Research

The Polka Theatre

General Notes

- The company was first established in 1979, entertaining over 90,000 children a year.

- Polka has three main aims: to stir the emotions, spark the imaginations and entertain thousands of kids.

- It offers two theatre spaces, the Main Theatre and the Adventure Theatre, both designed for children to get their first welcoming taste to the world of theatre.

Polka originally started out as a touring company in 1967. They utilised other venues to perform their productions, but this meant that they were limited to small casts and limited on what shows they could fit onto the stages they were able to perform on. "In 1976, Polka found the Holy Trinity Halls in Wimbledon and in 1979, following a lengthy fundraising campaign, Polka’s dream of a permanent home for children’s theatre became a reality."

Programming

The productions performed at Polka are always shifting, every few weeks a new production is in. This gives children a constant stream of choice on theatrical performances to see. As well as this, Polka has two theatres, offering even more choice and entertainment available to the public. The programming shows a focus on art and creativity, being not only educational with the morals offered in the productions, but also broadening the audience's perspective on matters that are relatable. A creative imagination can be sparked here.



Outside The Performances

Workshops and after-school sessions are available for children to "act, sing, dance and create" at Polka. Alongside this, Polka offer resource packs for teachers who come with a school of children to see a production. Workshops from that production are also available to get the children involved in the creativity and excitement of theatre.
   


Unicorn Theatre

General Notes
- first established in 1947 as a touring company by Caryl Jenner, committed to giving childrena valuable and first experience of 'quality theatre'.

- their main aim is to strive to push the boundaries of the imagination in everything they do: working for families, schools and young people.

- two theatres, four floors of  public spaces,  and two rehearsal studios

Programming

Similar to Polka Theatre, the programming likes to shift. However, unlike Polka, they have shows in for longer periods of time, such as 'The Caucasian Chalk Circle', which will be in for 2 months in the year of 2015.They also have workshops and other events for children to get involved in, and educate themselves in theatre.

Mr Tumble

Mr Tumble is a character that is a part of the CBeebies BBC programme, 'Something Special'. He creates funny stories and informative episodes designed for children with special needs. The audience can communicate and learn Makaton sign language with Mr Tumble, as he explores different scenarios, and also allows them to craft various objects, much like shows such as 'Art Attack' did previously.

As you can see from the clip above, Mr Tumble uses sign language to communicate with the audience. This is to cater towards those with the deafness disability. However, looking at the intonations in his voice, he has a clear speaking voice, worthy of storytelling and performance. His voice is clear to understand, and is clearly aimed at the target audience of young children, which is something we need to consider in our performance. His actions are subtle yet successful, as his movement is clear, but being for television, he is limited, whereas we can make our movements larger for comedic effect and also to clearly illustrate what is happening throughout.

Questionnaire

A questionnaire for primary school children to help us focus our production for the target audience.

1) What's your favourite story?

2) Who's your favourite character?

3) What's your favourite type of story? (funny, scary, adventure etc)

4) What's your favourite part of a musical? (dancing, singing or acting)

5) What do you think makes a good story?

The word "story" is used so that the children don't focus on musicals, as the questionnaire will be given to children that attend a musical theatre group. But this also offers us the opportunity to see what stories they may remember from their younger years, with the possibility of us then being able to use their ideas and bring them to life on stage.

Characters are important so that we know what sort of characters and dynamics we would need for our production.

The type of story is put simply so that the children clearly understand what story they are asked for, and it makes it easier for us to then see what type of show is the most popular, comedies or adventures etc.

The musical question is posed so that we can see what interests young kids who are in to musical theatre, as we may be able to input some of these aspects into our own performance.

The final question (I feel that five questions covers the ground we need and doesn't take up too much of their time) will allow the kids to expand any thoughts they have to further give us an idea of the production we should create for our target audience.

Choosing our production

We all were given homework to consider what show we could perform for the primary school children. I thought of The Twits by Roald Dahl, as we could consider many children's theatrical ideas such as acting as animals, aspects of comedy and tragedy, and a happy ending to the show.

One of the ideas was to illustrate the narrative of Finding Nemo on stage. This itself will be a great challenge, with it being a famous and beloved storyline. However it gives us the opportunity to use different techniques in theatre. We could use puppetry and physical theatre to illustrate the characters and the actions of the deep blue sea itself. Audience interaction is another big thing we wanted to include, and the opening would be a good place to start that interaction, to engage the audience and get them excited for the production.

However, after much deliberation, we constructed an opening to Three Little Pigs which then led to us believing that we could create a full production of this that would be engaging and enjoyable. We could implement all the ideas we had for Finding Nemo, with puppetry and physical theatre, but also include new ideas, such as songs and alternative narrative strands.