Peter Pan- Week 11: The Final Battle

Week 11! The show is almost upon us and today we finally reached the climax of the show! The cast have been working really hard and it's difficult not to admire the sense of achievement felt upon finally reaching the last scene. We jumped straight into the action today, so without further ado let's do the same here...

The final scene is quite a long one, with lots of different bits to it. The first bit involves Captain Hook and the Darling children, and then we have some bits with Peter and Tinkerbell, as she rushes to save him from Hook's dastardly plan. Lots of physical theatre in this bit as Tink relies on her movements to communicate the danger to Peter.

Cut back to the Jolly Roger and we see Hook and the Darlings debating whether or not the children should join his pirate crew. These events lead on further until we finally see Pan and Hook come face to face again one final time. It's been a long time coming but the conflict is finally resolves and the cast were able to stage the return back to London for the close of the play.

Possibly one of the most fun activities this week was figuring out the bow at the end. With everyone at varying heights deciding whether to put arms up or down was quite amusing, since everyone is drastically different. We managed to find a system that worked but there was some rather funny trial and error before we made it.

And then we practiced. It sounds anticlimactic but once we had finished the show it was time to return to the beginning and practice the entire thing. The cast worked well together and pushed themselves hard to get through as much of the show as possible before the session was over. The show is looking good and, seeing them begin to practice it all now; we can't help but feel proud of the bunch of 'em. Next week we have our dress rehearsal and then it's onto the Cygnet for the final show! Short post this week but sometimes that's not a bad thing; we'll save the big ones for the final two weeks.

Peter Pan- Week 10: Second Star to the Right!

We're back for the tenth week of Peter Pan and this week was all (well mostly) about puppetry! We've been talking about the scene for weeks, so today we had a little craft session creating some simple paper puppets, followed by some fun with ribbon and sticks!

The paper puppets are a favourite of ours; they have featured in a number of our projects and are a great and easy way to get creative! As most of the group have been entered for the Arts Award Explore this term, this is also a great means of experience another art form, which is part of achieving the award. The group created some fantastic puppet versions of their characters using pens and lots of tissue paper.

We then staged the scene in which Wendy, John and Michael fly off to Neverland with Peter. The scene involves the group using puppets to represent their characters as they fly across the London sky. The cast had to learn how to move their puppets and work together to make the scene look magical. This involves learning simple movements which would make the puppets look as though they are flying.

Once we had our flying scene we moved on to work on some of our later scenes in the play. We looked at one of the meetings between Hook and the Crocodile, focusing on how the ticking croc moves around the stage. We then revisited the scene at Skull Rock and worked on the mermaid movements. One team worked on the Skull Rock scene and practiced the battle between Pan and Hook.

The other team, meanwhile worked on creating a series of movements that all the mermaids could follow. The girls each came up with one movement they they taught the others and then we combined them into a string of moves that each would perform throughout the routine. As always we had a lot of hard work from both teams and the scenes get better and better every week!

Finally we looked at one of our later scenes where Wendy and the lost boys decide to return home, much to Peter's dislike. After a row the boys leave and Wendy is left alone. Unbeknownst to her, Hook is waiting just outside to trap her. This was a very fun scene as it was a rare occasion when the entire cast are on stage at the same time. It was great watching everyone work together in the scene.

And so it's almost the end of the road. We have one scene left to stage next week and then it's onto the dress run to practice it all. The show is in a few weeks time and we are so excited to get these guys and their performance on the stage for the audience. It's been such a fun ride as we approach show day and as always we are excited to see where the show goes next! Until next week!