First Acting Through Song lesson

 In the first lesson of acting through song, it was chosen that ‘Never enough’ by Loren Allred from ‘The Greatest Showman’ would be sung. This song was selected because it was advised to choose a song that could create an emotional connection to make the performance element easier to achieve. This is relevant as Open Mic says, “Whatever the audition be sure to connect to the message in the song. You want to get your story across and the feel of the song, so you can bring the audition judges on a journey with you" (Openmic, 2021). The research process (see image) consisted of interpreting the lyrics. The factor that made this task challenging was the lack of gestures. The emotion had to come from facial expressions alone. This is because it is within natural instinct to use gestures to express emotion but when you cut the gestures away, it moves the focus of expression to the face. From feedback, facial expressions are identified as a weakness. At the start of the lecture, there was nerves about singing in front of the class. A task that helped to create emotion was analysing the lyrics carefully. Then applying the interpretation of the personal meaning behind the lyrics and choosing specific lyrics that had a connection to display creative choices for facial expressions. As shown in the video, there are missed opportunities for facial expressions. For the majority of the performance, the face is neutral. The features of the face such as the raising of the eyebrows and smiling of the mouth could have been used to show emotion more successfully. The experience demonstrated what is expected of a performer in the industry and opened an understanding of what is needed in an audition. It was proven that during this experience, there was low confidence and expression to fulfil the performance criteria. Confidence and expression are weaknesses that are identified to be worked upon. On this occasion, these might have been due to the lack of preparation for knowing the song's lyrics and timing and experience in this discipline. Therefore, if it had been more prepared with the song, there could have been more time spent thinking about the performance aspect. The emotion would have come more naturally instead of concentrating on the lyrics, making this lecture more successful and effective. As a result, this experience would have been more successful if it had come with preparation to focus on performance and emotion alone. This would have meant that the feedback would have been more focused on my performance quality rather than the factor of lack of preparation. This content of feedback would have been more helpful moving forward. If this experience were to rise again, there would have been a song chosen that was familiar and one that had an emotional connection. This would ensure that the preparation would be more efficient and that my focus on the performance would be more substantial.