the audiences torches, as well as used fairy lights in certain areas to create a mystical forest. We met our audience at the main gates (highest star on the map) where we handed out torches to each individual, we then led them to the next star, the rock gardens. The play began with an exert from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this was performed in full costume with instrumentation and fairy-lights.

 

We then twisted the plot into a ghost story by implying to the audience that a cast member from the shakespeare scene had gone missing. At this point, some people began to clock on that it was all just part of the performance. We had hoped to keep them going for longer that the ghost story and the disappearance were real. In order to keep up the illusion, we used the fact that I am a local to the area to our advantage and made the ghost story specific to Coventry. Connor and I then led the group up the path whilst the rest of our company “waited in case Steph came back”. Again, the illusion was lost as Connor and I had scripted an argument, trying to blame someone for Steph’s disappearance as well as whether my ghost story was real. Because we performed this in front of our friends, they knew that we would never fight in the manner that we did, again shattering the glass. If we were to do it again in front of an audience of strangers we could have been considered more believable as they did not know our relationships with each other, or our personalities.

 

The ghost story happened at these two stars at the bottom of the map in a split screen- before the woman’s husband went to war, and after he returned. I narrated this part of the performance and unfortunately we had some difficulties, again because people knew us and found odd mannerisms amusing, taking away from the sinister story we were trying to tell. Also the violin we had accompanying the performance wasn’t loud enough. This narration was abruptly interrupted by a scream from the other side of the memorial tower, we then ushered the audience to follow the scream, revealing Jessie who had just seen the ghost will a man to hang himself. For this we used a mannequin that was not very effective. We hung him from the only tree without a dedication attached to it out of respect for the venue. Unfortunately this tree was very far from the audience and they couldn’t quite make out what they were meant to be looking at. After this the ghost appears and warns the audience to leave! This worked really well, Steph played the ghost and wore a dress that almost had its own glow in the dark. The only problem we had with this section was how to create a clean and obvious finish to the piece. We told the audience to run back to the entrance but as they did, we all slowly came out of character and verbally signalled the end. From what we heard from our audience, they wanted the adventure to continue and felt that that was an odd way to bring it to a close, which we agreed. 

The process itself was very long, we had two weeks to prepare it. During this time we all became very frustrated with the concept and ideas and logistics of the performance. We only visited the venue three times before the performance because of the terrible weather we had at the time. Another bump in the road appeared in the form of our City Council wanting to close off certain areas of the park. This news was given to us 24 hours before the performance. Luckily, our route was not effected, but if it had been, this could have meant reworking the entire thing as each part of the piece was site specific.

 

Experimental Theatre Scratch Weeks

During the scratch weeks, we looked at all different aspects of creating an outdoor piece of theatre. At first, we were told to look into creating a proposal to perform at an imaginary festival in Barcelona. We looked at poster designs, a message we were trying to convey and inspiring theatre companies that have done something similar. The theatre company that we were particularly intrigued by were an Australian company called “Strange Fruit” who stood on long bendable poles and created graceful pieces of theatre that worked around balance. During the research I also found Kamchatka, Osadia and the Godiva Awakes festival, each of which involved elements that we entered into our proposal. Our final proposal turned into an eco-friendly admiration of nature, and the forest taking back its home, with the use of collapsable towers and acrobats. Personally, I found presenting the ideas difficult as we had spent lots of time developing the idea and not compiling a coherent proposal.

The next few weeks we looked at work in a black box, where one person sits in a box with three panels in front of them, each with a window in that opens and closes manually. Our group presented the story of Goldilocks and the three bears. This was one of my favourite projects. We played with perspectives and areas in the space that the occupant of the box couldn’t see and how to enter the windows with this in mind. Each performance was 1 minute long and very hectic to create. Resetting each time was a hassle, but once everyone had created a routine for themselves it worked out fine. I felt sorry for our three bears, as they had to do the most running around to each of the different windows whilst wearing huge fur coats and hats. Unfortunately I have no images for this project to include, and the videos we took from the booth were lost, but you can take me word for it that it was a very enjoyable piece of theatre.

After this, we looked at promenade performances, my overall favourite of the three. The concept my group created was for young children and families. Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz wants to invite fairytale creatures to her birthday party. We took the audience on a journey through our university campus to visit Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Puss in Boots and Snow White. Some where inside the buildings, some where up on fire escapes and some where stuck in fenced off gardens. I really enjoyed performing in this, our group really worked well together too. We made sure the the journey we created for the audience was short but interesting and that there weren’t any long intervals in which nothing happened. The feedback we were given was positive as well. People enjoyed the audience participation (we made someone responsible for each characters invitation) and that the journey was an acceptable length. However, they said that the Scarecrow, who led the audience to the different characters needed to feel more urgency and excitement about getting the audience to the party. If we were to perform it for a real audience and not just one of our peers, then we would like to have a real tea-party at the end for the children to enjoy.