It’s just over a month until our performance and my main concern is the harmonies in the first and last songs. We have made progress, just some of the harmonies are difficult to get. Individually each member of the cast has an amazing voice it is just find the correct balance and group tone. I think the group are just doubting themselves and their own abilities. The trick is to listen. Listening to each other helps so much as it allows you to find the correct pitch and to synchronise with the backing music. But we have found a solution, any singer will agree that harmonies are difficult to learn and when put with all of the elements and put on a stage it is difficult to concentrate and pitch. Therefore, as a company we have set up a No Added Sugar Sound Cloud profile, where we can upload sound clips for people to access at home. By doing this each singer will be able to listen to their own parts and practice at home ready to come into the music rehearsals ready to go.
Recently, March 22nd to be precise, Forced Entertainment live streamed their performance of And on the Thousandth Night… from Lisbon, I watched enthralled as these great theatre makers made stuff up, on the spot, for six hours. The basic premise of the show, which has now been performed for over fourteen years, is that a performer tells stories into a microphone until another performer interrupts them with a story of their own. The result is a great mass of individual narratives very few of which ever receive their ending, some last for minutes and others just a few seconds. Often they are interconnecting so that rather than being hundreds of completely isolated narratives each one is related so that each new story is a direct result of what has come before.
In the above clip the final story about the restaurant in the desert acts as the punch line to Tim Etchell’s slightly earlier story about the man searching for water. This is theatre that is not afraid to reveal its influences or its craft. None of these performers know what the next five minutes will hold and that means when something works, as it does at the end of this clip, the effect is all the more wonderful. The Audience is expecting chaos and is given something else entirely.
For me it asked a lot of questions about how we structure our own show, how we create narrative and create excitement out of spontaneity. For me the greatest benefit of a devising process is that so much can go wrong, but occasionally something goes wrong in a wonderful way. I have attempted in some ways to facilitate this in the way I structure rehearsal. Often there is very little set direction for a rehearsal, I will go in with an intentionally vague idea of what we want to achieve.
Yesterday the task set out on our rehearsal schedule was simply to ‘create a new sequence on the theme of weddings and commitment’. What followed was four hours of, occasionally heated, discussion and workshop until finally we had settled on a concept we liked and some ideas on what would actually happen. The direction that we eventually took was more or less a complete surprise to everyone and I’m very glad to say much more interesting than anything I had considered leading up to the rehearsal. Some much loved ideas, including and long reference to The Wizard of Oz, fell to the wayside as we found other sources that served the new scene better.
I have found that most of the time a lack of structure gives better results this, is of course, a credit to everyone in the company who are not content with just performing but are working closely to create theatre that represents us. We achieve much better results by pooling our talents than by adhering to a script written before rehearsal.
Photography by Jozey Wade
One small example is the image below. In this rehearsal we were meant to be working a scene about break ups in preparing the space we accidentally made this and our Jozey captured this image which has become our central marketing image.
The real genius of And on Thousandth Night… is that it encapsulates the chaotic process which has made their work so successful and literally puts it on the stage for the audience to enjoy. We are attempting to capture that same chaotic force to make our theatre exciting, enjoyable and unpredictable.
‘The aim of arts marketing is to bring an appropriate number of people, drawn from the widest possible range of social background, economic condition and age, into an appropriate form of contact with the artist and, in so doing, to arrive at the best financial outcome that is compatible with the achievement of that aim’ (Diggle, 1994, 25).
As the marketing manager of this company, it is my responsibility to successfully market the show and increase our audience interest. Marketing is the key ingredient needed to guarantee an audience and to influence discussion about the show in advance. Due to the increase in the use of modern technologies in the past ten years and particularly social media, it is vital that we take advantage of the many ways in which we can inform people about the event. It has been my responsibility to set up and operate our Facebook page, Instagram account and Twitter account. Each site is useful for different reasons and publicises our company to different types of audience. They all have the advantage of giving an intimate insight into our devising process.
Facebook is an increasingly popular social media site which is used by people of all ages and lifestyles (school children, students, parents, and teachers). Our Facebook page is used to share dates and times of our event as well as a weekly picture which updates our ‘likers’ on what we are up to in our devising process.
Instagram is a site particularly of interest to the more arty and creative of us. It is a site dedicated to the sharing and editing of photographs and videos. Our Instagram account is the key device we use to document our rehearsal process through pictures and videos.
