Project 1Draft 2

Ever since middle school, I have participated in some type of school choir, in many performances with different genres and my favorite by far was a Broadway based performance called Rick’s Café. For this show, individuals and groups would audition different Broadway acts and perform them. In order to learn the pieces that were performed, the performers had to learn the music by reading and taking it from the score, as well as playing it on instruments to aid the learning process. They would also visually learn some choreography and practice attitudes in order to act like the characters they portray in the act. The performers would then effectively communicate with the audience by the mediums of singing dancing and acting. The performers have several manners in which to communicate with each other in order to get on the same page. On the other hand, the audience must be more attentive of the performers in order to communicate and caption the idea that the act is trying to bring across the stage. The audience must listen to the music and lyrics meanwhile paying attention to the dialogue, acting and dancing that’s going on onstage. While it may be hard for some audience members to do all of that at the same time, it is popular in Broadway shows for the performer to facilitate the act for the audience by incorporating ethos in order to sway the viewers to feel a certain way.In one of the Ricks Café shows that I participated in, Hercules, I was a background goddesses. I chose to sing “I Won’t Say I’m in Love” which is a song in which Meg acts and sings primarily about love. For this act, my peers and I had to sell it by being really dramatic in our acting and showing how much meg is in love with Hercules. We had to carry ourselves in a certain way and sing/dance in a certain way which would prompt the audience to recognize that meg was really in love and just fawning over Hercules. Although we were only the background goddesses and not meg herself, we still had a big responsibility when it came to setting the scene and using rhetorical appeals to get the audience’s attention. The setting in which the act is staged at is also important to the audiences understanding and it is crucial that it matches with the acts mood. The medium by which the audience is reached is by the form of the microphone and the stage. There can be a few constraints when it comes to communication in both the ways that the performers communicate with each other and how the performers communicate with the audience. Starting with how performers communicate with each other, it might be difficult for them to communicate if they have different levels of skill when it comes to reading music, understanding dance steps or even getting the music on time and on pitch. In order to avoid this, it is important to choose a group with people which are of similar skill level as you and know what they are signing up for. As for the audience, some troubles that can occur with communication are a bad view of the stage or bad hearing of the microphones. If a microphone isn’t loud enough or if an audience member is sitting way too far back in the audience, that might cause a negative effect on what they think of the performance and of what they are able to perceive of it. If everything goes well with both the performers and the audience, then the people viewing the show should be able to receive the message of the act effectively and they should be able to recognize what the purpose of the act was. Ricks café is a performance that my high school chorus does in order to switch things up a little bit in terms of genre and style of music that they perform yearly. While the majority of other chorus concerts are simply singing holiday songs or foreign and old hymns and pieces, Ricks provides variety in the programs and that’s why it is loved by many, including myself.