Risk Assessment and Restrictions.

RESTRICTIONS:

      

1) One restriction that we faced as a company was the lighting within the

Church. From an early stage we said that we wanted it to be relatively dark when performing because we are hiding from the rioters, dust sheets/dark cloth up on the window was suggested and we thought this was a good idea. However, when we arrived at the church we looked at how this could be done and seeing as the wall is stone we were unable to staple, or put any hooks in order for the sheets to stay up – a little improvisation was made and eventually they were put up with masking tape. After covering the windows that were necessary it did made a bit of a difference but not all windows could be covered so some natural light was let in which then made it hard for the LED’s to really strongly show.

     2) The nature of the building restricted us quite a bit with how we wanted to            convey some of our material. The vicar was very helpful and lenient with everything we told her that involved in our piece. However, when it came to the use of the altar this is where things restricted us, which was understandable. The vicar felt that as holy things are placed on the altar and where it is blessed it would be unsuitable to stand or sit on it as she was concerned that people who may come to watch our performance were religious and it potentially offending them. We had to be very careful in what we used and what we said whilst being in the venue.

    3) When it came to rehearsing some movement pieces on the main altar we seemed to of over-estimated how much space we actually had. We always knew that there would be choir pews that couldn’t be moved, but the space that was in front of them was still pretty tight and this was something we had to be aware about whilst performing it. However, once we were able to move a few things from the very front of the altar it did help us out a lot and we were able to move within a reasonable space.

The size of the side chapel that Jay and myself performed in was a bit of a squeeze for a lot of the audience members. Where we didn’t have a clue of exactly how many people were going to turn up we could only estimate and hope that the space would be ok, unfortunately it wasn’t as it restricted some from being able to see what was going on but for next time we now know that its better to over-estimate sometimes than underestimate.

      4) The resources such as the lighting, sound and acoustics restricted us in some ways. The positioning of the actual lights restricted us sometimes, for example, we set up the movers on a bookshelf that stood behind the main pews which made it look beautiful when looking at the altar, however, when audience sat down in these main pews some heads blocked the lights and that restricted us from us being lit on stage at some points, depending on where we stood.  In addition, the sound was interesting because as we arrived at the church we were told that we would be the first ones to try out their new sound system, now this could of gone terribly wrong or extremely well, fortunately it went well. When the music was played it sounded really good and filled the space out well, however, when it came to backing tracks and we had to sing without microphone’s and rely on the acoustics of the church to carry our voices we had to make sure we sang louder than we usually would, sing upwards and never downwards and not let the sound through the system restrict our voices being heard.

    5)  On our very first visit to St. Margaret’s Church where this was just an interest at the time the people who showed us around said that the choir loft and the music area at the back were out of bounds for us to use. However, with these being the only two area’s we were not allowed to use it didn’t restrict us that much as we had plenty of space to perform in different area’s. It would have been great to use the choir loft due to it being high and us potentially using it to show power and status but unfortunately we wasn’t allowed and we respected their restrictions.

     6) In my opinion, I thought the movement of the audience would of gone a lot worse. However, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.  Although, at times it was pretty slow moving getting the audience to do as you wanted but it was good chance to interact with them more and gave us time to get anything sorted that we needed to do.  The side chapel was were it became hard as they seemed to be afraid of moving right forward in order to fill the whole space, it was also them moving out of this room that it was slow-moving as there was a lot of them trying to fit in one small room which restricted the pace of the piece.

RISK ASSESSMENT:

RISK	LIKELIHOOD	NUMBER AT RISK	ACTION TAKEN
Fall from window sill	HIGH	2	Well rehearsed in the space and removing objects off of the window sill.
Boxes	MEDIUM	50+	Well rehearsed, taping flaps down and making sure we were well back from the audience.
Candle (in the final scene)	MEDIUM	2 or 50+?	Well rehearsed, made sure that movement during the scene was slow so I was able to control the candle responsibly and making sure there is a fire bucket nearby.
Electric Shocks	LOW	1	LED’s.
Trips	HIGH	50+	Well rehearsed, cables taped down to the ground.
CRUSH	MEDIUM	50+	Restrict number of audience members.