Blog – Page 5 – No Added Sugar

Verbatim and the Morality of Using the Words of Others

Tom Briggs / May 7, 2014June 2, 2014 / Reflection, Verbatim and Interviews

Verbatim theatre along with documentary theatre has become increasingly popular over the last twenty years. The central concept of verbatim is that you put the real words of real people on stage as near as possible to how they were spoken. Some of the first works of verbatim theatre to gain notoriety include Richard Norton-Taylor’s The Colour of Justice which used the court records to recreate key moments in the Stephen Lawrence murder trial. The Colour of Justice has since become very influential and many agree played some part in the inquiry and the Macpherson report that followed. The playwright Robin Soans has said that a certain amount of expectations have built up around Verbatim theatre and that an audience “will expect the play to be political” (Soans in Hammond and Stewart, 2010, 19) in the last few years however many have challenged this preconception and shown that verbatim can be more about the people than the politics.

Alecky Blythe wrote The Girlfriend Experience about the way prostitution works in modern Britain and while it was partly political it was made far more remarkable by the people and their real lives being displayed as they never have been before. Her next play was to eradicate politics almost completely London Road was about a community recovering from finding a murderer in their midst. Breaking the mould once more London Road is the first verbatim musical and this seems to indicate that Verbatim has lost it’s sacred status and that it is open more to poetic licence and experimentation.

In the above clip a range of verbatim writers talk about the balance to be struck between representing the interviewee and creating good theatre. Alecky Blythe expresses how she finds herself taking bigger leaps in poetic licence as her career has gone on. London Road as a play is the closest to Three Words of any verbatim play I’ve read because it concerns itself only with the people, what they do, and how they feel. It is verbatim used to bring new voices and perspectives into the theatre, it puts the humanity of its characters on display to the audience.

This too is what we wanted, people will always be at the centre of Three Words and we needed to inject a healthy dose of reality to ensure we were not making exactly the kind romance that Hollywood seems to incapable of escaping. That was when we made our decision to find as many interviewees and use their stories as the backbone of the show. We use verbatim in several places, much of it recorded, here is one piece that made it without any editing into the show.

In other places we have had to do as Alecky Blythe has done and edit, merge or downright invent stories for the purposes of making the show easy to follow. ‘The 2p Train’ was a based on a story from within the company and one from outside, we spoke to the outside party and presented them with our script for their confirmation. This type of merging is mentioned in the above video by the director Nadia Fall and it is commonly used in order to simplify the amount of characters the audience has to follow. As we only really had two characters throughout the show a lot of merging took place but always with the express consent of those we spoke to.

The clip above shows that Verbatim has lost some of the puritanical attention to detail that companies like Blythe’s Recorded Delivery developed in favour of something a little more theatrical. It has past the point of being simply political in the way that it was for writers like David Hare and Robin Soans. Verbatim is developing into more than a set of rules into another tool for storytellers to use. It brings people into the theatre that would never normally cross the threshold let alone step on stage and celebrates their stories. Verbatim is really the only way to truly represent people and that’s what Three Words is all about.

Works Cited

Blythe, A (2011) London Road. London: Nick Hern Books.

Blythe, A (2008) The Girlfriend Experience. London: Nick Hern Books.

Hammond, W & Steward, D. (eds.) (2010) Verbatim Verbatim. London: Oberon Books.

National Theatre (2014) The ethics of verbatim theatre. [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39JSv-n W5U [accessed 4 May 2014].

Norten-Taylor, R. (1999) The Colour of Justice. London: Oberon Books.

Work In Progress – Review

Shellie-Ann Barrowcliffe / May 6, 2014May 17, 2014 / Development, Work In Progress

Audiences are always collaborators. Without somebody watching, theatre can be no more than a faraway tree falling unheard. (Gardner, 2009)

Work In Progress events are also known as Scratch events, they are something which is becoming more popular to do throughout the development process when creating a performance. This is due to being able to present your work at any stage to an audience which is willing to critique your work and as an audience member ‘we are engaged critically, even creatively; asked to reflect on what we felt worked, what didn’t and what’s missing.‘(Gardner, 2009). This is important throughout the development phase as it gives you a feel of what will work with a larger audience and what possibly needs to be changed or maybe gotten rid of altogether due to it not working or creating the right effect.

It is even the case that theatres are starting to hold Scratch night events in which performers, comedians and dance artists can go along and perform their work to an audience who will then provide feedback afterwards in order to help the production to develop to its best potential.

As a company we felt that we would benefit from holding our own Work-In-Progress event so we carefully selected a group of 8 people to come and watch our performance, whilst it was still raw and a few scenes had only just been developed and some still under construction so that we could get an idea of what was working for the audience and what was missing. We chose the audience and limited the amount of people we invited so that we could get the best possible feedback we could. Even though there was a lot of positive feedback, it was really the negative criticism that we were interested in so we could go ahead and work head to work from the feedback to make the show even better. I believe that with all of the feedback we have been given that the work in progress benefited our company a lot, although we do have a person who has the final say, this is a little hard to do when you have created the work, watched it develop and then know what might need to change. Putting a production in front of an audience, changes it. So it was a positive for us to get really good feedback as well as things to be changed.

