Verbatim
This week I have collected verbatim interviews and statements on the subject of role models, acting on behalf of others, responsibility, adulthood and expectations in life for Shoes To Fill.
I have also collected statements of expectations of being a parent as a parent seems to be a person coming up frequently as someone whom people wish to fill the shoes of but at times avoid this and walk their own path in life.
The recordings are important to us as a company as the way words are spoken can show us how a person felt at the time of speaking. Pauses, slurs and speech idiosyncrasies all reveal emotion and thought process that are essential when portraying one of the important people that have given up their time to help create Shoes To Fill truthfully.
Script and inspirations
The group has had a script read through where I offered my feedback from the perspective of dramaturge to ensure clarity for the audience whilst maintaining that filling people’s shoes is the main theme of the piece. I have offered to attend all rehearsals to ensure the theme continues to have clarity from the point of view of a spectator or in case research is quickly needed on areas actors are unsure of. There has been edits and ideas to help shape the script in its final editing phase.
I shall gain more perspectives by interviewing others of multiple ages allowing the piece to be less unbiased. A role I play includes narrating verbatim about forced marriage to bring this issue to the forefront, so I decided to research into this more to give my acting more depth on the websites Plan-uk and Gov.uk. I also watched Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage which showed an engaging way to tell verbatim stories. I saw that the eyes played a large part here and looking at the audience was important to create a connection with them.
An element that runs through our piece is an expectations versus reality section for this I researched into common sayings and ideas relating to 5 areas of expectations in life. For this I looked at common expectations for children thinking about Christmas presents, expectations of school and nursery being fun educational and the best time of your life. I then looked at expectations about university such as one about being able to do many hobbies and keeping friends for life.
Different expectations of parenthood were taken from parents in snippets of verbatim and then taken from this we have created more expectations versus reality scenes about having children and how this feels. The last section was expectations of old age and the one expectation we all have – death. I passed this onto Ollie so he could make this comical.
I also looked into different elements in the media that are and have been role models. The writers came up with the idea of unrealistic love in the media to create the Finding the one song.