Images from Dress Fittings

Makers Diary: Red Vogue

Sharon e-mailed me today and suggested that I need to get four ushers, so I posted an advert on the portal; I also text all of the performers to ask if they can ask about their friends too. Sharon is going to apply for a temporary performance license, so that we can charge on the door. I think I will charge £3 for normal admittance and £2 for students. I will also have a special guest list to give to the duty manager of people who do not have to pay to come in; such as supervisors.

I had an e-mail from Kerry at Camden asking for copy and publicity, I will have to put something together for her. I need to try and get some of our postcards to her as well really.

Lorraine had the dress fittings today-some alterations are needed but they are only minor. The dresses look fantastic and both girls are really happy with their dresses. I am definitely going to need to get them some specific bra’s though to go with the dresses. I can’t expect them to get them as they will be taking their clothes off and this makes their underwear part of their costumes and it needs to be right. Nikki’s needs to be one that Rich can take off easily and will not have to fumble around with. I will have to go on a mission to soton central I think.

I am a little concerned about the opening section, as I am not convinced that the girls are going to be able to move that easily in the dresses. It is a factor that I asked them to consider but they seem to think that it will be fine. If they feel that they can work in the costumes then I have to take them at their word.

Richie tried on the size 14 dress that I had left over from The Woman Who Swallowed the Moon, but it was far too small. Lorraine and I have been and bought a suitable pattern and some fabric; she will knock him up a dress over the next couple of days.

We are not having any more rehearsals now until Sunday because Richie is away seeing his kiddies-half term. We are going to have to start looking at the participation section in our next rehearsal. I will prepare some audience responses for the Sunday session, so that they have some material to work with. I have already prepared their toolkit and will be running through it on Sunday with them. I don’t want to give them a written copy because I want them to feel free and not to become reliant on a piece of paper. We will just have to keep going with it until it sinks in and they feel confident with the structures that they will have to respond to the audience.

Makers Diary: Rehearsal

Nikki could not make it to this morning’s rehearsal, so I decided that Richie and Debs should work on their five minute entrances. Debbie made some interesting progress on her entrance but it still needs to be longer. We all had a discussion about Richie’s entrance and Richard expressed a wish to enter as a woman, he wanted to try and ‘fool’ the audience so that they would be surprised when he undressed. He wanted to explore the drag angle of a female image. He suggested that he should do a choreographed routine to the song that he composed as his entrance. All three of us spent the morning trying out different scenarios and devising him a dance routine. He will need to work really hard on perfecting it if he is to fool the audience into thinking he is a woman; that will be the key to the success of his entrance. If he wants to puncture their expectations and assumptions he will need to find a convincing physicality and movement. He is going to need a dress and he has already tried some red ‘porn’ shoes that I had in my collection of red shoes. I rang Lorraine to ask her to bring a size 14 red dress to see if that will fit Rich, if not we may have to make him one.

Once Nikki arrived we tried putting the opening section together in a sequence. We tried doing the opening elements in several different orders but we ended up with: ‘She’ text-Rich-Debbie-Nikki-undressing-redressing-inscription. This was really successful and I felt very relieved as it is finally starting to take shape as a performance.

We rehearsed the moon text and the rape text for most of the afternoon. I am really concerned about their words; they need to be off book as soon as possible to start to really get to grips with the physical aspect of the sections. I am not convinced that they even look at their texts and notes between sessions! We had to make a few adjustments to the moon text just to express our ideas more clearly and to make it smoother and easier for Rich and Debs in their section of the text. Our previous blocking was a little to cumbersome and messy with the potential to go quite wrong and somebody get hurt. We have ironed that out and if they could just be more confident in their lines and blocking we could move on.

We are going to have to get on to the participatory elements as soon as possible now or we are going to run out of time and that is the heart of the work-the reason for all of the texts and inscription. I am definitely going to have to drop the other two texts for this round of performances because it is more than evident that we are just not going to have time and Nikki, Richie and Debs will not be able to get off book in time with even more to learn. We will get them prepared for Camden though.

Makers Diary: More Housekeeping

The performance gym and arts centre are not going to be available for out of hours rehearsals, so that is not going to be an option. It is so frustrating that we have not had an opportunity to get into the space that we will be performing in but what can I do. I have e-mailed Sharon Armstrong with all of the specifics of the performance, time etc, so that we can get the duty manager sorted and booked.
Lorraine is travelling down tonight with the dresses, so that we can have some fittings tomorrow. I am really excited about the dresses….lets just hope they both fit.

