Lesson 1

What Is Children's Theatre?
Children's Theatre is any play, musical or performance that has been specifically written or devised for children and has been adapted to be suitable for children, the language and movements are less complex so that the children are always able to understand what is going on and always be fully engaged because if at any point the children lack understanding of the performance they immediately loose interest - and children who have lost interest in something are restless. Also the performance is very energised and moves along very quickly because having a slowly paced performance with little energy not only would children but any types of audiences will loose interest and become bored.

What Skills Does It Take To Be Good

• Don't try and be cool and care about what you look like because in doing so you will only think of things that will prevent you from working at your full potential, so when performing just do it right and don't care about what you look like, or if you are being judged, its the audiences privilege to judge.
• Commit and give it 100%, once you have started do not stop, give it everything you have got and put everything into it because if you put half and half it will come out a ball of rubbish, to be successful you start at 100% and you end on the same way, if you go down hill then so will the performance but if you stay 100% committed then your performance will be successful.
• Don't think, feel, just feel what's right and if it goes it will flow, the more you think about what you do, it will be over analysed and won't be natural, and a performance or exercise that doesn't look natural isn't a good performance.
• Use sounds in exercises, it doesn't have to be words, don;t concentrate on saying the words of the performance concentrate on the sound and making different noises, and experimenting to see which sounds best or most interesting as you are never going to learn anything new if you don't experiment a few time and things wrong and right, learn from yourself.
• Improvise don't repeat the same thing again because like previously mentioned there is nothing worse than looking unnatural or looking as if you are forcing something on - be in the moment.

To be an excellent children's performer you need to be a total performer and be able to successfully create a script that is suited for and will entertain young children otherwise in defeats the whole purpose of the script., be able to devise a piece that is set to be performed in the new theatre and can be seen on all three sides. You have to be extremely energetic to keep the children focused and entertained at all time during the whole performance. One really important factor is that you need to be positive and have a positive attitude towards who your working with and children, you need to be able to make big, bold and clear movements that could be exaggerated throughout because that may be seen as funny and silly to a child and could keep them entertained for longer. Be controlled and engaging and have a lot of eye contact with the audience to make them feel really apart of the performance and the experience.

Voice and Body in unison is very important in theatre because they are not two separate things, they are one both controlled by each other and when say something or acting something it is always best and most effective for your body to be in total sync with your voice so both are giving if the correct messages to the audience and that everyone is able to understand the performance properly, if your voice and body is not in unison, especially for little kids they could not get confused which leads to restlessness.