Initial Ideas – No Added Sugar

A Single Spotlight

Abigail Dawson / May 28, 2014June 2, 2014 / Deveopment, Initial Ideas, performance, Technical

Throughout the process of Three Words not only was I the Production Manager, but I also took on the role as Lighting Designer (LD). Unlike a scripted play, our company devised the performance from scratch so I wasn’t able to go through our script from day one and think about ideas for lighting the stage, frankly because we did not have a finished script until a few weeks before the performance. When taking on a devised piece of work, this is something that a LD especially, has to deal with. Instead, I had to write notes down when scenes were first created and developed about the atmosphere and the intentions of the scene, so I could slowly put together a lighting design.

Francis Reid states that “the lighting designer is not some rather grand person who appears towards the end of the rehearsals and implies: ‘Right! You, Director, have done your production bit and you, Designer, have done your scenic bit. Stand aside and I will light the result of your (pathetic) efforts!” (2001, p. 90). The LD is in fact a part of the production team and communicates with the Director. Ultimately, the LD gives the director what he wants. All the way through the process I arranged meetings with Tom (Director) and Shellie (Stage Manager) to discuss ideas of what his initial vision of his production was. He opted for a production that was exciting, fun and visually stimulating. The first idea that sprang to my mind was adding lots of colour. The most important thing to remember when adding colour to lights is to “determine what role colour will play in the production style” (Reid 2001, p. 77). We need to think, ‘what do these colours represent?’ and ‘will a certain colour portray a certain emotion?’ For Three Words, I suggested a colour scheme of blue, purple, pink, green and orange, instead of always utilising straightforward white lights. These colours do not each represent an emotion necessarily; in fact they were not even used to create a tense or happy atmosphere. When blended together, these colours formed a visual picture that was vibrant and hopefully intriguing for the eye of the audience. When discussing colours with the Director, we agreed that having such a range of colours also essentially portrayed the range of stories and situations we put into our production. I even managed to take our company colours pink and green (from our programmes and posters) and light our pre-set with them. Below are some photos taken during our technical rehearsal in the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre auditorium & attached are my Magic and Focus sheet:

NO ADDED SUGAR FOCUS CHART

NO ADDED SUGAR MAGIC SHEET

Like Brecht, we utilised some of the methods which he created for Epic Theatre. Such as our flipchart with three words that described each scene, this resembles Brecht’s use of placards which also explained each new scene. He basked in the fact that the audience were aware they were watching actors performing a play, set changes would be in full view. I was also influenced by how he employed his lighting on stage. Many of his lights were visible to the audience, much like ours, and even our operator was on stage with us which eliminated any impression of a naturalistic feel. His use of lighting would indicate a passing of time or a chance in scenes, which is exactly what I aimed to use ours for. We did not necessarily require the lights to create a mood or atmosphere, if colour was added during a scene it would be to suggest a change in tone or pace of the dialogue, not a change in the actor’s emotions. Fundamentally, “Brecht wanted above all a space to tell his story in” (Leach 2004, p. 123) which I believe I also created with my lighting design plans.

Another influence I encountered during our process was Headlong Theatre Company. I believe their lighting design, fantastically created by Malcolm Rippeth in many of their productions, transports their audience into a scene. They use colour, generally subtle, but which enhances the mood and atmosphere of a production. Below are photographs from their current production of Spring Awakening (2014) and past production of Chimerica (2013):

springawakening — (Taken from https://headlong.co.uk)

CHIMERICA-WEB-15 — (Taken from https://headlong.co.uk)

I sought to take an essence of Headlong’s lighting and create our own style. Something that was bright and colourful, something that the audience would visually enjoy. I have thoroughly enjoyed my role of Production Manager, however my passion lies in designing lights. I can only hope this showed through our production of Three Words. If I have any three words to say its: Watch this space. Below are some photos taken from our dress rehearsal which show some of my colourful lighting design in action on the stage:

14129840867_11967495a5_b — (Taken by Linford Butler: 27/5/14)

14316389635_82134916bd_b — (Taken by Linford Butler: 27/5/14)

Works Cited
Reid, F. (2001) The Stage Lighting Handbook, New York: Routledge.
Leach, R. (2004) The Makers of Modern Theatre: An Introduction, London: Routledge.

The Brand.

Phoebe Wall-Palmer / May 9, 2014June 2, 2014 / Development, Initial Ideas, Marketing

What constitutes a brand? Well, first you need a strong visual identity: logo, fonts, colors, a catchy tagline – but that is not enough. A successful brand engages on an emotional level – it is all about the customers’ experiences with your company (Goldbogen, 2011, 42).

