Reflection

For our songalogue project we were supposed to take the lyrics of a song and turn them into a spoken monologue. I originally couldn't think of one so the first song to pop into my head was the Christmas song "Frosty the Snowman". Not a great choice. It was obviously hard to take seriously so to hold in my laughter I tried to keep a straight face. However in my first rundown it wasn't very good because I actually sounded more angry then the happy mood of the song. It was also hard to memorize because there would always be that one line I'd always forget and because I had to readjust the lyrics to make it sound less awkward. It was hard to do so I decided the best choice would be to change my song. I changed my song from frosty the snowman to "Wake Me Up" by Avicii. This is a personal favorite for me so it was quite easy to memorize. The first time I performed it, I had kept some of the pauses that the song had put in which sounds good when singing it, it doesn't sound very natural when saying it. I had gotten rid of some awkward lyric ties and cut the repeating chorus and worked in making it sound more real and natural (although the fact that the song rhymes it didn't sound 100% real). When I finally performed the final draft it was a much bigger improvement from the first draft in how I spoke it and in emotion. It was also a huge improvement of song choice and emotion that Frosty the Snowman. Some of my strengths were that I looked all around instead of looking straight down or up and that my memorization was very good (probably because I know those lyrics by heart). Also, after watching the video I saw how my voice and my body language tied in well with the mood and emotion of the song. So overall my strengths were pretty good. Some weaknesses I think I need to work on are my blocking and use of arms because I sat in a chair the entire time, and my arms weren't really doing anything only for the big parts did I use them. That would be the one thing I would change. However I was satisfied with my performances because I think I had made some huge improvements. The rest of the class did very well with their performances and were very enjoyable. However I think that some people needed to change up their tone in their performance as it was pretty flat for some of the parts. I also suggested to them some better blocking because if they were walking around some had an unnatural tone or their body language was flat. I told them these things in their emails for them to work on, but overall as a class, they did pretty good. I think that our class did a very good job on these songologues and that the performances were very entertaining.