Looking at it from the stage managers point of view, things were not perfect, people changed movements and things changed, whether this was down to nerves or just a lack of knowing what they are doing I do not know. But it is now time to make sure everyone is confident in their actions and can show this through their movements. We need to work hard on making sure the transitions are right for the show, as I believe this could make it or break it as it could interrupt the flow of the performance if people are not confident enough when changing scenes around. I know this might seem like a minor thing but it is going to get sorted for the performance. The little details also count. I feel like I need to figure out exactly where the music and sound effects are going to go as this has not yet been clarified but shall be done in the next rehearsal.

Overall I feel proud of the company after the viewing and know that together we will continue to work hard and work together to tighten up the scenes and make all our hard work pay off. We have THREE WEEKS until our performance, that in itself is exciting.

Works Cited:

Gardner, L (2009) Keeping Work-In-Progress theatre up to scratch. Available from: http://www.theguardian.com/stage/theatreblog/2009/sep/15/work-in-progress-theatre-scratch [Accessed 6th May 2014]

Performing Puppets.

Jozey Wade / May 5, 2014June 2, 2014 / Development, performance

We decided early on in our process that we wanted to be open to and explore as many different performance disciplines as possible. Having been influenced by Filter and a lot of innovative productions that some of us saw in Edinburgh last year, we really loved the idea of creating a mash up of performance styles, rather than strictly sticking to one. In doing so, we hope to provide the audience with a kaleidoscopical way to watch and experience such normal stories. Part of this was to capture the vast scope of feelings and experiences attached to love, but we also did want to celebrate different ways of performing, different ways of telling stories.

One of the performance styles we considered and admired when seeing other shows was puppetry, particularly in more adult orientated shows where it can be quite beautiful and haunting. As such, we have incorporated it in two very different ways, into two of our scenes. The Fantasist (shown in the video above) used puppetry to explore bi-polar disorder, using very different styles of puppets (as you can see) to give life to the different aspects of the disorder. While our puppetry is not being used to create a character for something inhuman, one of their puppets in particular is of a similar style to two puppets we are using in one of our final scenes.

Without giving away too much about the narrative of the scene, we are using specially adjusted jackets to symbolise two characters. We are doing it in a way that is very similar to the way they create the large man (shown dancing with the woman in the video) in The Fantasist. However, our puppets will simply be jackets (no head/ hat etc), as we found that there is something more beautiful about the fact that the jackets could be anyone. Their story very personal (being somewhat based on a true story) but also universal, and the depersonalised jacket-puppets certainly seem to add to that.

What is helpful and interesting about watching this video, as one of the puppeteers, is seeing how detailed and life like the large man’s movements are, despite the fact that he is an unrealistic looking man. Tom has been working with Abbi and I to block the scene but, having now brought the puppet home to play with and get used to myself, I can see that the real work is in the detail. It is in creating a character for these puppets in the little ways that they move, and in making them breathe. An example being in how I have made it so that my puppet’s hand shakes: a small signification of his age and health.

A few helpful pointers or quotes I have found on puppetry from an article by Cariad Astles:

1: “The puppeteers [] need to be
able to focus energy and attention clearly in the direction required” (Astles 2010) – This is something we have discussed in rehearsals; our focus and eye line needs to be on our puppet, so that the audiences attention is focused where ours is – on the puppets. We discovered that if we look at each other, or look ahead to where the puppet is headed, or out into the audience, we could move the focus to ourselves, meaning that the magic of the puppets and their characters would be lost.

2: “The intention here is not for the puppeteer to pretend not to breath; but to make the audience believe that as s/he breathes, so does the puppet or object” (Astles 2010) – Both Tom, Martyn (who came in to help one rehearsal) and myself have had some puppetry experience before and have learnt, through this, that the key is not to deliberately make the puppet breath, but to allow the puppet to move with our own breaths, meaning it looks natural and also retains that key relationship between the puppeteer and the puppet.

One 3rd interesting quote I have found is this: “Stephen Mottram (2007), likens the puppet to a musical instrument: in order to play it, you need to practise exercises daily in order to train your ﬁngers and your body” (Astles 2010) – This isn’t something we have discussed (as clearly we don’t have the time that trained puppeteers would do to build this up), but I am discovering (now that I have the puppet at home with me) that playing with it and getting used to the feel of it as much as possible, even watching carefully in the mirror, is incredibly important and will make a huge difference to how effective it looks on the night.

References:

Astles, C (2010) ‘Puppetry training for contemporary live
theatre’, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 1(1), March: pp. 22-35

RTENewsNow (2013), The Fantasist – a play about bipolar – RTÉ’s Morning Edition, Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHH5wB3PBhk [Accessed 5 May 2014]

So its nearly time to show our ideas…

Shellie-Ann Barrowcliffe / May 1, 2014May 4, 2014 / Development

The time is nearing to our second work in progress… Tomorrow in fact!

Do I feel ready? Yes…no… I really don’t know.