1599060_10201498592099131_801229275_o — Official NAS Logo

Once we had our logo finalised, we needed to get thinking about our essential marketing tools – poster and flyer designs. As it was the early stages of the process, and the piece is devised, the performance was changing and evolving daily. Theatre in general is recognised as something that is difficult to brand and market: “Difficult brands have two primary characteristics: constrained availability and uncertain outcomes (Harrison and Hartley, 2007) … Uncertain outcomes relates to the risk involved in attending a performance without prior knowledge of how it will be received” (Preece and Johnson, 2011, 19). As we have no credit to the piece, such as reviews or Arts Council funding, it is even more essential that we got the marketing the best it can be to attract an audience. After a group discussion, we decided on a marketing strategy involving post-it notes. We liked the idea of hand-written type, alongside the layering and jumble of the notes. It connected very well to the fragmented and post-structuralist form of theatre that inspired us in the beginning of the process. We planned to write questions on each post-it and stick them around campus and in town. We would ask questions similar to that of our interviews to collect verbatim material, such as “how long should you wait before you say ‘I love you’?” Beneath the question would be a link to our twitter page, in the hope that people would tweet us their answers, with the hash-tag ‘threewords’.

This scheme was in the pipeline, but we felt it was too early to begin as we didn’t have posters and flyers in place. Inspired by the post-it note idea, we decided to create an image of a heart using them. This would make our branding consistent, and the post-it note would be recognisable in relation to No Added Sugar. We particularly liked the contrast of the heart, something traditionally associated with love, made up of something quite ordinary.

We forwarded the images to our graphic designer. We were regrettably vague with our guidelines as we still had not come to a decision as a group on exactly what we wanted, but felt we needed a draft of something to work with.

NAS Flier 31 Mar page 1 — 1st Draft NAS Flyer

NAS flier 31Mar page 2 — 1st Draft NAS Flyer

At around the same time, Craig Morrow (the artistic director of Lincoln Performing Arts Centre) needed copy and an image to put in the assessment brochure. We used the image below as it was consistent with the initial poster and flyer designs. Th hand written title added to the ‘home-made’ vibe that we particularly wanted to pride ourselves on, and the blurred writing at the edges was just a little ambiguous and provoking.

Though the current flyer and poster draft were connected to the company through the colour palette and supported our marketing scheme, there was something quite uninspiring about the post-it’s for the poster and flyer. The grey on the face of the flyer made it feel quite pessimistic and cold. It just was not the tone we wanted to create. Additionally, the post-it note heart could have looked brilliant if we had very large posters so the detail could be seen, but was not nearly as striking in A4 or A3 size unfortunately.

As rehearsals continued we stumbled upon another image. It was suggestive of the theme of love, and the way we planned to deal with it on stage, but still rouses curiosity to find out more. We hoped it would entice an audience far more effectively.

Two inanimate, gender neutral objects, intimately hugging. We all felt there was really something beautiful about that. It also connotes what we are doing with romantic relationships, stripping away the hollywood romance, and leaving the bare bones of what we all experience in reality.

We forwarded this image, with a much clearer brief to the graphic designer, and they hastily began work. We then needed to change the image we had sent to Craig Morrow so it would be consistent with the posters and flyers. We had just missed the deadline, but I went directly to his office to see if it was too late to change the image. I was told that as long as I sent it by the following day it would be absolutely fine. Unfortunately, despite sending it in time, there was some miscommunication in their department and the new image was not used. By the time we had noticed the assessment brochure had gone to print. As had our posters and flyers. We were then in a position with our essential marketing tool having the mannequin image, and the publicity within the venue having something quite different.

With the advice of Diane Dubois, we soon settled upon trying to interweave the two themes. We have begun pushing the post-it note marketing scheme, posting them in and around campus and regularly tweeting about them to create interest. We are continuing to use both images, such as the homepage of this blog site, so that both the mannequins and post-its become recognisable to our company. Web-based marketing, such as social media and websites, are becoming more widely celebrated as an integral marketing tool.

Web-based tools will be seen as complementary to traditional methods. In time, they will replace some of the traditional methods and become more central to organizations’ efforts to engage their audience members between performances and to cultivate and enhance relationships between audience members and the organization itself (Preece and Johnson, 2011, 30).

Online we can more effectively, and instantly, collaborate the two strands and become a consistent presence to our potential audience.

We have certainly learnt a lot from this issue. More urgency and attention should have been paid on how we connect with our audience, and what with, not just making material to perform. Perhaps we should have continued with the original poster and flyer design, but we were willing to take a risk and use an image that we felt really represented the company we had become and the performance our audience will see.

NAS poster FINAL — Final Draft NAS Poster Design

NAS flier FINAL — Final Draft NAS Flyer Design

Works Cited

Goldbogen, T. (2011) Re-Imagining a Brand. TYA Today, 25 (2) 42-44.

Preece, S. B. and Johnson, J. W. (2011) Web Strategies and the Performing Arts: A Solution to Difficult Brands. International Journal of Arts Management, 14 (1) 19-33.

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)

Sir Toby’s Party, a Touring Company’s Nightmare

Tom Briggs / April 15, 2014June 2, 2014 / Development, Initial Ideas, performance

There is often a scene in Shakespeare, a crowd scene, a feast or a ball that that can be beautifully realised with the budget of National Theatre but for small scale touring companies these scenes can be nightmares, how is it possible for a touring company with a small cast to create Shakespeare’s great crowd scenes.

