When I went to the Paper Birds workshop the woman talked about performing verbatim. She talked about how you can never truly become the character you are portraying. So you can rather try and become them, to the best of your ability, or essentially create your own version of them. I knew that pretending to play a woman in her 70’s or a man in his 30’s is more than likely going to cause offence, especially given that the person acting that age is a 20 or 21 year old drama student. So, I needed to work with my actors so as to could capture the emotion of their character without trying to mimic them.
I started to talk to the performer about who they thought their character was just by reading the words on the page. I wanted them to develop their own back story for their characters. I wanted the actor to think about who this person could be. I worked with many of them and we gave their character a voice through giving them an age, a mannerism and thinking about the life they might have led. I wanted the characters to be portrayed as if real people but not a replica of the actual person telling the story. Working with the performers in this way helped myself and them gain a better understanding of the type of performance they would give on stage.
Shoes play a big part in our piece. When you have more characters on stage than performers it is important to show the audience that they are different. Logically, it made sense for our group to show characters through shoes. We place the shoes in front of the mic for verbatim so as to let the audience know the performers are not trying to be the person. We want the audience to know the words being spoken are real. We are doing this through what we have labelled the ‘reality mic’. The microphone front stage left is where verbatim is told and audio of real voices is played. Making it subtle yet effective.
When written scenes occur on stage, we have made directorial decisions as to whether shoes seem necessary. Where there is a clear character they will have shoes. The constant appearance of the character Ashleigh and the character that says her fears throughout the piece need shoes. This is to show the character is the same. For the expectation vs reality scenes, characterisation is crucial as they are not wearing shoes. This was decided as they are the same characters but they are talking about what they want from life and so are waiting on the shoes they will eventually fill. For the reprise song, I have asked all performers to wear their own shoes. To the audience this may not be obvious but to the performers and myself it is sending a clear message that you should choose the shoes you wear.
Working with actors to build on their characters is an enjoyable experience for me and it is how we fit naturalism in our piece.
Tamsyn.