Category: performance

It was during an S Club 7 Song…

Gabrielle Ruth Evans / / Development, Love, Music, performance

All the musical elements for Three Words are coming together. The number of Music rehearsals has been doubled and the harmonies are being nailed. Like in my previous blog, some of the performers were finding it difficult to get and keep the correct harmonies. Therefore we have had to change a harmony in All you need is Love into two parts, however over the past couple of days, one of our performers Sam was able to pick up a newly revised third harmony which was what the piece was missing. I was able to leave Sam to sing the harmony, as she is one of our most confident singers. She has been a great help in helping the group pitch some of the most difficult harmonies. In adding the third harmony back in, I think it has given the song a stronger texture. The only thing worrying me now is the tone. It is coming after a difficult section, but will in theory and hopefulness lift up the audience’s mood and helps them believe love is all you need. In keeping with the song, our group had a moment of pure genius while rehearsing in Jozey’s bedroom. It was difficult to try to come up with a way to end the piece. At this point the lengthy music rehearsal was getting to everyone and we were going to give it a rest for the day. But then something magical happened. I am describing it as magical because it gave me Goosebumps and as it began to unravel glockenspiel master Becky’s face lit up with excitement. All the hard work the singers put in that day had paid off with a great ending of what can only be described as a love line mash-up. Here is an example:

Of course after the magic, became the practicality of directing at which point will the build up start, who will start it, how long will it go on for and how will it end? But I felt as musical director; after the hours spent it really is true that in a moment of pure spontaneity something amazing can be created. Jozey and Phoebe will lead the group to start and through the direction of myself and Jozey voices will gradually be added into the mix until it reaches a point. Then the guitar playing will cut out and voices will begin to fade out to leave phoebes last line… love is all you need. I think this will be a lovely way to end such a chaotic and unique piece and in a way is a symmetrical to the beginning.

From this point on all ‘Three Words’ needs is its finishing touches to the performance. Some of the parts required some enhancement. In particular during First Kisses one of the performers, Abbi’s line is ‘It was during an S Club 7 song’ at which point anyone around her bursts into a dance to Reach. Instead of using a soundtrack it would be nice if the motif was played on piano. Another thing we added late on into the performance was the Imperial March. This replaced the wedding march in the wedding scene as we thought it would add another aspect to the ever changing hilarity of the performance. These little moments of music come within in some light and funny pieces.

As well as adding little bits into the performance in order to fill the silence between the little scenes and to make the piece more flowing, it was decided that the transitions will be a mixture of guitar, piano, verbatim and in some cases spontaneous song but together by myself, Jozey and Tom. The piano parts in particular, some were created using simple chords and others were parts of songs featured in the piece. This I hope will help to tie all of the little sections together and polish up any scene changes.

At this point, I am feeling confident that the all the elements especially the music shall be good. With only a week to go, the big numbers just need polishing and the individual music needs practising but I am confident in saying  as a company we have put our heart and soul into the performance, challenged ourselves and from my point of view with help from the fabulous Jozey the music is where at the standard if not above what I am hoped from the beginning of the process. I just hope in this next week we can build it up more and give the audience something amazing to watch and listen too!

7 days left… No Added sugar … Three Words… LET’S DO THIS!

Chair Duets

Rebecca Sowter / / Development, Deveopment, performance

Our performance is now just over two weeks away and so we have been blocking the last few smaller scenes this week and we pretty much have a full show (woohoo!). One of the last scenes we have put together has been inspired by Frantic Assembly’s Chair Duets and adds a new element to our already very eclectic performance style.

The scene we have made combines three recordings of verbatim with three separate movement sequences. We took the essence of Frantic Assembly’s Chair Duets: the nature of the action/reaction and the “firm and deliberate” (Graham and Hoggett, 2009, 141) movement are the main two similarities between our work and theirs.  However, once we had got to grips with the rules of the chair duets we decided to break quite a lot of them to adapt the style to our own performance. Firstly, one of the sequences does not use chairs at all and another only uses one. Although this breaks the fundamental rule of chair duets (which are supposed to be performed with two chairs facing outwards), we found that we could perform a wider variety of moves. Secondly, we are using the duets to tell the stories being recalled in the verbatim whereas traditional chair duets should not have a story behind them. We have also slowed our movements down in places which contrasts with Frantic Assembly’s routines that are “played at quite a mesmerising speed” (Graham and Hoggett, 2009, 141).

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Our chair duet

Despite these differences, the influence of the chair duet is pretty clear in all three sequences and has been a helpful springboard in developing our ideas. Our duets communicate the same messages of “touches, embraces, flirtations, rejections” (Graham and Hoggett, 2009, 141) as original duets do and all of these actions and emotions play an important part in the three verbatim stories that we have collected. The chair duet has become for us a way to capture the ups and downs of first dates and relationships in a very simple but physical and visually interesting way.

 

 

Works cited:

Frantic Assembly (2009) Frantic Assembly Book of Devising Theatre – Chair Duets. [online] Available from  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LC-dkYZOUVo [Accessed 11 May 2014].

Graham, S. and Hoggett, S. (2009) The Frantic Assembly Book of Devising Theatre. London: Taylor & Francis Ltd.

 

Performing Puppets.

Jozey Wade / / 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]

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

Tom Briggs / / 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).

Photo: Filter Theatre Twitter.
Photo: Filter Theatre Twitter.

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]

Song Writing: The reasons to love me and reasons to stay away.

Samantha Mckenzie / / Development, Love, Music, performance

Towards the beginning of our rehearsal process, when we were collecting writing material, we set ourselves the challenge of writing a list each. The list was to be split into two sections, one being reasons why someone should love you and one being why someone should stay away. We shared these lists with each other in a rehearsal and all picked the lines and sections which we wanted to make into a script. After some deliberation, we then decided that the lists could be made into a song. As I have had some experience song writing before, I nominated myself to be the writer and I compiled the lists together and wrote a melody.

I was inspired by the kind of songs that feature in stand up comedy and I wanted to portray the same clever style. I looked particularly at the work of Tim Minchin.

Once the song was finished I worked with the musical directors Gabby and Jozey to put together the accompaniment and then it was decided that Jozey will play her ukulele in the performance and Lauren will sing the song the song with me. We have allocated the sections of the song in terms of which lines refer more to which singer.

The song:

Reasons to love me song

Work Cited:

Tim Minchin (2010) You grew on me [online video] Available from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frNpdG4F9mw [Accessed 10 April  2014].