Act 2 Scene 3 of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is one such headache, a party that must get suitably out of hand in order to justify Malvolio’s statement that Sir Toby and Sir Andrew “Make a alehouse of my lady’s house” (Twelfth Night, II.iii.88-9). There are two obvious solutions the first is simply to make Malvolio seem even more unreasonable by having him interrupt a particularly sedate party.

Filter Theatre found another far more interesting way however, with just a small cast they looked beyond the proscenium arch for their party. The scene starts slowly with much shushing and tip toeing and very quickly gets out of hand as games begin on stage, the audience members hurling fuzzy balls at the cast and later at each other, pizza brought into the stalls and distributed, tequila slammers are given out on stage. The audience are not just watching the party, they are as Michael Billington observed “participants in feast of misrule” (Billington, 2008).

Above is a picture of some of their party preparations for each show, tequila and shot belt included.

All of this brings the audience into the chaos so that when Malvolio does eventually interrupt it is particularly unwelcome and fosters antipathy in the audience and characters alike. So that when the wayward knights do get their revenge on Malvolio, a hilarious but disturbing twist on the yellow stockings, the audience need not feel any sympathy for him.

Filter realised that the audience need not be passive in theatre and used them to give the show life. There is of course a long history of audience participation in performance but here it was used to give an old over-performed text some life. In a way we found ourselves in a similar position love as a concept is the oldest story, it comes with all sorts of clichés attached and it occurred to us that the audience was a resource for keeping the work new and unpredictable just as it has been for so many others. One scene around the subject of marriage planning was getting nowhere until we stopped acting all the parts and turned it over onto some guinea pigs.

The other lesson from the chaos of Filter theatre was that the theatre can make the audience live something rather than just watch it. Theatre can evoke sensations; it can make a scene look how it feels for the characters. This is a principle we have applied with our scene about keeping secrets in relationships. We could have written a naturalistic dialogue of a wife finding out about her husband’s affair, a scene that would have a fairly slow start a climax and some kind of resolution. This felt like a betrayal of the kind of work we wanted to do, to create something that vibrant and new, we instead focused simply on the climax so that’s we started with lots of revelations being spouted as quickly as we could building to a cacophony of voices all competing with each other to confess and with each lie a physical action, the girl who loves musicals way too much dances a tango from Rent, while they are scattered with rubbish by messy people and the make-up addict liberally applies lipstick to our stage manager. The stage picture is as chaotic and manic as the ensuing argument might feel in real life

These two lessons from Filter have helped us a little to navigate our way through what could easily been dull, clichéd scenes. Giving us the tools to make theatre we hope will be a celebration of the human obsession with romance and not merely another replica of stories that have been told for thousands of years.

Works Cited
Billington, M. (2008) Twelfth Night Review. [online] London: Guardian. Available from http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2008/sep/03/theatre1 [Accessed 11 April 2014].
Shakespeare, W. (2010) Twelfth Night. London: Macmillan.
FilterTheatre (2013) First Day Rehearsing. [twitter] 27 August. Available from https://twitter.com/filtertheatre/status/372366949054828545/photo/1 [Accessed 14 April 2014]

When I fell in love with the film ‘One Day’

Lauren Elizabeth Walker / April 4, 2014June 2, 2014 / Deveopment, Initial Ideas

(Brooker, 2011)

A couple of days ago, I watched the film ‘One day’ and fell in love with it straight away, I was expecting a very typical Romantic comedy but what I got what something completely different. I first noticed that is was a Film 4 film, which instantly excited me as I knew straight away I wouldn’t be in for a typical love story. Film 4 have also produced other contemporary films such as ‘This is England’ where Shaun Meadows shows the “struggle of a portrait of working-class life” (Ebert, 2007). The story shows real story’s about real people, not sugar coating with a happy ending.

(Ebert, 2007)

“One day is that reality is rarely what we were expecting” (Brooker, 2011). David Nicholls the writer of the novel ‘One day’ likens his book to “flicking through a photo album” (Brooker, 2011) (which is a very similar effect that we are trying to create) it does not conform to a typical love story they meet, they fall in love, babies and marriage etc. It shows a real relationship between two people that at times hate each other. An example of this reality the film sets out to portray is the fact that we don’t even see the night when the couple finally have sex, the only thing that is shown is its consequences. This reminds the audience that the sex really isn’t that important, it isn’t what defines the relationship and its consequences can ruin a friendship. There are arguments and conversations in the film that the audience can really relate to. This style and reliability is the effect we are aiming to create in all of our writing. I instantly thought of our theatre company when watching this film, as we don’t want to miss out any of the hard bits in a relationship, we want the audience to think ‘Yes that’s what I do’ we want to tell the stories that at times probably aren’t as interesting as two people falling in love at first sight but this doesn’t mean they are not important and don’t have the right to be told!

Works cited

Brooker, W. (2011) Film review: One Day [online] London: At the heart of the education debate. Available from: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/417189.article [Accessed 4 April 2014].

Ebert, R. (2007) This is england review [Online] London:RogerEbert Avaiable from http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/this-is-england-2007 [Accessed 6 April 2014]