Final Blog Submission

Research and Development

Our company name derived from our aims in terms of target audience. We wanted to play to an age that we knew the most about, this would make it easier for us in terms of devising. The immediate direction was to go with those aged between eighteen and twenty one as this is primarily the age for students attending University. However, we felt that limiting ourselves to adults only left little room for creativity. Upon reflection, we decided to go with those aged between sixteen and twenty one. This gave us a wider bracket to work within and opened up doors to different themes. Along with this age range, we needed a company name that reflected our choices. Being a company based within Lincoln, we vocally discussed all the ideas that typically relate to Lincoln.
One common theme was that of the train barriers, as these seem to cause many citizens complications. We took this idea of the train line and quickly linked that with the idea of the railcard. Students aged sixteen to twenty one are usually issued with a student railcard, and as this tied in with our location and target audience, our company name was born.

Here is our company logo

Deciding upon the concept for our show proved a difficult task as we all had very different ideas on the direction in which our performance should go. One way to solve this problem was to see what our target audience wanted from us. We each conducted a short survey and gathered answers from people within our target audience. A common theme was comedy, naturally this was the direction in which our group chose to go. As individual members we had already expressed our interest in comedy and light-hearted themes in comparison to dark themes, so this was a clear direction for us. Another theme that became apparent from our survey was that our audience wanted to be presented with relatable issues. One common theme that most sixteen to twenty one year olds have is that of education. Mostly the fear of moving on from education or leaving education. Upon conducting further research we discovered that a good majority of graduates aim to go on to teaching. It seemed natural to take this step forward and work with a comedy script about teaching, combining our survey answers together.
We wanted our story to focus around a main character that would be our primary post graduate teacher. After brainstorming some ideas about where this storyline could take us, we developed characters and a basic plot structure which we then improvised scenes around. After a couple of improvisation sessions, it became clear that this was not aiding our creative process. We scrapped these sessions in aid of writing a full script and coming back to the rehearsal process with a scripted piece. Within this comedic script, we also needed an element of drama to contrast with the themes. We chose to look closely at a forbidden relationship between the Headmaster and another teacher, although this provides an element of seriousness within our piece, it also helped to add further comedic lines when the other teachers discuss this relationship. This only furthered our comedic exploration. One comedic scene within our piece is when our protagonist character has to lead a parents evening. We asked teachers we knew for any horror stories about parents evening that they could share with us. To our surprise, there were loads, the primary theme being that of argumentative parents. This gave inspiration of a comedic scene between our main teacher and a set of parents. These teachers that we spoke to also gave us some tips on how to deal with argumentative parents, which we later turned into comedic lines within our piece.

Our company poster

Engagement

Our initial response to our rehearsal process was to improvise scenes. Our director set up a premise and we were asked to create our own characters and run with it. This caused problems as everyone opted for a similar kind of character, which limited our progression within the scene.
Upon re-grouping our directing team decided to delegate specific characters for us to play around with. This meant we all had a different personality or character trait and the improvisation ran relatively smoothly.

Initial rehearsal process, improvising characters

After this scene, we re-grouped again and the directing team swapped our characters about. This was done tactically to see what kind of roles each actor would fit. Our directing team noted down the outcomes for each different character played by each different actor and noted this back to us when we re-grouped to discuss our experiment.
We eventually settled on a group of characters that we wanted within our piece and our directing team identified who would play each role. This meant that we were delegated our characters ready for our next rehearsal.
Our next rehearsal consisted of a similar theme, we tried to improvise but this time as our characters. We already had the basis of a scene and so we followed this idea carefully, ensuring we didn’t stray too far away from the intention. This idea failed and we re-grouped to discuss what was going wrong. We decided we didn’t have enough background knowledge of our characters and so ideas were crossing and getting confusing. Our directing team asked us to write down a short paragraph about each of our characters to try and give ourselves some names and basis in terms of intention and motive,
We each took turns to discuss our characters with the group and think of ways to connect our characters backstories. We created an interesting web of characters that connected well and so we went back into improvisation. Even after this character work our improvisation was heading nowhere and we collectively decided that we needed a script to work with.