The creation of Twitter means we can now see inside the minds of celebrities and other (possibly less interesting) people out there. The site allows us to release our everyday thoughts and experiences into the world of the internet. Twitter is very useful in terms of advertising and increasing the flow of information about our event, its uses such as ‘following’, ‘retweeting’, ‘favouriting’ and ‘hash-tagging’ make it easier to get our name heard. There are also a variety of other theatre companies and creative professionals who hold Twitter accounts (which we have followed and contacted) and have shared our tweets.
All three Social Medias have their advantages and have been essential parts of our marketing process. So far we have been successful in gaining 226 likes on our Facebook page, 40 followers on Instagram and 236 followers on our Twitter account. We hope for an increase in these numbers as the event draws nearer in order to share the details to as many people as possible.
What’s next?
Our next steps in terms of marketing our event are the creation of posters and flyers; both of which are underway. We aim to disperse these in the key areas of Lincoln and also post images of them on our social media sites in order to increase ticket sales. The idea we have in mind for the image on our posters is a photograph of layered post-it notes in the shape of a love heart. The post-it notes will be green to interlink with our central colour scheme and the heart represents our theme of love and relationships. The reason we have chosen post-it notes is to reflect the way in which we have layered stories and styles in our devising process and the fragmented way in which our piece is formatted. We hope to use the same post-it notes to market our piece further by dispersing them around the university campus (particularly the library). Written on them will be ‘love notes’ and our twitter user name: @noaddedsugartc, encouraging whoever finds them to tweet us with their thoughts and feedback.
Works cited:
Diggle, K. (1994) Arts Marketing. London: Rhinegold Publishing Limited.
As a company we decided to create a unique devised piece instead of taking and performing or possibly adapting a ready-made script. The devising process will allow us to create and recreate ideas into something that we do not even know yet. I feel like this is going to be a tough but exciting process as Stage Manager due to its changing nature, I will have to be organised and note down everything that is important even if it is going to change as then we will have a reference in case there was a previous idea which could work but had been lost through the changes. ‘Devised work is a response and a reaction to the playwright – director relations, to text-based theatre, […] and challenges the prevailing ideology of one person’s text under another person’s direction. (Oddey, 1994, 4).
Throughout our process there will not be one set writer, it will be a case of individuals going away and finding material and then as a company we have a say in the ideas that we liked or what we thought could work. It is a case of collaborating ideas and then an individual of the company will go and write a draft script in which will be read through as a company, suitable actors chosen and then edited to performance standard, even then it shall still be changed as staging takes place.
Meet the company!
The devising process has allowed the company to ‘stretch the limits of established practices’ (Govan, 2007, 3) in the sense that there is no linear narrative. As a company we have been able to fragment several techniques and stories together to create our piece. It has allowed us to play with different styles that normally would not be seen in the same performance ranging from puppetry to music.
Works Cited:
Govan, N., Nicholson H., Normington K. (2007) Making a Performance, Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices, Oxford: Routledge
Oddey, A (1994) Devising Theatre: A Practical and Theoretical Handbook, London: Routledge
As part of our devising process, each member of the company is researching into different milestones in a relationship which may be used in the performance. For the structure of the piece, we have discussed using a timeline of some sort that plots the generic events that occur in an average relationship (first kisses, meeting parents etc). These events will then be explored individually through a mixture of real accounts from the public, our own experiences and the heightened portrayals that popular films/songs/TV use. I am delving into the muddy waters of marriage; a foreign territory for me which means relying on my own experience is not an option.
In films and TV, marriage and weddings are often overly romanticised or unrealistically dramatic. What springs to mind instantly is the classic soap opera nearly-wedding where just before the couple say ‘I do’, something terrible happens that disrupts the ceremony. This more unrealistic view of engagement could be something we explore, however I have already started talking to real couples who will be getting married later this year. Their responses give an honest but heart-warming account of what this life event is like. From the interviews, I have picked out a few points of interest that could be used in the performance. The proposal is something that I think we can definitely play with and using details of real proposals we could create a very uplifting (but genuine and not sugar coated!) scene. Below is a picture of the location of one proposal that was revealed in an interview which we may explore in rehearsals:
the location of one interviewees proposal
First dance songs could be a useful and interesting way to connect our use of live music to this section. That would also create a potential opportunity to have a more physical scene, as currently we have a lot of static, text based moments. It would also be interesting to link some of the stories that we find together. Here is a short list of possible songs that we could use for this section:
