Matilda

1. Matilda - Rehearsal with choreographer - Write up
For the first few rehearsals of the Matilda number we are working on
with the Choreographer for our showcase on the 23rd June 2022,
the targets that I set myself were to give ideas for choreography,
pick up choreography quickly, and to start to think about the
characterisation I need to add into the number to help it come to life.
The piece we have decided to choose is the song ‘Revolting Children’ from the musical
Matilda. This song is the part in the musical in which the main character Matilda and her
fellow classmates stand up to the mean headteacher ‘Miss Trunchbull’ as she called them
revolting children hence why they are rebelling by becoming the revolting children she says
they are. The musical itself was created in 2010 and is based on the 1988 children's novel
written by Roald Dahl ‘Matilda’. The musical is about a five year old girl with telekinesis
powers who loves reading and learning, and how she manages to escape her poor home life
with her mean family and helps her teacher to live the life she wants by getting rid of her
horrible aunt (the headteacher) with the help of all the other school kids. The main theme
presented in the musical is Bullying, in which it is mainly the adults in this musical who do
the bullying which is what gives the musical it's genre of Dark comedy throughout.
The song ‘Revolting Children’ is in Act 2 in which right before this, one of the characters
Lavender (who is Matilda's best friend), misspells a word in a spelling test and is sent to the
chokey by Miss Trunchbull (the mean headteacher). As a reaction to help Lavender, all of
the other children misspell simple words, as Miss Trunchball can not send all of them to the
chokey. Matilda then uses her powers to make the chalk write on the chalkboard convincing
Miss Trunchbull that the ghost of Miss Honey’s father is demanding that she gives Miss
Honey her house and possessions back which then queues the song ‘Chalk Writing’. After
this, Miss Trunchball runs away screaming and all the children celebrate getting rid of Miss
Trunchbull with the song ‘Revolting Children’.
In this piece, all three main musical theatre elements are used, in which the characters sing
the song, whilst dancing on and around the tables and chairs in the school set up, like
‘revolting children’ whilst adding over the top and rude facial expressions to add the acting
element to the piece. There are many skills for each element of musical theatre that are
evident in this piece. In the singing element there is a need of; musicality, projection,
phrasing, tempo, articulation, projection, pitch, breath control, and use of accent as the
characters have very strong British accents. For the dance element, there is a use of;
coordination, weight placement, focus and control, pace, dynamics, energy, posture, use of
space, and most importantly spacial awareness and balance as the characters do a lot of
dancing on the chairs and tables used as props to mimic a school classroom. Within the
dance section, there are a lot of strong, powerful moves used to mimic the lyrics of the song
which states that the children are ‘revolting’. The acting element of this piece is made up of
the facial expressions each character has when singing and dancing, therefore because the
acting element solely relies on facial expressions in this piece, the expressions need to be

2. very over the top and big to present each character to the audience well. However, for our
interpretation of this piece we are only using two of the musical theatre elements which are
acting and dancing. By making this number purely physical based, we as a class are
creating a contrast between this piece and the rest of our showcase which has a majority of
all three musical theatre elements in it.
In the first few rehearsals of this piece, we were heavily focused on getting the choreography
of this piece down as it is a big dance number in our showcase. To prepare ourselves to be
doing a full out dance rehearsal, we started off each rehearsal with a dance based warm up
with the choreographer to get our stamina up, followed by a small bit of stretching on our
own to make sure we all felt warmed up individually, so that we don't injure ourselves. In the
very first rehearsal of this piece, we started off by watching the number performed by the
official musical cast online, and decided what we wanted to do with the stage layout, and got
a feel for the type of dance move that were incorporated into the piece. We decided as a
group on a layout of four tables and eight chairs spaced parallel together in pairs almost
creating a box type layout. We then discussed how we were going to start the piece, and
decided that Ria should take the role of acting out the big singing section at the start whilst
we all run on crazily into a tight formation behind her. We then worked on some ideas for
choreography and decided to have a slow section in the tight formation behind Ria for the
start, and then space out for the big dance break in which we used very powerful moves like
big jumpers and punches to replicate the idea of rebellious energetic children.
Within our rehearsals I feel as though the thing I find the most challenging is trying to keep
up with the energy in the choreography, as it is very fast paced and high energy with lots of
jumps and moving around the stage, which means I also need to be very spatially aware of
my surroundings so that I don't injure myself or others in the performance. Keeping my
energy levels up in rehearsals is very important, in the sense that not only do I need to be
alert to pick up choreography and perform it to the best of my ability, but I also need high
energy levels in terms of emotions, to keep everyone's spirits up in rehearsals to make sure
everyone is performing to their best potential, which sometimes can be hard, especially
when doing the same routine over and over again as it can get boring sometimes.
Within the first few rehearsals of the Matilda piece for our showcase on June 23rd, I feel as
though I reached some of my SMART targets that I set myself, but I feel as though I still
need work on some of my other targets. I feel as though I managed to pick up the
choreography quickly and gave some good ideas for the choreography like the ideas of
putting canons in some of the sections, and adding some different tricks and jumps into the
choreography to make it look more powerful. However, in these rehearsals, because i was
so focused on the choreography of the piece, i forgot to start looking at adding some
characterisation in all of the sections of the routine, as i did add some characterisation on the
occasional move, but i need to be much more consistent with my characterisation throughout
the piece. So I believe that characterisation is definitely the most important thing I need to
work on in this piece for the showcase.

3. This image shows one of the canons
that I gave an idea for, in which we all
pose in different positions to show our
revolting personalities, in a canon.
This part of the routine is one of the
sections that I did add some
characterisation in, in which I did a
moody face to represent the character
of a rebellious child to the audience.
This image shows one of the many
jumps and leaps put into the routine,
to show the powerfulness of the song
and how it represents the childrens
powerful uprising in the musical. As
you can see by the image though, we
as a group need to work on our timing
as we are very out of time on this jump section, which will not look good in our final
performance. Therefore timing is something else that we as a group need a lot of work on.