Our next rehearsal was a small meet up to talk about and clarify plot points. As we had a script writing team, it was important that our script writers had the same understanding of the characters and where they were heading. This meeting also co-incised with a meeting about our production title and the re-draft of our logo. Our photographer Iona came to take some company shots and we managed to organise who was writing which bit of script.

The company collectively script writing

Coming back to our rehearsal with a full script meant that we were able to section off and work on individual scenes. We grouped our rehearsal schedule into scene aims and worked hard upon these scenes in the time we had. Firstly we discussed exits and entrances for each scene as this is vital in terms of staging and set design. Once this was decided and noted by our production team, we set to work blocking through our first scene. Initially this drew up problems with lines and some edits had to be made to the script. It was good that we caught this early as it meant we could quickly fix this issue. Once we had blocked through our first scene, we moved on to blocking through the second scene. This scene contains props such as tables, chairs, sofas and edible food. We noted down as we worked through the scene what props would be needed so that we had a definitive list. We left this first scripted rehearsal feeling positive about what was to come with our piece.

First read through of the company script

In our next rehearsal we re-capped and polished scenes one and two ready for our feedback session in the upcoming week. We had decided to only show scenes one, two and four as these contained the majority of actors and our feedback could contain information for all characters. Scene four proved difficult to rehearse as it is a split stage performance. We struggled to work without our actors being off script as this scene contained much more movement and gesture than the previous two. We blocked through it roughly and moved on to scene three. We all acted as critics and advised in terms of blocking and movement throughout this rehearsal, this meant our scene had a well rounded view and we worked collaboratively as a group.

Working with script on scene 8

Feedback week came around and we viewed and gave feedback to Full Frontal as they performed some scenes from their work. Unfortunately we could not feedback this week as one member of our group was unable to attend due to illness but it was good to get some insight into what the other company were doing. It was then we decided that we needed to work on our advertising and social media presence. We already had twitter, facebook and instragram set up for people to follow and view. But we decided we needed to push this further and really give ourselves a presence online.

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From this point onwards we decided to start working intensively on our performance. This meant rehearsing as much as possible with as much set and props as we could use. We tried to get off script relatively quickly, and organised a script rehearsal purely to secure or lines. This was extremely beneficial as it meant we could run lines together as a group. From this point onwards we rehearsed most days, working hard to polish our performance and overcome any issues.

My Character Development

During our initial stages of development, I specified to my cast that I would be interested in taking a primary performance role and a small technical role only. From this stage onwards I began actively contributing to group improvisation to determine which kind of characters would take a crucial role within our piece. As we progressed, it became clear that our group contained a variety of very different personalities and that we could use this to our advantage. I began displaying a very dominant role within the improvisations and so our directorial team decided that it would be best for me to play a dominate female role.
As we wanted our characters to be relatable, we began to think of teacher stereotypes and invented the character of Lacie Bell. Lacie Bell was to be a fairly new, young teacher who uses her dominate behaviour and sex appeal to manipulate her colleagues and boss to get ahead in her job. Once this character was confirmed, our directorial team decided that it would be best for me to portray her on stage.
At first I thought that playing Lacie Bell would be almost easy, as she had a clear incentive. However portraying this on stage proved quite a challenge.
As weeks progressed I tried different angles to Lacie to try and emphasis the manipulation of her character. During early development, I tried to play Lacie as more of a vocally angry character. I wanted her to be manipulative by the use of her voice, almost like she got her own way by being vocally louder and more forceful than the other characters around her. During rehearsal this did not portray that well on stage and I decided to explore a different way of portraying her character.
I decided to tackle Lacie’s character by being more physically dominate on stage. Giving her physicality that was almost smug and gave a the sense that she thought she was better than the other characters around her. This included giving her a very unimpressed facial expression, as if the other characters were unimportant in her life. I gave her a very dismissive attitude towards all characters other than Steven, the headmaster of the school. This was because Steven was the only way in which Lacie could get ahead in her career. She needed him to help her get ahead and so she was overly nice to his character at all times. This worked in part and I decided to keep most elements of this for my performance.
Thirdly my directorial team asked me to be more sexy within the scenes where I worked directly with Steven. This proved to be the more of a task as I found being directly intimate with someone on stage to be difficult. This could be perhaps because I am usually quite shy of my body and being asked to use this as my primary form of manipulation was very unusual for me. Me and our director worked hard to try and bring this side out of me and to close the gap that I seemed to be unintentionally putting between me and Steven.
Eventually I overcame by inhibitions and was able to be intimate on stage, however this needed to be pushed further and so our directorial team organised rehearsals in which it was just me and Chris to really work in depth on our scenes. This use of body, combined with strong vocals and overall physicality was accurately able to portray the character that our writing team had created and I hopefully took this to stage with me.

