"A Questmas Story" started when Michael came up with an idea of a play about Christmas. The idea included Christmas being banned by "the government" and five brave kids who decided to bring it back. The parents of the children broke the law by buying and offering presents to their loved ones and now they are being captive by the "Evil One", that's the main reason why the kids decided to work together to save Christmas.
By bringing this unfinished idea to the table, Michael sparked our attention. We all wanted to develop the idea and be a part of it. We first split up in groups of 5, each group coming with different thoughts, then we managed to put all ideas together and start building a storyline.
It took us about a month to finish building the play. The fact that we have been given the chance to be a part of the writing process of a play helped a lot in developing our imagination, teamwork and writing skills.
My character was part of "The Team". The team was basically three dumb acolytes always making mistakes. The acolytes hadn't been given names, which I don't think it was necessary anyway. Each of the three of us had different characteristics but what we all had in common was our lack of intelligence. Our boss, EO (Evil One) gave us one job, to catch the kids but we weren't even close to succeeding, always at least 10 steps behind them.
To get into the character, the process was way easier than in the first year. The projects we've done in the past helped me through it. Because of all the techniques that we used over the course, my confidence is stronger now, especially after performing for 4 times "A Questmas Story". I am now more comfortable on stage and the audience isn't that intimidating how it was in the beginning.
In the past, because of the big amount of people in our class, we have split up in two groups to make it easier for us to collaborate, and for the teachers to organize and make themselves clear to us. For this show, it was the first time when we all worked together as a team of 26. Of course, the organization was a bit more difficult but the experience was great for me. I consider myself a better team worker now because of the experience that I've had in this project. Also, the fact that we have done 4 performances in two days gave us "a taste" of the professional theatre actors life. Seeing the progress in each performance, the emotions we've had before performing, the feeling triggered by the applause at the ending, everything was memorable and it will definitely help me in the future projects.
We have done technical and dress rehearsals before the first performance. It made the whole process look and feel more professional, it made me feel like I am truly a theatre actress. Also, everyone was very stressed before the show day and it made it harder for us to work and accept each other, especially because of the emotions we had. It helped me to improve my work under pressure.
The feedback we've heard from our teachers and other students who watched the play was very positive. Everyone seemed to enjoy the play. I think it's amazing considering the fact that we've all worked on it, it was a team project and it went quite fast. I've been told by my teachers that I still need to work on my articulation which hopefully, by the end of this year will get even better by working on it.
At the end of the project, my skills improvements had become very noticeable. My improvisation, vocal projection, research, confidence, all those skills and a few others.
All four performances were a huge success. I got to the point that I like playing a "dumb" character. I like being in a comedy. The humour of funny characters brings life to the play. I also love to hear the audience truly laughing and enjoying the performance. Seeing happy people makes me happy and knowing that while performing I made someone laugh increases my self-confidence as an actor. I still need to work on very many things but by now, the work we've done in this course made me more than happy about myself as an actress. I am confident about my skills and very sure that every experience I've gone through in this course will help me in my journey as an actress
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