Blog 4 – Catching Up

In one of our past workshops, our director Tamsyn created an exercise where we improvised a scene using a stimulus, for example an object being stolen. We were then all given different ages to work the scene around and note the difference in our actions, body language and voice. When given a particular age such as five, our behaviour became a lot more childish, loud and immature and then when dealing with the same situation a lot older, we noticed we became a lot more practical and mature when trying to find a solution. This was a useful exercise to experiment with the physicality and behaviours of embodying different age groups. In another workshop, we started to develop a “chair duets” scene, playing with the idea of the progression of a relationship as the characters pass through childhood, to the teen years and through to adulthood. It was interesting to play with altering our behaviour, facial expressions and movement to reflect the stage of life that the characters were facing. This movement scene prompted the further idea to write either a narration or a song over the top of this to highlight what was being shown – more on song writing in my next blog!

Hannah

Blog 4

These were key ideas we all came up with in the early stages:

  • Wanting to fill the shoes of a parent/guardian/sibling
  • Being scared of filling the shoes of a parent/guardian due to personal reasons within the relationship, perhaps an addiction
  • Feeling restricted and forced to fill the shoes that society deems as the “norm” – one’s sexuality perhaps, going to university
  • Looking up to celebrities in the media or television/film characters – wanting to fill the shoes of a role model, fictitious or real – the ideal life

A poem had previously been written by Clare, our lighting designer, about someone feeling like that had to go to university but even though they have certain adult qualities, they would rather be a child again. I slightly edited this poem and added the final verses, which are highlighted in blue in the attachment below, to also relate to the notion of feeling worried and intimidated to fill other people’s shoes.

University Poem – edited

 

Hannah.

Blog 3

From the beginning we all decided that it would be a good idea to include original music within our piece. I wrote a song called “I Want” *, intended to be sung from the opinion of children, showing their innocence through their hopes and dreams for what they want their lives to be like in the future: the perfect job, husband/wife, car. However, the song ends on a deeper note as the children start to wonder what would happen if they can’t live up to their parents. Can they even fill their shoes?

Attached is a copy of the musical arrangement that I have created on Sibelius technology.

I Want Page 1 I Want Page 2 I Want Page 3 I Want Page 4 I Want Page 5 I Want Page 6

 

I went on to write another song called the “Media Song” **, which was intended to be a parody of how television shows and celebrities in the media give their viewers unrealistic expectations of adulthood, such as love at first sight etc. Attached below are the original lyrics.

MEDIA SONG

final media song

 

The last song I wrote for Shoes to Fill is a reprise of “I Want”. It was written to answer our copy and also part of its predecessor.

I want reprise ***

 

Hannah.

 

* The song was performed in the final production to one simple line of melody as we found this easier since we are not known to be a musical group.

** This song went through a drastic change to fit in with our later final structure of the five chapters of life. It slotted into the finding “the one” section as it now speaks more about how we have unrealistic expectations of love due to films, book and television.

*** Both this song and the final version of the media song were sang a cappella as we found on show day that it was difficult to keep in time with the melody line.

Can we talk their talk? (Rehearsal – 24/02/2015)

As a company, Forefront Theatre want to use the words of others to create a performance piece which reflects other people as well as us. In order to do this we had to think of ways to portray their words in a respectful and honest manner. So, we chose to look at Verbatim theatre to help with this.

In a previous rehearsal, our writers had interviewed the Forefront Theatre Company members to help with their writing and I had recorded them so as to use the audio in a possible scene for our production. Using this idea Rachael Caulton, our dramaturg, put forward headphone verbatim theatre as a suggestion and so these recordings were experimented with in that way.

All performers were asked to pick someone else’s answers and listen to them. Once they had listened to the audio, I then told them to repeat what they were hearing as they were hearing it. I did not want the performers to mimic the accent they were hearing but instead to match the words and rhythm of the voice. To pretend to be the person would be difficult and is not necessary as the words are important in our piece not the accent of the voice.

IMG_20150224_162957

Listen from Webley (2015)

This rehearsal was very productive and headphone verbatim theatre proved a challenge but is definitely  worth pursuing by our company. It helped the performers develop their understanding of verbatim and experience how to perform it to an audience in a stylised manner on stage.

Tamsyn.

Work Cited:

Webley, T (2015) Listen