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

an ensemble because we were working towards the same goal of rigging the light. We also worked briskly and precisely together to keep our team member who was in the cradle, Rachel, feel safe and able to depend on us, our thoroughness in ensuring the outriggers and castors were stabilised and locked also cleared Monica and I from any personal liability had something gone wrong. Were I to do this exercise again and having looked over my notes from previous sessions, I would have like to draw up a risk assessment and look at the risk rating for the work we were doing; even though we were being supported and monitored by Scottie and Phil, this was the first time I had operated any sort of equipment like the tallescope and having a risk assessment would eliminate any surprises that may have gone wrong during the exercise.
Creating our own radio ads and familiarising ourselves with the sound equipment called on my group and I to be resourceful and fast thinkers, working from a short brief to an end product in such a short space of time gave me a small glimpse into the processes of a sound designer.

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

moving.