Development – Page 5 – No Added Sugar

Landmarks that make up your timeline… Sexy sex sex.

Lauren Elizabeth Walker / March 6, 2014June 2, 2014 / Development, Initial Ideas, Love

In rehearsals and discussions, we have been exploring different landmarks in a relationship. As a group we decided it would be easier to allocate each other a factor of a relationship and work on them individually. I decided I wanted to research “Sex” exploring awkward sexual encounters with a person, and alternatively sex with somebody that you love. While researching I came across an inner monologue of a Man’s thoughts during sex. The monologue sparked lots of different ideas in the rehearsal and there was lots of useful stuff in it. We decided at first that I am going to rewrite the monologue twice. One of them will consist of a man’s thoughts when having sex with someone they love and the other when the sex is awkward and new.

Here is a paragraph of the monologue I found to give you an idea.

“Sex. Sex. Sex. I am thinking about sex. Now I’m thinking about thinking about having sex. What is wrong with our brains that we can’t just enjoy things? We have to analyse them? Have we been doing this position to long? If I switch now, is she going to think that I wasn’t enjoying that last position? Because I really was. It’s sex- unless my penis is being bent in half, I am enjoying all of this”.

(What Culture, 2013)

I also researched typical music to make love to, the music that I found was extremely cliché and most of the songs are what you would expect to hear in a sex scene in a film. The most famous ones were “sexual healing” and “let’s get it on” which are the songs that will be playing throughout the scene.

The lonely island- “I just had sex” Paolo Nutini- “Candy”

Marvin Gaye- “Lets get it on” Jeremih- “Birthday sex”

R Kelly- “Bump and grind” James Morrison- “You give me something”

Barry white- “I’m gonna love you” Marvin Gaye- “Sexual healing”

While researching I also looked at different movie clips, as most films portray sex as something that is romantic and just works when really this is not the case at all. It’s interesting that a lot of the films that portrayed these scenes were the older classics. The example I have shown here is a perfect example of what I’m sure most girls envisioned there first times to be! Newer films such as bridesmaid portray the awkwardness and sometimes how it really is funny and just doesn’t work!

Films

An example of an awkward film clip…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44zNphZdnXc

(You tube, 2011)

An example of a love scene…

(You tube, 2009)

As the scene progressed we decided that we wanted the girls inner monologue as well as the boys, it made more sense to have both sides of the thought process during sex. Instead of interviewing I wrote two different monologues and we pieced these together to create the scene the writing style is very ‘real’ and doesn’t portray the things people necessarily think is going through somebodies head when having sex, because it isn’t all “I love him” and “this is perfect”. It’s lots of different emotions. Men and women are paranoid, they don’t know if what they are doing is working or what the other person thinks of what they look like naked.

Works Cited

Philips, H (2013) 10 Most Awkward Sitcom Sex. [online] London:Whatculture. Available from http://whatculture.com/tv/10-most-awkward-sitcom-sex-scenes.php/5 [Accessed 26 June 2011

Wheatley, C 2011, ‘One Day’, Sight & Sound, 21, 9, pp. 70-71, International Bibliography of Theatre & Dance with Full Text, EBSCOhost, viewed 28 May 2014.

Megan (2009) Ghost Unchained Melody [Online Video] Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXfxUVjHFl0 [Accessed 6 July 2014].

videovipere (2011) Bridesmaids sex scene [Online Video] Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44zNphZdnXc [Acessed 6 July 2014].

Love comes in many forms

Abigail Dawson / February 26, 2014May 4, 2014 / Development, Love

When creating a piece of devised theatre it is important to discuss and experiment with the style and structure that our performance will undertake for the final show. As a group, and me personally, decided that a fragmented and post dramatic structure would be the perfect fit for our style of theatre which we wanted to create. Our piece as a whole aims to be about love, what different kinds of love people have experienced, how love has affected people, and generally how people feel about the four letter word. Love itself is not a simple and smooth experience; there are many ups and downs throughout. Considering this, we want to apply this manner of jitteriness to our performance so the audience feel like we have taken them through the journey of love; unpredictable, erratic and also spontaneous. A fragmented style appears to be a perfect fit. Love connotates so many different things to individual people, therefore there is not one simple fluid means of exposing love.

We sought to conduct and collect information from interviews with friends, family and even venture out in to the public and talk to the local community. Asking them questions such as “Do you have any rules within relationships?”, “When do you think it is okay to say I love you?” and “Do you have any past or present experiences you would like to share about finding or losing love?”. These questions will hopefully open doors to aid in writing text for our performance, sharing peoples ‘real’ thoughts about the subject matter. We also hope to possibly turn these interviews into verbatim sections of our piece. Our aim is to expose ‘real’ experiences and thoughts about love, something for the audience to emphasise and relate to – it may be their own words they hear recited, or it could be something they have experienced or believe to be true.

Not only do we wish to reveal to the audience what is ‘real’, we also aim to juxtapose and mock the ‘real’ against what we watch in films. Love portrayed in films is generally false; it is over exaggerated and embellished to an extent where in reality it just would not happen. For example , in the film ‘ 10 Things I Hate About You’ when Heath Ledger sings ‘Can’t Take my Eyes Off You’ to his love interest on the school’s football field bleachers, and he arranges the school band to join in to make a romantic gesture. This simply would not happen in reality. Another example is in ‘Friends with Benefits’ where Justin Timberlake arranges a flash mob for his love interest to show her that he is in fact interest in her after all – below is a video of the romantic gesture.

