Month: April 2015

Devising Vs Staging a play.

Emmie Kearns, Emmie KearnsLeave a Comment on Devising Vs Staging a play.

“Creating an original performance, as opposed to staging a play, inevitably involves drawing upon a personal experience or reframing pre-existing within a collectively designed structure.”
(Govan et al, 2007)

As a company there was a decision for us to devise our first performance as a company instead of just staging a play. Within this process we decided we would have writers, to help collect material for us to devise from and also to generate a script, to provide structure to the piece. The performance would have a particular verbatim feel, in which we would use other people’s stories and our own to create a piece. This choice of devising would be difficult for me as stage manager as things could change multiple of times, in order for this not to be a problem, organisation is key! Every scene created, even ones which may not be used, I have stored and kept, by doing so this helps keep track of where our performance started and process it will take to get a final performance. During every rehearsal I take notes down and any lighting or sound ideas that are suggested from the director or even some of my own. As assistant director, I can use all of this information to direct and devise a scene from what the cast like and enjoy to their dislikes. The devising process as Govan puts forward above, I feel describes the process that our piece has taken, we will using our own personal experiences and others to devise from.

Scene Drafts

(Stage Manager Folder from Kearns 2015)

The choice to use verbatim within our piece also means as stage manager, there needs to  be a method of which you can differentiate between the verbatim stories and the other bits that make up the performance. To help me accomplish this I took part in a lighting workshop provided by Darren Page, Lincoln Performing Arts Centre Stage Manager. Through doing so I was able to explore the different ways lighting can be used in order to create different effects. For example the use of spotlights and the different colour gels that can be used to create different feelings and emotions on stage. A particular example that stood out for me was the use of a blue gel light and a white light to create a very clinical feel and the impression that a memory is being created. It’s ideas and experiments like this that help contribute to the devising process also.

If you want to see more, then come see the performance! It’s called Shoes to Fill and is being performed at Lincoln Performing Arts Centre at 19:30pm on MONDAY 18TH MAY!!

Hope to see you there!!

Works Cited:

Govan, E., Nicholson, H. and Normington, K. (2007) Making a performance: devising histories and contemporary practices. [online] London: Routledge . Available from: https://www-dawsonera-com.proxy.library.lincoln.ac.uk/readonline/9780203946954/startPage/64 [Accessed 25th April 2015].

Kearns, E (2015) Stage Manager Folder

Oliver Parkes Blog Post 4

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Although I didn’t come into this company wanting to perform, I understand that in companies such as these we must make compromises for the good of everyone. As one of only two boys in the group, it makes sense that both of us play the male roles, especially as so much of the piece is verbatim, even if it means I need to put my wanting to write on the backburner for the time being.

 

I was given the part of the Bosnian character today, a part I share with fellow performer Sophia, who also acts as our producer. I don’t know anything about the actual person whose verbatim this is, and so the director and I worked on creating the character for this scene. We know from details in the speech that the character is a father and that he went to war. Sophia told us, and the accent that he has also tells us, that he is Bosnian. We know that he has moved around a lot, and the general timbre and sound of his voice gives us an approximate age for the character. The recording also gave us a little bit of information about his family – he has a daughter, and used to be married. He was quite young when he got his girlfriend pregnant, which suggests that maybe it wasn’t on purpose, and why they went from “girlfriend” to “wife” so quickly.

 

At first it was daunting playing a character so far from myself, but as Alecky Blythe states: ‘The technique is so transforming – you’re copying their words so precisely – you can play quite far from yourself. It was very exciting, when I started out as an actor, to be able to play a Jamaican grandma, because I’d never normally get cast for that part.’ (2013). Like Blythe, the prospect was also exciting – there’s no way in any other circumstance I’d get to play a character like this. I read books like Verbatim Verbatim by Will Hammond and Dan Steward to get an idea of what performing verbatim was like. However, because I was learning from a script and not the original recording, my performance ‘lacked the accents, emphasis, colour, pitch, pace, intonation and inflexions of the original speaker’ (Taylor, 2013, 370). I tried as much as I could to stay true to the original words of the character regardless, just with the addition of my own character.

 

As two people were playing the character, our director decided that we would have to make the characterisation of this part very particular in order to show that both performers were playing the same character. To this end, we decided that things like touching the face and the same rhythm in speech were paramount. Putting on an accent as the character’s native language was not English, we felt would have been a step too far, and could have come off as offensive, so we felt it was best to speak as we normally do, only slower to give the impression that the speaker was not entirely comfortable with English. We were already using clothes, in particular shoes, to show that someone is playing a particular character, so we decided to use a military-esque jacket to show the transition between me playing the character and a different actor playing him.

 

Ollie

 

Bosnia-Verbatim-barely-edited

 

Blythe, A. (2013) Alecky Blythe: How to create verbatim theatre. [online] Ideas Tap. Available from: http://www.ideastap.com/ideasmag/the-knowledge/alecky-blythe-london-road-on-verbatim-theatre [Accessed 20th April 2015]

Taylor, Lib (2013) Voice, Body and the Transmission of the Real in Documentary Theatre. Contemporary Theatre Review, 23, (3) 368-379.

