Reflective Practitioner: First Devising Session Plan

I have now planned the first devising session and wanted to share that with you:

First Devising Session

Explanation of project
Go through the brief (hand out)
Set down aims/objectives of the project (hand out)
Go through tasks that need to be achieved (handout)

Housekeeping
Go through and get their availability for the next week or so

Vocal Warm Up
Diaphragm breathing (x5)
Diaphragm breathing with Haa on exhale (x5)
Tongue Trills (x5)
Lip Trills (x5)
Exhale with Aaa (x 2)
Exhale with Ooo (x 2)
Exhale with Eee (x 2)
Mmmeee long and drawn out (x2)
Mmmay long and drawn out (x2)
Mmmah long and drawn out (x2)
Mmmoe long and drawn out (x2)
Mmmoo long and drawn out (x2)
Siren moving up (x2)
Girl gargoyle guy gargoyle
Betties bitter butter made her batter bitter

Physical Warm Up
Work through correct posture (golden thread technique)
Shoulder and neck rolls (x 5 each)
Shoulder bounce (x5)
Tense & release exercise (x 2 toes to tips with arms in air)
Yawn & stretch exercise
Chewing toffee exercise
Move around the room and I will call out instructions

Devising Warm Up

Introduction Mimic Game (One person steps in and introduces themselves, however they like, movement song etc, and then everyone else copies them. Each person gets a go at introducing themselves.)

Yes Lets! Game (one person says ‘Lets all….’, the rest reply enthusiastically with ‘Yes! Lets all….They then proceed to do that thing whole heartedly until someone else says ‘Lets all’)

Follow the Leader (it is important that they make every effort to copy exactly and seriously)

The Flag Game (they are waiting for the flag white they are saved but black they are all dead. A game of concentration and group dynamics)

Devising Session

She is a ? (Form a circle and once you step in you can’t stop until someone else buts in and takes your place. They have to think of all the different things that a woman or female can be called)

Her Confessions (has the same rules as the previous game but the confession have to be a statement, not a story)

Once Upon a time there was a woman. (One person starts to tell a story, if someone wishes to but in or start a new story, they have to say STOP and then start with the beginning line each time)

I went to the death shop (same as I went to the sex shop, only all the ways you can think to kill yourself)

Warm Down

Black Liquid scenario on the floor
Breathing out

All of the games in this session are designed to either generate material about Her for the speeches (She is a ? & Her Confessions) or are attempts at games which present the opportunity for liminoid acts (Once Upon a time there was a woman & I went to the death shop). I am hoping that we will be able to play each game endlessly, pushing it to its limits and maybe through that process discovering new games and structures.

The Hand Out

Premise

It is HER party; hats, food and drink but SHE never appears. The performers will play games and give speeches endlessly for 6 hours, like they are stuck in a time warp, destined to repeat them selves over and over but with nothing ever being the same twice. Through, games, tasks and repetition, the audience and performers will work together to piece together HER, to generate the missing SHE; endless possibilities will play out and be generated over a 6 hour period. Who is She, What is your relationship with HER?

Outline

This will be a durational piece of work that will last approx 6 hours. The audience will be able to come and go as they please, moving freely through the space. There will also be a diary booth that the performers will take individual audience members into throughout in order to record their thoughts about their experience.

The work will consist of 2 overriding structures that will marshal the activity of both the performers and the audience. The structure will last for approx 2 hours and will be repeated 3 times.

Much of this will be developed through a devising process, so it is difficult to be particularly specific at this stage about the structures that will marshal this work.

There will be two main things going on: Speeches and Games. I am hoping that there will be many speeches and 3 games. I have already decided on two games but everything else will have to be discovered through the devising process.

Aims & Objectives:
A Little Theory

Research Project Title

The Creatorly Participant: A Theory of Production and Reception.
(Re) Defining the Role of the Audiences of Contemporary Participatory Theatre Events.

Aims

To identify key strategies, methodologies and devices being applied in various contemporary participatory theatre.

To examine and explore the role of the audience at various contemporary theatre events.

To generate and develop new primary and secondary source material that identifies documents and disseminates the nature of various participatory theatre audiences’ roles.

To develop a written thesis of production and reception that will conceptualise the ontology of the relationships between particular and specific participatory theatre events and their audiences.

To explore the wider aesthetic, social and cultural implications of those relationships within the wider arena of contemporary performance theory.

Objectives

How can participatory theatre be defined?

What are the key practices that make up the arena of contemporary participatory theatre?

What is the ontology of specific and particular participatory theatre audiences’ roles?

What are the implications of those relationships between the work and its audiences for wider theoretical concerns?

A Little Background Info & Theory

I have been a performance practitioner for over 5 years now, running my own performance group: Vertical Exchange. As well as being involved in contemporary performance as a practitioner, I am also a theatre scholar; Siren Song is part of a year long, ongoing project that makes up the PaR section of my PhD research. (In fact this will be the 3rd development stage of the work; it has already been performed in Winchester and at Camden People's Theatre in London). I wanted to take a little time just to clarify and theoretically contextualize my work for you.

As I mentioned, Siren Song is part of my PhD thesis, which is entitled: Participatory Theatre: (Re) defining the role of the theatrical spectatorship. My research project seeks to investigate the production and reception of specific participatory theatre events through the actual experience of the makers and audiences. I am primarily concerned with the phenomenology of particular participatory events and the role that is taken up by the actual, material audiences in attendance. I am looking to conceptualise and theorise those actual experiences through applied cognitive materialism in order to develop a localised and specific theory of production and reception.

