Theatre Reflective Essay

Having only been exposed to the performance side of things in high school, learning about the amount of work that goes into production offered me a refreshing look into theatre and all it entails. The hands on experiences of LX2 and SX were eye openers for me in terms of looking at what happens backstage while actors are rehearsing, which is the part of theatre I am most familiar with.
After visually mapping out the hierarchies within a theatre, coupled with the exercise where we operated the tallescope to rig a light, it soon became clear to me just why there are so many people involved backstage. The exercise required us to work together for safety purposes; though we were somewhat randomly grouped together, my group and I worked well as

Though I had very little previous experience using the mixing desk, amplifiers and other types of sound kit used in professional theatre, I was familiar with mixing sounds together using software. Putting together a script and mapping out the sound effects we wanted and when, meant every person in our group had a job and a large contributing part to the making of the radio advert. My group worked well together after we established a loose hierarchy and role for every person, despite the advert being only half a minute and considering the fact that there were 5 of us I was surprised that no one was left without a purpose at the time of recording. Once again this consolidated my earlier thoughts in that even though there seems to be great numbers of people involved in the production team alone, each person is invaluable to the smooth running of a theatre, with everyone depending on one another to get their job done in order to keep the production process