Forced fairy tail

For this project we have been put into 3 groups of 4 and have been given the task of devising our own performance of a Roald Dahl story. My group and I have been given James and the Giant Peach. Whilst creating our performances we have to combine elements of dance and story-telling together to make our performance similar to physical theatre. So far in our group we have came up with a few ideas of what we could do for our performance and as well as giving the members of our group roles to do in the performance. I have been given the roles the Criket and Aunt sponge, this meant I had to multi-role. I am very happy that I got these two roles to James and the Giant Peach because I have always been interested in these characters and have always wanted to play as them. I am also excited to play a villain role. We also had an insight into physical theatre by watching various physical theatrical groups. This was interesting to watch as much like myself and the rest of the group has never really seen a physical theatre. This has definitely helped me to get more of an idea of what it is like,  I did feel however when I was watching these clips that physical theatre wasn't at all like I was expecting. In fact, it was so much better and was interesting to see how people use their bodies to tell stories. I was very intrigued by it all. I am very much looking forward to this project as it will be something different and will be interesting. We also got given a physical theatre dance lesson by our course tutor and it was very enjoyable. It did get tougher as we kept getting more instructions to do but was interesting to see how I got on. I now feel like I know a bit about physical theatre and this will definitely help me and my fellow group members to do our later performance. We are now beginning to work on adding elements of dance into our performance to show the different motives and personalities of the characters. For example, my character Aunt sponge  is a very cruel women who takes pleasure in taunting and bullying young James (in this case Janice). So I had to show her personality more through movement. I did find this quite difficult because I didn't know how to use my body to show these characteristics. I got given advice by my fellow group members on how to do so. We chose another male member of my group to portray Aunt Sponge to walk more or less in time with myself as Aunt Sponge and lunge towards Janice for the first scene. I was happy how the first scene went and I am now feel more confident in using my body to perform. I do feel however that I need to show more facial expressions throughout my time on stage to create effect and show my character's personality more. I have also enjoyed giving feedback to the other groups. That way they can learn from their mistakes they make and can progress. My group and I have now created the first 4 scenes of our performance. In our first scene we will have Janice in the middle of the floor with the aunts walking on from different sides to taunt her. They then pick her up and fight over her which later ends with Janice pushing them off. I am happy with this scene but I do feel however that our characters need to be developed further because they don't look realistic nor believable. I have taken on board what my tutor said the last time we went through that scene ,and I agree that the aunts could be seen more as a comedy duo like the Ugly Stepsisters from Cinderella. This is something that can be worked on. By showing that the aunt sponge and aunt spiker are quite comical and dumb-witted, we could kthought I worked well and had lots of ideas which I then shared with my group. We have now put together a beginning, middle and an end to our performance piece. We had a lot of time putting this all together and now looks more like a story. We have worked on our characters more and have had an insight into creating a small dance routine for our characters. I really enjoyed doing this because we could come up with any element of dance and real-life movement and turn it into a piece of dance. I am now feeling really confident with our performance as things are gradually coming together.