The objective of a PhD is to contribute original new knowledge to an existing field of scholarly research. The AHRC’s definition of PhD research is built around a frame of three key features that constitute and outline what may be classified as rigorous research:

• it must define a series of research questions or problems that will be addressed in the course of the research. It must also define its objectives in terms of seeking to enhance knowledge and understanding relating to the questions or problems to be addressed

• it must specify a research context for the questions or problems to be addressed. You must specify why it is important that these particular questions or problems should be addressed; what other research is being or has been conducted in this area; and what particular contribution this project will make to the advancement of creativity, insights, knowledge and understanding in this area

• it must specify the research methods for addressing and answering the research questions or problems. You must state how, in the course of the research project, you will seek to answer the questions, or advance available knowledge and understanding of the problems. You should also explain the rationale for your chosen research methods and why you think they provide the most appropriate means by which to answer the research questions.

(AHRC 2005) [i]

The aim of this piece of work is to develop and identify strategies and devices of performance practice, that enable the audience to take up the same role ad the ‘makers’ and ‘performers’ (a role which I have coined as the ‘creatorly participant’). This means that I am pioneering a new and experimental form of participatory practice; hence the reason you may have found the concept ‘perplexing’ or alien. Forging into new and un-chartered territory is always an ambiguous and risky activity. (As I will go on to explain, risk is a vital concept and a key factor that underpins the project).

With Siren Song, I aim to bring together a group of performers and an audience in a particular ‘space’ (the party), at a particular ‘time’ (for 6 hours on the 22nd Oct), then through a pre-determined structure of games and tasks, the performers and audience will work together to produce a postdramatic performance text. The whole point of the performance is that by playing certain games and undertaking specific tasks both the performers and audience generate a unique (to that particular event), polyphonic, multiplicitus, performative manifestation of HER/SHE. That performative manifestation of HER/SHE will not be a fixed, fictional ‘character’ but instead will be a set of possibilities, a plethora of ‘could’, ‘should’, ‘has’, ‘is’ an ‘will be’, HER/SHE’s. Thus HER/SHE will manifest in performance as a multi-dimensional presence; a presence that will be unique and personal for each and every person present, audience and performer alike. There is no conclusion, no cohesive whole or even an end to the work; potentially it could go for an eternity, dynamic, fluid and forever shifting. This dynamic repetition is a widely recognised device within contemporary practice. The element of the ‘unknown’ and the repetition push the boundaries of performance and make the event an actual experience, something that has to be lived through, not simply watched or witnessed; the audience become integral to the event. There is no event without the audience’s participation. Both audience and performer take an equal amount of risk during the 6 hour event. Risk and investment are the core ingredients for the success of the event.

I am sure that you can now understand why nothing except the games, tasks and space can be fixed before the event itself. I have no idea what will happen during the event itself and that is really the point. We will only be preparing for the event, not rehearsing in a traditional sense. The process will be designed to generate material and I do not want to fix too much before that journey begins, as this would betray the practice that I am adopting for the making of Siren Song. I want the performers to be involved at the very heart of the creative process. It’s scary but really fun and exciting at the same time.

My practice sits firmly within an established body of work and has developed out of a 20 year trend for a particular brand of devising. (I would suggest that perhaps you have a quick look at the work of groups such as Forced Entertainment, Uninvited Guests, Blast Theory, Lone Twin, Imitating the Dog, Goat Island, The Wooster Group, Punch Drunk, Stan’s Café, Reckless Sleepers and The Little Dove Theatre Company). If you want to look at some of the criticism and theory that surrounds these practices and to some extent helps to understand my own, you might want to look at the writings of Auslander, Zarilli, Kaye, Kershaw, Fuchs and Etchells; all of which chart and explain where my work sits in relation to other practice and how it has developed from the practices of other makers, like the ones listed above.

The games and tasks will generate new material each time they are played or undertaken, thus I am not concerned about ‘monotony’ setting in. The audience will be free to come and go as they please, different people will be in the space at different times; so despite games being repeated, I very much doubt that they will elicit the same response for the many possible combinations of players at any one time. The games will be repeated but I suspect that they will create a totally different experience each time. It is repetition and games that will replace the traditional dialect of orthodox drama, these devices will take up the slack within the postdramatic situation, creating the tension, structure and pace.

I can understand how a lack of details might make you feel nervous or as if I am unsure as to what I am doing with the project, I anticipated that because of my previous two experiences of working with undergrad students on this project in the previous stages. I can assure you that I am completely in control and the whole process is underpinned by sound epistemological and ontological considerations as well as being marshalled by a rigorous research methodology. It is experimental practice that is breaking new ground and new ground always feels a little precarious.

The process will be a journey, one which continues on into the event itself. I am an experienced practitioner and have worked with performers on many similar projects. I have a whole ‘toolkit’ of strategies and practical devices that we will be applying in the devising process in order to develop and shape the work. I will be leading and guiding through actual material methods for the whole journey; you will not just be thrown in at the deep end. It is my responsibility to enable you, the performers to develop in the appropriate manner. It is a responsibility that I approach with respect and professionalism. My role will be more of a creative facilitator than that of a director. I don’t know if you have come across the term ‘creative performer’, but that is the role that I will be facilitating you to adopt.

Alison Oddey. Devising Theatre: A Practical and Theoretical Handbook, London: Routledge, 1994.

Deirdre Heddon & Jane Milling. Devising Performance: A Critical History, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

Emma Govan, Helen Nicholson and Katie Normington. Making a Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices, London & New York: Routledge 2007. All of these are great books for talking about this type of process.