Sept.14 2018 In-Class Writing

I haven’t seen that many live theater productions, so it’s hard for me to judge whether the performance is great or no. As for now, I would just define “great” as the one that makes me remember the most.
I watched my very first theater production, Billy Elliot, in London four years ago. Back in that time, my English was not as good as now, I even have trouble understanding people’s conversation in a daily basis talk. However, what makes the experience wonderful, is I can somehow magically understand what the plot was. For me, that was beyond my understanding. Because when I watched the play “Assassins” and “Les Miserables” with my peers in Cheshire Academy, I still have a hard time comprehending what the plot really is, because I can’t really clearly hear what the actors were saying on stage and sometimes they just speak too fast. But for Billy Elliot, I can basically understanding everything because the visual aspect of the play is so strong. The actors were using a lot of body languages to develop the conflicts in the story. With no clear sense for the plot, I still get to know that what’s the conflict between Billy and his father, and how the society was struggling when the miners were rebelling. Informations about emotions and relationships were given out not only by the dialogues that the actors has on stage, but also their body movements and their own emotions. When we talk about acting, there’s huge part of Billy Elliot is dancing. The boy who was starring as Billy Elliot was phenomenal. When it comes to the part of interviewing Billy Elliot to school, that little actor went on dancing for ten minutes straight. I can feel the power that has been presented on the stage, only one kid on the stage facing thousands people that sits in the audience seat looking at him. Yet he is not afraid, he was so confident with his performance and his solo dance sticks in my head from that time till now.

What I also remember from that production, is the performance of the “small roles” such as miners, students in the ballet class or boys in the boxing class. What’s so great about their performance is, when something is going on on the stage such as when some main characters are having a conversation on stage, they don’t look “dead”. What I mean by that is, in Cheshire Academy’s musical productions, there would always be times when a small role is just standing there on the stage watching the main characters have their conversations. That’s “dead” to me. Even if we are trying to act “normal” by doing stage talking, our movements are still robotics. But the performance that I watched is not like that. Every person on the stage has their own thing to do. Even if their job is to stand there and do nothing, their facial expressions are still telling me that there is an actually world up on the stage that is right in front of my face. It doesn’t feel like a production, it feels like reality.

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