Society is constantly submerged in digital content, theatre scholar Dominic Hingorani states “in a digitally saturated culture, many young people may have little direct experience of the live theatre and find it irrelevant” (Hingorani 2012, 59). As a theatre company we had to acknowledge how society receives content about the world around us therefore, to create theatre that is relevant to our audiences we had to incorporate technology. A theatre piece called Mad Blud (2008) written by Phillip Osment, is a verbatim theatre piece aimed at young audiences. The piece was themed around knife crime in the city and incorporated technology into the piece by having the actors listening to the live recordings on Mp3s on stage. By involving modern day technology into their piece it enabled actors to convey the true emotion of the interviewee.
The piece inspired us to incorporate verbatim into our piece and having many different stories of how members of society grew up as this is our centre theme for our performance. We did this by compiling stories from us as a company and to then perform to each other, this gave us the confidence to further develop this idea and to further compile stories of how some grew up. However, I explained how we needed to compile stories from an array of people, as we were more likely to interview people who were of the same ethnicity and demographic. This would mean we would narrow our audience greatly and therefore we should make sure to interview people of different ages and races to reach with all members of society.
Mia
Work cited:
Hingorani, D. ‘Creating theatre work for a diverse teenage audience’ in theatre for Young Audiences: a critical handbook. Maguire, T & Schuitema, K (Eds.). (2012). Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham.
We previously conducted an interview with the rest of Forefront to deduce their feelings on the prospect of growing up. One thing that we found particularly interesting were the responses to a question regarding role models. This led us to become intrigued by the idea of how different people feel about filling their parents’ shoes. We collected words such as “proud”, “excited”, “intimidated”, “cautious”, “terrified”. The latter feelings particularly interested us. The notion that someone really does not want to follow in their parents’ footsteps was something that we suddenly felt needed to be explored further, needed to be told. They are attached below but are marked as numbers instead of names for confidentiality reasons. I then used these paragraphs and turned them into part-verbatim, part-created diary entries intended for different characters to say in relation to filling or not filling role model’s shoes.
PARAGRAPHS – numbers 3, 6, 7, 9 were chosen to be made into entries as shown in the doc below.
The through storyline I came up with developed from the more negative answers we collected. It consisted of two siblings coping with their alcoholic mother and how the eldest, Jo, feared following in her footsteps. We played with the idea of expectations and reality and this was shown in the edited longer version of the tinder scenes, where the parents meet on-line in a cute way and everything seems perfect. This is the way that the mother told her children, to shield them perhaps from the reality. Then later in the script it is revealed that actually this was not true and they were both not the perfect people the mother made them out to be.*
As our subject was shoes, I came up with a metaphor that ran throughout the script. The character of Jo collected shoe laces of all designs (she mentions skull ones for example to foreshadow death) and her holey trainers represented the family gradually falling apart when her father leaves and her mother sinks into alcoholism. I started the whole storyline by writing a couple of monologues regarding this and my notes are still attached detailing my thought processes.
We re-drafted the script as we realised that it was going to be far too difficult to direct as it was too heavy on dialogue. The below version split up a lot of the monologues and many were edited down or removed. **
After interviewing my mother to collect some ideas regarding the fears a parent faces, a created a character who runs through the final script. She appears in each of the five chapters and makes these clear by speaking of her fears regarding the subject of the particular section. She speaks to the audience as if they are her child.
* This was scrapped in the final performance but the expectation versus reality idea remained. Ollie wrote five very humorous scenes that showed exactly this and they fitted into each of the five sections as a different through storyline.
** The final script was very heavily changed regarding my through storyline. It could be seen as complicated so it was simplified to just include two siblings who have a rough childhood with a mother who leaves them and a father who then becomes an alcoholic. The eldest sibling who always tried to protect her younger sister from following in either of their parents’ footsteps, discreetly is part of the final story, represented through a pair of converse on stage (parenting verbatim, final Doctor scene).
Eden and I have been asked to perform a scene in which we are to act two opposing religions in Ireland, and through adversity and against the odds we find love.
The scene has presented problems from the off, as Eden and myself are not skilled dancers, so we had to alter the scene so we felt comfortable performing it on stage.
Eden was conscious of my lifting her, as she did not feel comfortable, even though I could lift her the scene needed to be changed, the last thing we both wanted was for us to not appropriately portray love.
There are two dance pieces I have looked at on Youtube that will provide some inspiration in the coming weeks, I hope they help.
As part of the Shoes to Fill paper marketing I created a marketing pack that can be sent to venues, newspapers, radio stations and anyone wishing to know the in depth details about our show and the company. The pack was inspired by work produced by the theatre company Sleepdogs for their show ‘The Bullet and the Bass Trombone’ as they would be aiming at the same type of target audience as we are:
“The Bullet and the Bass Trombone will appeal to:
-Audiences for contemporary theatre and performance, who like companies and artists such as Chris Thorpe, Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, Chris Goode, Melanie Wilson, Samuel Beckett, Pina Bausch, Elevator Repair Service
-Audiences for storytelling and comedy who like performers such as Stewart Lee and Daniel Kitson
-Audiences for contemporary music who like artists such as Aphex Twin, Gavin Bryers, Michael Nyman, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Bjork, The Books, Nick Cave, Velvet Underground, Tom Waits
-Literature audiences who like Angela Carter, The Master and Margarita,
-Film audiences who like the Cohen Brothers, Jim Jarmusch, Andrei Tarkovsky
-Audiences interested in fantasy and science fiction
Sleepdogs provide a detailed description who would enjoy their work, including companies and shows they are similar to, this makes a venues job very easy as can use their database, built up of information about previous audience members, showing what they have been to see before and they can then target this show at them. The audience members are getting concise information about shows that are aimed at their interests, instead of a big email or newsletter that has information that isn’t relevant to them. We tried our best to create a similar version for our show that can be sent to the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre marketing manager Julie Ellerby. “segmentation, which involves aiming at particular sections of the market rather than taking a scattergun approach”. (Hill and O’sullivan, 2003, p.5)
“-Theatre student audiences
-Music students
-Students in general
-Audiences that enjoy verbatim and documentary theatre, performances life vagina monologues and Sleepdog’s The Bullet and The bass Trombone
–Audiences that enjoy kitchen sink drama and naturalistic performance
-Audiences that enjoy music in theatre.
-Ideally for ages 15 and above, anyone that has had to face the ideas of their future (or their past) and what they are going to do with their lives.” (Forefront Theatre, 2015)
Along with target audiences the marketing pack also includes selling point that can be matched with previous shows that were similar and again find audiences through their database. Another important aspect of this pack was to provide a show copy that can be used by the venue in their programme for that season, especially important for our show as it was part of a special final degree show festival.
“Have you ever been daunted by the thought of filling someone’s shoes? To follow in the footsteps of your parents, your sibling or your role-model. To make them proud. You could be like them. Grow up, become an adult, get a job, have a family, get a dog and have a baby…or not. Using original songs, verbatim and our superficial ideas of aspiring to be like our role models; we will explore the shoes some people want to fill.” (Forefront Theatre, 2015)
Hill, Liz. O’Sullivan, Catherine. O’Sullivan, Terry. Creative Arts Marketing. Oxford: Butterworth
Sleepdogs. 2014. The Bullet and the Bass Trombone, Sleepdogs, Marketing Pack. Bristol.
Forefront. 2015. Shoes to Fill, Forefront, Marketing Pack. Lincoln.