Reflective Practitioner: Rules=Freedom….or so it would appear

After the last few sessions, it has become evident that the tighter and stricter the rules, the more freedom is produced. Forced Entertainment seem to thrive on a more open and unstructured process but throughout this process I have not found that to be the case at all. Maybe it is the lack of performer’s confidence and experience of devising in this way or our awareness of time restrictions upon us…I am not sure but it does seem that rules=freedom in our sessions. However, Robert Wilson and Liz LeCompte do take an authorial responsibility over the devising process despite the ensemble and collaborative nature of their work. They both seem to take the reigns in a manner than Etchell’s claims not to. I do feel that my role in this process is more like Wilson and LeCompte than that of Etchells. I am not directing in a traditional sense but I am orchestrating and facilitating. I am more like a conductor of an orchestra-keeping a coherence but not adherence-allowing each skilled performer creative freedom and expression but under strict rules and tasks. Like a curator, working around a theme and set of criteria.

Makers Diary: Toolkit

I have had a really good think about how I can help the performers find exciting and challenging ways of bringing the audience’s material to life for them. This is such an important aspect of the work, in fact it is the heart of the work; all of the other elements of the performance are designed to enable this engagement between the audience and the performers. If I give the performers a choice of the ways in which to approach the material, I think that they will be feel less anxious and actually feel more freed up to be creative. I am going to call this their participation toolkit.

I have devised five different strategies for approaching the material that the audience provide them with: storytelling, soundscape, freeze frame montage, abstract movement machine and naturalistic. I have designed each one so that they are either a game or a task and can be approached as an interaction between activity and their performance personas. I have used some of the elements of playback theatre in order to create these tasks and games- only with a more aesthetically responsible view in mind than you would usually find in any playback session. I have combined elements of playback theatre with some of the warm up exercises that we have been using in our sessions to date.

Storytelling: One of the performers has to start by choosing a chalkboard that they want to address. Once they have chosen this, they will start by saying Once upon a time there was a woman……they have to keep going with telling a story that is based on the chalkboard until another performer interrupts them and then continues the story or changes its direction. This continues indefinitely until a performer calls stop and then that scenario is over.
Soundscape: One of the performer’s chooses a chalkboard that they want to use and respond to. They will start to produce a soundscape that tells the story or responds to the chalkboard suggestion. Once they have started the other performers will join in to build on it. It stops once one of the performers calls stop.
Freeze Frame Montage: Once the board has been chosen, the performer will take up a position and then the others will join them to create a freeze frame. Once they have held the first freeze frame for five seconds, the starting performer will call change and take up the next position; this process will be repeated until the starting performer calls stop.
Movement Machine: Once the chalkboard has been chosen, the starting performer will begin to make two repetitive movements in succession accompanied by a sound. The other performers will join in until they form one single unit- a machine.
Naturalism: This is fairly self explanatory really. The starting performer will begin a naturalistic improvisation and the others will join in until the starting performer calls stop.

I am really hoping that it will be useful and can’t wait to take it into a devising session. I suspect we will have to refine these games but I hope we can do that as part of the process.

am Makers Diary: More House Keeping and Other bits

Richard has e-mailed me a piece of music that he has made and would like to use for his entrance instead of the existing piece….this is fantastic, it means that he has been thinking about what he would like to express in this section and that is a wicked start…I am so excited for him. It shows a real investment in making his performance personae. I am really looking forward to working with him to devise this section now.

I have re-booked rooms to accommodate our change in the rehearsal schedule now and have had all of that confirmed which is good. I have e-mailed Sharon to get some out of hour’s rehearsal space but have not had a response back for that yet. I e-mailed Kerry at Camden Theatre to ask a few questions:

Dear Kerry

I just wanted to ask a couple of questions:

1. When do you need us to supply our publicity material by and in what format?
2. When designing the publicity material what details do we need to include about the venue?

3. In addition to my original tech requirements, I am going to need a microphone off stage, that has a live feed into the onstage sound system...will this be possible? I have a microphone, so really am just checking that it will be ok to do that.

I think that is it for now. If I think of anything else then I will drop you a message.

Best wishes

Joanna Bucknall
Vertical Exchange