Again, it simply does not happen in reality, and if it does it would probably be a very rare occasion. Either that or I walk through various flash mobs every day where a man is declaring his love to a woman through song and dance. By contrasting the ‘real’ and the fake we can truly see the reality of love, and that it is not all flowers and kisses and flash mobs, instead we get an inside look of the stories of realistic relationships. However it must be noted that we do not wish to portray how bad love can be, we do not want the reality of it to come across as negative. We aim to show the good and happy moments of relationships too, but we are able to ‘real’ thoughts and feelings from the public and how they go so much deeper than what we see in films. Contemporary and also classic romantic films will be our key sources when attempting to mock love. We shall develop this idea throughout the devising process and continue to discuss how to insert it in to our performance.

There is a long road ahead…

Shellie-Ann Barrowcliffe / February 25, 2014May 4, 2014 / Development

Our company is still newly formed and we are working together as a new group and discovering what each member is interested in. We are still finding our feet and finding our ideas. There is still a long journey to make and I don’t think it is going to be an easy one. There is going to be things that people love, things that people dislike and things that people might not understand. There will be a range of emotions throughout the process but it is how we work through these emotions and possibly direct the energy into the performance that will develop who we are as a company.

Devising a piece good enough to be performed is a difficult task within itself, we don’t want it to be something that is mediocre, we want to develop something with a unique twist but something that isn’t necessarily cheesy or cliché. We currently have a wide range of ideas and are in the process of having too many ideas, which is a good things for now as it gives us a lot of space to explore and play around with text, images, films, projection and other forms of media.

Taking inspiration from The Trilogy, which was performed at the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre (30th Jan) we want to take the parts that captured our imagination and put the same skills and techniques into practice but with our own work. We are also taking inspiration from Ours was the Fen country and their use of verbatim, sounds and movement. Other inspirations currently include Filter Theatre Company and several films.

It is going to be a long but hopefully enjoyable process to stage manage this show, something which I am looking forward to. It is great to see all of our current ideas coming to life on the stage.

Thoughts about music.

Jozey Wade / February 23, 2014June 2, 2014 / Development, Initial Ideas, Love, Music

One of the things we have agreed upon as a group from the start is that we intend to use live music in our piece.
We have been greatly inspired by companies like Filter Theatre who utilise music and live sound to enhance their work brilliantly. As well as work by companies that Tom, Phoebe and I saw at the Edinburgh Fringe last year, such as the Flanagan Collective with their charming folk musical, ‘Beulah’, and HitchHook Theatre’s ‘This was the World and I was King’ which used original songs to underpin the story of three children and their parents during World War One; “the inclusion of music [was] seamless” and it “complemented each scene wonderfully” (Adam 2013).

Photo: http://hookhitch.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/web19.jpg

Production still from HitchHook Theatre’s ‘This Was the World and I was King’.

Music can be such a part of romance and love, it’s hard not to involve it in our thoughts on the subject. While in a relationship, couples tend to have a song that somehow speaks for and “belongs to” their relationship, recent dump-ees have a song or two that they sit and cry to, newly weds have their wedding dance number and romantic meals or gestures are often accompanied by romantic background music (Barry White perhaps). On top of that, music itself is, more often than not, inspired by love – especially popular music. Song lyrics are often about romances gone wrong or romances gone right, or romance in one way or the other.

So, we felt that complimenting and under toning our piece with music throughout would really provide a kind of romantic atmosphere (where appropriate). In using popular loves songs from throughout time too, it would give the audience references to relate to and even laugh at. The aim is to have a sense of humour, not to be too cheesy. Just honest.

So, starting to make a list of famous love songs (this list will be edited and added to as we go):

Unchained Melody – The Righteous Brothers
I Will Always Love You – Whitney Houston
True – Spandau Ballet
The Power Of Love – Hewey Lewis and the News
The Heart Will Go On – Celine Dion
I Wanna Know What Love Is – Foreigner
The Shoop Shoop Song – Cher
What’s Love Got To Do With It – Tina Turner
I Wanna Dance With Somebody – Whitney Houston
Crazy Little Thing Called Love – Queen
Somebody to Love – Queen
The Rock Show – Blink 182
I Would Do Anything For Love – Meat Loaf
What Makes You Beautiful – One Direction
Always – Bon Jovi
All You Need is Love – The Beatles

I’ll stop here for now, but we will continue this! I clearly need help thinking of more modern “hip” love songs (because I may as well be 50 years old as far as music is concerned). Gabby and I have also made a list of the instruments and capabilities we have, and also things that people could possibly pick up or learn in the time we have.
Here is our list of instruments and possible players so far:

Ukuele – Jozey (and Lauren wants to learn?)
Guitar – Jozey (very basic but could learn more) and Tom
Piano – Gabby (experienced) and Jozey (very VERY basic but could learn more)
Horn/ Sax – Gabby (experienced)
Glockenspiel – (Becky is learning)
Tambourine – (Any of us could learn)
Vocals – Lauren, Jozey, Phoebe, Sam, Shellie and Abbi

Reference:

Adam, N (2013) ‘This Was the World and I Was King’, Broadway Baby, 22 August. Available online: http://www.broadwaybaby.com/shows/this-was-the-world-and-i-was-king/31504 [Accessed 23 February 2014]

What is our identity? Initial logo drafts.

Samantha Mckenzie / February 9, 2014June 2, 2014 / Development, Initial Ideas, Marketing

Here are the first drafts of our initial logo idea. As a company, we would like a logo which represents us successfully as professional, to the point and tassle free. I think this clean cut design does justice to us and our performance. The combination of printed and hand written style type face represents the combination of styles and forms we are experimenting with in our rehearsal process. However, one thing we did ask of the graphic designer is if some colour could be injected into the logo to bring some life and excitement to it.

Work Cited:

Zamysliansyj, J. (2014)