Alice Ball

Drama Evaluation

Lighting and Sound

In our class production of Teechers we used lots of different lighting and sound effects to show the audience that we were in a school and also make them feel like a part of it. For example, there was a school disco scene where Gail (a flirtatious, girly character) attempted to try and snog Mr Nixon (the school’s drama teacher). We created a disco atmosphere by making the lighting very dark with only the disco ball reflecting patterns on the walls behind the audience. We then played some loud upbeat pop music, which is the typical type of music you would find at a school disco. By having the patterns reflected behind the audience, they were made to feel part of the disco and as if they were actually there. Furthermore, by having the music quite loud it meant that the audience really had to listen to the dialog that was going on onstage. This is similar to a disco or a dance club where it is difficult to hear what people are saying; therefore it made the audience feel like a part of it. We then formed into four lines (one in front of each section of the audience) where we danced like over-enthusiastic school teachers to Brittany Spears’ Hit Me Baby One More Time. I think that this was a good choice of song because in the play, Hobby quotes that “[…] all teachers dance like retards” so for the teachers to be able to dance really badly and be cheesy, we needed the song that played to be cheesy too. This added a comedy element to our play because all of the actors were doing really bad dancing. In addition, we used coral movement for the dance which added to the comedy element because we were all doing the same silly dance.