Starting Out
Possibly the most exciting thing about starting a theatre company is the potential to explore areas of theatre that I had previously not been involved in. Not only am I performing in the piece, but for the first time in my career I am to be involved in arranging the lighting for the show as well. I’m looking forward to this as in addition to being another skill to acquire it also means that when watching other performances I can observe what choices they made when it came to their own technical needs. I am currently looking into shows from all media that were praised for their lighting, so as to better inform my own decision making process.
As a co-producer, one of my most important responsibilities is to source funding for our play. However before I can do this, I needed to figure out how much funding we would actually require in order to produce the show. Therefore Charlie and I drew up both an actual budget and a real life budget, pictured below.
Real Life
Actual
As you can see, Charlie and I plan to raise £150 via crowd funding, our website of choice for this being Indiegogo.
First Week as Stage Manager
Now that our roles have been allocated I feel we are able to make more progress as a company. As Stage Manager I scheduled our first production team meeting for earlier in this week. This gave us the opportunity to begin considering our rehearsal schedule and important deadlines, such as the production of marketing materials and our script. We have decided to aim to have some rough designs for potential logos by Thursday next week and have also distributed Code of Conduct contracts to be signed by every member of the company. In regards to our rehearsal schedule, unfortunately we have not been able to produce a full schedule as most of the company members have not yet been informed of their tech/assessment days for other modules. We have also finalised the script writing team, which will be led by Zach, in preparation to begin writing next week.
And So We Begin…
“Devised work may begin and end without a written text. It may be inspired by a written text and contain pieces of the original text in the work. It comes from dreams, obsessions, rants, photographs, smells – well, you get the picture. It comes from everywhere and anywhere that creates inspiration. Simply put, devised theatre begins with an idea and then the creators start to investigate the best form to bring that idea to performance.” (Carr, 8)
As a collaborative piece of devised performance this means that my roles of Assistant Director, Assistant Stage Manager are very fluid. This allows me to have more creative input and work closely not only with the performers but also with the technical production aim of the show as well helping to translate our creative ideas on to the stage. I work as not only a second-eye for the director, running extra rehearsals, initial blocking and line-learning workshops for the cast but I also am on hand to organise rehearsals, take notes of blocking, oversee lighting, sound and video cue sheets, help with the stage managers script and organise set coming on and off stage in order to help create the directors overall vision.
When it came to deciding how we wanted to create the show we decided to take advice from Goat Island as our “work is developed collaboratively” (Goat Island, 2000). This meant that the major decisions about plot and subject matter would have to be agreed on as a group. We wanted everyone in the the theatre company to be passionate about the subject to create the best performance we could. The main focal point of our ideas was around political issues as our audience are just able to vote in elections and our political climate is always changing. Politics also effects our everyday.
The other main focal point was looking at real life stories, potentially using verbatim to tell the stories. Diving into issues such as homelessness, illness, leaving university, death of a loved one, issues which are very present in today’s climate. However, it was also at this stage that we decided we wanted to do more of a comedy than a drama. We want to provide escapism and a light-hearted show that our audience can walk away from feeling reassured.
The video featured below is one example of a real- life story we looked at potentially using. LaLa is an elderly gentleman in America who has devoted his life to maintaining his wife’s memory. He created a a garden of umbrella’s and a room of photo’s. His enthusiasm inspired a band called Mutemath to make their music video about him, along with the music video they also created a few back-story videos to tell the world about LaLa and Louise. Below is the official music video, however there is more content on LaLa available on Mutemath’s YouTube page.
(Mutemath, 2016)
Works Cited:
Carr, T.W. (2015) Devised Theatre. Southern Theatre, 56(2)6-15
Goat Island (2000) Letter to a Young Practitioner. [online] Chicago: Goat Island. Available from http://www.goatislandperformance.org/writing_L2YP.htm [Accessed 27 January 2016]
Mutemath (2016) MUTEMATH- Monument Official Music Video [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6i6TBT4kfg [Accessed 4 February 2016]