Category: Rachael Caulton

Post show reflections

Shoes To Fill went well other than a minor technical error which was dealt with professionally. I enjoyed performing in a somewhat comedic show. We wanted to provide a mix of comedy with our poignant verbatim stories to allow the audience to experience a mix of emotions and I think we achieved this. I enjoyed the challenge of playing different characters and emotions, as well as singing.

When acting in verbatim scenes I remembered the original recordings in my head thinking about the struggles those people went through to improve how realistic I acted. When performing the expectation versus reality scenes I tried to remember what it was like to go through a similar experience and matched my voice and body to do so using Stanislavsky’s emotion memory technique to guide me. For example when I said “Santa will always bring me good presents”(Foden and Parkes, 2015,) I tried to release my inner child and the excitement Christmas brings. I also remembered how I felt when I found out that the magic that was Santa was not real and the sad emotions that came with the thought of being lied to all these years, the magic being broken. However I have no experience of being old or taking “15 pills a day”(Foden and Parkes, 2015) so had to imagine how this felt. I thought this would be difficult to remember so acted out counting this number on my fingers as I walked offstage.

 

I also thought about the research I have done over the module to aid my performance by thinking about real life situations I had read about for example alcoholism in our Ashleigh diaries scene with the feet. I thought about how it would feel to have an alcoholic parent and tried to evoke this. I enjoyed helping to market the piece by handing out flyers on the street of Lincoln. The show day was well organised, and included two dress rehearsals which we improved each time from helpful feedback given by our lecturer and director.

I feel as though I now understand processes involved to create a theatre company as I have done so practically, this includes gaining the knowledge of the budgeting and planning needed for performance, as I have seen and helped peers through this process.

Group dynamic has played an important role in our process of Shoes To Fill as we have overcame disagreements and pulled together to create our show as a company.

I believe I have succeeded in ensuring that the company has not drifted off topic and that we have continued to look at expectations in life and role models for ‘Shoes To Fill’ by using appropriate research to inform the writing and devising which maintained clarity for the audience. We believe the truths we have performed are relevant to all – as many have come from verbatim. Through our performance we challenged expectations by showing reality alongside them, through comedic voice overs. We hoped to inspire people to break stereotypes and follow their own expectations in life as we sang in our reprise “the only shoes you need to fill are those life helps you find” (Foden and Parkes, 2015, 30).

 

Rachael

Works cited

Foden, H. and Parkes, O. (2015) Shoes To Fill. Unpublished.

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.

Laces.

As laces are used to hold things together they can be seen as a metaphor for keeping oneself together when the world around them seems to be falling apart. The speaker in the piece has a collection of laces so I researched into what colours represented so to use appropriate colours for our story. I found also there was a colour to symbolise a recovering alcoholic. I passed this onto the writers.

Using these would be useful as this allows two research results to be combined together to create these scenes as symbolism is something brought up in Edward Gordon Craig’s works so to use these colours would enable us to represent these messages.

 

I am soon to collect verbatim material from to possibly use within the piece or inspire its final routes as the last draft of the script takes shape and am continuing to look into images to use for the opening piece in the song titled I want.

I am looking forward to soon learning about production skills as my research into the piece will soon take this role when the writing is complete to enable the piece to use other tools to effectively create Shoes To Fill.

 

Rachael

Bat Mitzvah

Answers have been retrieved from an American lady whom I owe many thanks to for her time. Her daughter has answered about her bat mitzvah and whether taking part in this tradition provided her with aspirations of her own or pressure to conform. The results were of interest and provided insight into the tradition from a real perspective.

Alcoholism

The company also wants to show an example of someone not wanting to fill shoes so have taken information from my findings on alcoholics to create a narrative which will run through Shoes To Fill involving a story of an alcoholic mother. To do this in a realistic and unbiased way I took information from a variety of sources I found on alcoholism. I looked into Alcoholics Anonymous studying their 12 steps to recovery programme. I also looked into the organs that are affected the most when someone is an alcoholic to see the journey their body undertakes in becoming reliant on this substance and which bod parts shut down and begin to become unreliable like the mother herself in caring for her child.

Through my research I also found the national association for children of alcoholics – a person with a parent of any age can contact them for help. By doing this I aimed to provide the writers with a thorough background knowledge of the issue as well as looking more in depth into the service available for such people and looking at the reason why this would not be a good shoe to fill and how this may create alternative role models for children other than parents.

This provides us with a darker tale to ensure our performance has moments of darkness to show how filling someone’s shoes can be difficult or not an aspiration at all.

Update

This week I work shopped my idea of using the survey responses as stimuli, to develop the Boal exercise Rhythm with chairs ( as mentioned in my previous blog). Using the survey responses created some interesting images on what it constitutes to be an adult and what responsibilities adults have,in connection with a letter to a past self the writers created.This gave movement to the scene but currently a new way of transitioning needs to be researched to enable the actors to change more fluidly when going into the spoken role and between creating the images. I will research this to allow us to explore and experiment with movements in order to develop our pieces aesthetic,whilst ensuring the movements relate to Shoes to fill and adulthood so that the scene retains clarity for audience members.The Theatre of the Opresssed allows actors ‘to stretch the limits of their imaginations,[and] demechanize habitual behaviors’ (Anon.,2015) meaning adults and children would be depicted in non habitual ways and thought of more thoroughly.

The writers are now working from some of the survey responses  to edit and develop the scene, using the perspectives gained from the survey.The letter talks of what shoes the future self thinks the past self should fill. To develop this further I shall suggest to the director the idea of having shoes placed by the chair for the actor reading the letter to wear, to symbolise that they are the same person. This shall be referenced multiple times in our piece as the idea for this has been brought up when related to other scenes by actors and the director.

Legal ages

Using the research I found on minimum legal ages a game show like scene has begun to be devised and research anomalies have been passed to writers to use for creating questions and answers for the game show. By incorporating the audience in this scene there is another sense of using Boal here to enable the audience to ‘better understand ourselves, our communities and our world’ (Anon,2015)as the audience will  share knowledge on minimum legal ages in multiple countries.This will show what these different countries constitute as adult or ages of responsibility thus giving them a greater understanding of the world if they participate in the performance, as the Theatre of the Oppressed aims to do. Our piece will not specifically be a Theatre of the Oppressed piece however – though there shall be other moments of audience participation- but will reflect and echo some of Boal’s techniques as suggested to enable imaginative thinking when devising scenes.

Rachael.

 

Works Cited

Anon. (2015) What is Theatre of the Oppressed? Theatre of the Oppressed: A rehearsal for revolution New York. Available from http://theforumproject.org/whatisto/ [Accessed 14 March 2015]