I think this is a great time in our process to show it to a selected audience due to the fact that we have been working so long on making it ‘right’ that I am not too sure if we know what right is anymore… We know how we want the scene to feel and the way we want the audience to connect in their own way but we have been spending hours that we no longer know if it is achieving what we want it to achieve. I believe showing it to an audience allows us to get some fresh eyes onto our material.

I feel that because it is a devised piece rather than scripted it is difficult to know if something truly works with an audience until we show it to one. We didn’t want to wait until the performance date it self so now is a good time as it leaves us with just under a month to develop and improve on the feedback we will be given.

As a company we know what still need the greatest improvements but hopefully this work in progress will pick up on aspects that we our selves had not thought of yet. It could be the slightest thing that is not right but this could change the whole feel of the scene. We are lucky enough for this to be our second work in progress so we can see how far our piece has come. We have come so far but know we still have so far left to go.

I feel so far this has been a journey that none of us expected, it has been fun, creative yet challenging. We are bonding more as a company that it is starting to feel like one, we have come so far from when we first formed. We are more comfortable around each other and parts of ourselves are starting to come out, showing hidden talents along the way.

We really are nine different people coming together to create one unique show.

We have assembled the best available in Lincoln.

Lauren Elizabeth Walker / April 30, 2014June 2, 2014 / Development, Initial Ideas, Love

No Added Sugar (2014)

The original idea for the wedding scene was to create a section in the performance that showed how couples who are planning to get married can be forced into big extravagant weddings by friends and family. Some couples set out to get married in a small venue with just their nearest and dearest there, but quite often it seems the people closest to them get involved and persuade them otherwise. The initial aim of the scene was to remind the audience, that even though fancy weddings can be beautiful, underneath all that what really matters is that two people love each other enough to promise themselves to one another for the rest of their lives. Firstly we talked about how planning all the different things that need to be organised in a wedding can be like a military mission. This led to many different ideas for a scene. We wanted to create a live wedding plan on stage for the audience to see, we hoped we could write it in a way where the audience could see a couple be cajoled into this wedding by us. The idea that followed was that we wanted a main ‘military type’ who would be in charge of giving out different jobs to each actor on stage, one of our first ideas was to place the live feed onto a map which would show the seating plan and be ready for the audience to see. With this idea in mind, I began to write the scene… we made a list of the most important factors of a wedding this included…

The Date.

The Venue.

The catering.

The dress.

The Music.

The Idea finally progressed into a scene that required audience participation. We thought there was no better way to show the audience how a wedding can manipulated then using two audience members who had never met before and planning their wedding! When writing the scene, I at first wrote it in a military style, having each actor with a different role within the wedding an example of this is….

“This is Sam… Wires, communications. She can write invitations like you’ve never seen. Calligraphy that’ll make you weep openly. She’ll be in charge of fonts and napkin folding.”

Throughout the process of devising our show, one of our main influences has been ‘Filter Theatre’. From the start we always aimed for our piece to have a relaxed atmosphere which gave the feel of organised chaos. Filters work also has this feel… “Although diminishing the audience, the timing of the event was actually crucial to the success of Filter’s performance; the informal atmosphere aimed for was enthusiastically embraced by an audience who had mostly just arrived from the pub. The production represented, in many ways, the RSC’s ‘‘night off’’, with a party feel amongst many sections of the auditorium” (Kirwan, 2009). Although lots of our performance showed similarities with Filter Theatre, I feel the main scene which we took real inspiration from them would have to be the wedding scene. In their rendition of ‘Twelfth Night’ Filter Theatre used lots of different audience participation the first time they use it in the show is when “Viola engaged with the audience directly at the start, making them complicit in her plan by borrowing a hoodie and baseball cap from a boy in the stalls, before completing her disguise by sticking a pair of socks into her pants” (Kirwan, 2009). This act proved extremely amusing, an effect we hope can be achieved in our scene. The scene that we took the most inspiration from was the party scene, which used audience participation to create an ‘spontaneous party’ this was all set around the song “What is love?” it began with an onstage whisper of the song, and built up until it was being repeated and sang louder and louder the onstage actors then began to involve the audience as ‘Sir Andrew’ who “wore a Velcro cap with sticky balls attached to it”(Kirwan, 2009). He asked the audience to throw the balls onto the stage, sometimes missing it but congratulating them when they had succeeded. The party then began to build up when the band joined in and the stage manager emerged with pizza boxes which were given out to audience members. When watching this scene I remember feeling as if I was apart of the action from start to end. This style is what we wish to create with the wedding scene, and I feel having two audience members on stage will help to achieve this.

Works Cited

Kirwan, P (2009), ‘Review of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (directed by Sean Holmes for Filter Theatre) at the Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, November 2008′, Shakespeare (1745-0918), 5, 1, pp. 114-117.

Kirwan, p (2013) Twelth Night at the curve theatre. [online] Exeunt. Available from: http://exeuntmagazine.com/reviews/twelfth-night-4/ [Accessed 30 April 2014]

No Added Sugar (2014)