Practitioner Jerzy Grotowski and His Influence

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Jerzy Grotowski focused on the elimination of unnecessary movement, often referred to superfluous movement, as Grotowski believed that the theatre had become too infected with extravagant costume, makeup, acting and staging he states, “theatre can exist without make-up, without autonomic costume and scenography […] without lighting and sound effects” (Grotowski, 1968, 19).

The relationship between the actor and the audience was also key in Grotowski’s methodology, he further states “our productions are detailed investigations of the actor-audience relationship” (Grotowski, 1986, 15). Grotowski believed theatre at the time did not focus on building a relationship and therefore created theatre that included the audience more.

I tried to make sure that the scenes in which I choreographed help develop the actor -audience, I did this by getting the actors Oliver Samuals and Eden Shortt for the ‘Catholic vs. Church of England’ verbatim scene to connect to their character. By having the actors connect to their characters and their characters relationship to each other, they would enable to audience to also connect to the scene and its theme as Grotowski stated, “we consider the personal and scenic technique of the actor as the core of theatre art” (Grotowski, 1986, 15). Therefore, to create good theatre one must remember the actor’s technique is on trial and to develop the scene the acting technique must be at a high standard.

For the opening number, I choreographed it to have the most movement in the centre to entertain the audience through the physicality whilst also making sure the actors are able to be physical whilst singing. I had been told by the writers that the ‘I Want Song’ is to replicate children and then at the end of the song they are in secondary school and so I tried to illustrate this through the movements. I took inspiration from musical numbers such as “Hairspray” (2002) with the bigger and move fluid movements were being used, acknowledging the melodramatic acting and this is what I aimed to do. By implementing larger movement directed towards the audience I was trying to have the actors play with their movements and for them to inject life and energy to the opening scene. Therefore, by having the actors play I was implementing a part of Grotowski, “[…] infinite variation of performer-audience relationships is possible. The actors can play among the spectators, directly contacting the audience and giving it a passive role in drama” (Grotowski, 1986, 20).

 

Work cited:

Grotowski, J. (1986) Towards a Poor Theatre. London: Methuen London Ltd.

Finding The Right Balance!

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For our performance of Shoes to Fill we have two brilliant writers. They are both good at what they do, yet they have very different writing styles. One of them perfectly captures the serious and the other captures the humorous parts of life. This worked massively in our favour.

As a company we decided we wanted a script which both used our words and those of real people. This meant thinking of a structure where we could include all this information and still have the piece make sense. So I started to think of how we could do this successfully. I thought about all the verbatim pieces we were collecting and started to think about how we could link them all in.

We had written our copy by this point and so I knew it needed to reflect this. There was a word that stood out and remained in my head and that was ‘expectations’. I started to think about and write down simple things, such as; ‘Married life is great!’ and then I would think about the possible reality of this, for example, ‘He stopped saying that after buying his wife’s tampax for the third time’. I then thought about the expectations people have for their lives and the expectations society has for people. From this I created a structure, which I ran by the writers and performers and everyone agreed with.The structure would be built on the five expectations not only I, but others feel they should fulfill in order to have lived life ‘correctly’ according to society. They are: grow up okay, go to uni or get a job, find the one, become a parent and grow old.

I wanted to put on stage a piece that tests what we know using subtly and humour and I think this structure will do that.

Tamsyn.

Meeting with Darren and Lighting Workshop

Clare Owen, Clare OwenLeave a Comment on Meeting with Darren and Lighting Workshop

Following our first production meeting, LPAC’s stage manager Darren Page invited Emmie and I for an informal chat about lighting and sound. During this talk, I believe the most important advice that Darren gave to us about stage lighting was that the lighting used for each scene had to be used for a reason. Following this talk we were invited to attend a lighting workshop that Darren would be running the following week.

The workshop ran by Darren and his colleague Mark was incredibly helpful. They discussed how different types of light created different types of effects and how that had an impact on the atmosphere of a scene. For example if a scene is lit using ‘top lights’ a sinister atmosphere is created as when an audience ‘cannot see someone’s eyes, it creates a feeling of distrust’ (Page 2015). Darren and Mark also spoke about how the audiences’ focus is defined by the light, in the sense that a lit area on a dark stage indicates to the audience that is where they must look. This is supported by Drew Campbell who states ‘lighting also discriminates between where the show is happening and where it is not’ (2004, p7)

Moving forward from this I intend to sit out of a few rehearsals and make notes on what types of lighting I should use for each scene. I will of course be in conversation with our director Tamsyn to agree on what mood she wants to create for each scene and with Emmie to check that my designs can be applied practically.

photo (3)

(Photo by Clare Owen 2015)

 

WORKS CITED

Campbell, D. (2004) Technical Theater for Nontechnical People. Second Edition. New York: Allworth Press

Owen, C. (2015) Photo of Lighting Workshop Notes

Page, D. (2015) Lighting Workshop. [workshop] Lincoln, 20 April.

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