Displaying my uninterested, smug persona on stage

Being intimate on stage

My Backstage Role

I took on the backstage role of being Health and Safety advocate for our group. This role includes assessing potential risks, ways to avoid them and ways to overcome the risk should it occur. The health and safety law applies to theatre as much as it applies to other businesses. You cannot put performers and audience in a position of danger from your artistic choices.
‘The Health and Safety at Work etc Act 1974 and related legislation places duties on employers, employees, the self-employed and those in control of premises.’ (HSE, 2015)
To do this role I had to produce a risk assessment for our location, any use of props and set and any personal risks that our actors may incur. This included looking at the rostrum we are using, and making sure it was visible. Taking the allergies of our cast into consideration when using edible food and most importantly the use of electronic cigarettes as these can be dangerous.

Arts Council Policy

As we have set up our company to run as a touring company, we had to take into consideration the Arts Council and how they would affect our performance. Arts Council England (ACE) measure the strength and value of a theatre company through key factors such as vision and artistic policy. ACE claim that a successful company should ensure that ‘every aspect of [their] activity contributes to achieving [their] artistic aspirations’ (2016). Through this guidance we looked at how we should write our mission statement and how our performance should stay true to our aims.

Our Mission Statement is as follows:

Railcard Theatre believes that theatre can be important in the development of today’s youth.
In an era of an ever changing, consistently growing presence of digital media, at Railcard Theatre we believe that these can be combined to create a beautiful hybrid of performance.
A performance that utilises the audience’s fascination with social media. We aim to combine modern media with naturalistic theatre in order to reach our audience.
The combination of the two styles builds a platform that makes theatre appealing to those who might not typically attend.
Railcard Theatre aims to portray relatable issues to today’s youth in a way that is both new and familiar.
We incorporate familiar digital social platforms into original writing to construct a narrative that is both interesting and forward thinking.
Our aim is to bring more young people into the fold of Theatre with a vision to inspire them to contribute to the future of the ancient industry.
Young people are the future, they are the key to ours and Theatre’s life expectancy.
Railcard Theatre believes theatre can move people to breed change, inform people of political stances and shape a generation as much as the film and television industry.
We aim to make theatre accessible regardless of social class or background. We use social media as a key feature of our performances due to everyone’s exposure to it in the 21st Century.
We believe that in order for theatre to shape a generation, it must evolve, to adapt to today’s audiences whilst maintaining the conventions that has shaped it for generations.

Within our performance,  we made sure to stay true to our manifesto by combining modern social  platforms with the use of snapchats, texting and a twitter feed. We felt this added a new exciting element to our performance that would connect with our target audience on a relatable level. We set our performance within a school and had stereotypical style of characters as we felt that this was directly relatable to our target audience of between 16 and 25.

Arts Council England (2013) Great Art and Culture for Everyone: 10 Year Strategic Framework. Manchester: Arts Council England.

Arts Council England (2016) Self-Evaluation Framework: Artistic Policy/ Statement. [online] England: Arts Council England. Available from http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160204101926/http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/selfevaluation/framework/artistic-aspirations-and-programme/artistic-policystatement/ [Accessed 20 May 2016].