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).
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.