Makers Diary: Our First Session

We had our first devising session today from 4pm to 8pm. Nikki Denny, Debbie McGregor and Richard Haddlesey were all present and definitely up for it; which was a really huge relief for me. I decided in the end to roughly apply the schedule that I had planned for the auditions as a structure to the session and to give me a chance to asses the performers and what I can expect from them during this process.

All of the performers were understandably nervous and a little reserved but then none of them knew each other before this evening’s session. Nikki was really enthusiastic and attacked all of the tasks with loads of energy-which was fantastic and if she keeps that level of commitment this will go really well. I suspect that she has the most performance experience out of the group. Debbie was really shy and didn’t really get warmed up until the end of the session. She does have something about her voice and her performance presence that is really intriguing and I will have to work hard to really pull that out of her- she just needs some of Nikki’s confidence. Richard seemed really daunted and was quite difficult to handle, he has a very short attention span and thus has a tendency to be disruptive to cover his nerves. I hope that once he gets into it and starts to invest in the project he will be able to focus more and will forget himself and be less self-conscious. When he gets it right it is really good, when he is honest he produces some really interesting material for us to work with. He does have no performance experience and is doing this as a favour to me, so I will be gentle but at the end of the day the work has to be done and done well. I will need to think about ways of helping him to understand and control his own physicality.

It was difficult to keep the devising sections going at certain points in the session, I had to keep interrupting and taking a lot more control than I would have liked to. I am hoping that this is simply a case of nerves and that as Nikki, Debbie, Richard and I get to know each other better that their inhibitions will just slide away in favour of the tasks ahead. Richard has a tendency to fall back on smutty humour and innuendo; whereas Debbie and Nikki relied upon clichés and obvious material. I am hoping that as we move forward they will challenge themselves to approach things in more difficult and less obvious ways. I will have to keep a tight handle on the direction of the process as we have such little time; we do not have the time for the performers to take a long journey to get to where we need to be. This will be very challenging for Richard as a non actor but I will also expect Nikki and Debbie to push the capacity of their performance skills.