Actiontrack 2011: the last two days

Eleanor Dolphin concludes her blogging on the Actiontrack Week with the two final days, which concluded with a memorable performance last night (pictured above):

DAY 4:
By today everybody had a job that they had to do; this ranged from set design to costume organising to revising the choreography to learning your lines, and if they’d finished people helped others out with their jobs. We finished preparing the canvas being used on set, now all we had to do was place it on our stage- a tougher job than it sounds. We got scenes 5, 6 and 7 scripted and today was everybody’s last day to learn off the lyrics and lines. The band were very busy practising with the soloists and at the end of the day the set was up and the band’s instruments were moved in and the general feeling was one of pride and that bit by bit our show, which seemed very obscure and patchy in the previous days, was finally starting to come together nicely.

DAY 5: Showbuild Day! It was great to see everyone come in this morning with a smile on their face, determined to give the audience an unforgettable performance this evening. Nick gave us a quick run-through of the day’s events and what had to be done. Everybody was together in the BSR all day today observing how the scenes clicked together, going over technicalities as in lighting, position and cue for performance. There was a great feeling of comradeship in the atmosphere while running through the whole show from 9.00 to 5.30.

This show was unusual for both the Actiontrack team and St Columba’s students, as we came up with our plot and dialogue while we were actually on stage over the 4 days this week. This was a very difficult method of acting and it required a lot of determination and concentration from all of us: we weren’t handed the script on day 1, instead we made the script up each day.

This evening the show started at 8.15. It was called The Girl in the Golden Shoes and it portrayed the journey of a girl as she discovers the truth of her unchangeable, irrevocable position in a ‘shadow’ world. We put together a total of seven songs for the performance; ‘I’m starting again’, ‘Loose Lips’, ‘Hostile Room’, ‘Black Eyes’, ‘The Hero in the Dirty Tracksuit’, ‘Golden Shoes’ and ‘Dear Jesse’. The soloists were Aifric Tracey, Hugo Hollis, Kezia Wright, Zac Stephenson, Alex Bowring, Sam Harley, Niamh Faulkner, Hamish Law, Pia Klippgen, Catie McGonagle and Maria Coloma. We had Zac Stephenson on the guitar, Mark Agar on the bass, Rachel Rogers on the cello, Annika Franz on the keyboard, Jasmine Blenkins O’Callaghan on the drums. Nathan played the acoustic guitar and I played the piano. I had done a couple of plays before this, but never had any of us taken part in a show quite like this one.

I think I speak for everybody in 4th form when I say that we had a ball this week and we would like to thank the whole Actiontrack team; Nick, Molly, Nathan and Katie for everything they did for us.