CINDERELLA PANTO 2018

Pantomime is a project that the level 2’s, 1st year performing arts and production and 2nd year production students take part in. It is an opportunity for 1st year backstage students to step up to become managers of their own departments, where they manage the rest of the backstage team whilst being supported and mentored by the second year backstage students. The show, Cinderella, took place over 8 weeks, which we spend the time building and creating a professional pantomime atmosphere.

We were given lectures by a professional set builder who has been working in the theatre industry for over 50 years, which developed our knowledge, not only on sets for pantomimes, but theatre as a whole.

For the set, they had to find a way to build a set that would contain multiple settings. Their idea was to have two levels, the top one to be the kitchen, and the rest to be easily modified with stage blocks and lighting to portray other scenes like the ballroom and the village. It took us between 2 to 3 weeks to build and paint the entire set and floor.

Lighting was used to manipulate a scene, such as, showing the time of day, or giving an influence, on whether it was a character, or a mood, such as, if a scene with a villain was being shown, the set would have dark colours like purple or dark green in it.

For FOH (Front of House), it was their first time catering for different types of audience members, friends and family in the evenings, but also having a matinee performance for primary school children. They had to learn about promoting to a varied audience as well as managing ticket sales.

Costume and props were given free reign on how they wanted to create their items. Panto is the opportunity to create products how you want, regardless of the timeline as there isn’t one set. For costume, they kept the traditional panto costumes philosophy of; The more exaggerated the character, the more exaggerated the costume. Props decided to experiment with different methods of creating props, as they do not need to look realistic, so the idea was to create cartoonish looking props, and to make them look very unrealistic.

As panto is known for being silly and outrageous, so does each production aspect, such as sound. The sound manager identified all the sound effects in the script, and had to find the sound effect that matched the information in the script and make a list to play these. They worked with the DSM (deputy stage manager), who cues the sound and lighting during the show. The DSM also relays notes between the cast, crew, production managers and director.

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(Chloe Peigne 2020)