In this essay, I will be demonstrating how scores and RSVP cycles have changed me as a devisor and director, paying attention to the creative process and how I have adapted and evolved within my practice. I will be analyzing my understanding when using verbatim theatre and when working as an ensemble whilst emerging immersive and site-specific theatre. I will demonstrate how these techniques have furthered my knowledge into my chosen subject, theatre and performance and how they have already impacted my performance.
Documenting individual practice
Anna Halprin once said, “It still hadn’t sunk into me that I could use scores” (Worth, L and Poynor, H, 2004, pp 66). Throughout my time as an actor, I have never once written a score but would rather remember the improvisation or write a detailed plan of action. By starting the theatre and performance course, I have become more organized when blocking and improvising performance through the use of score and RSVP cycles. Through these new techniques, I am beginning to use pictures to remember and vision my devised work from beginning to end. For example, my group had decided to do a site-specific piece in a pub. For establishing characters, we used RSVP cycles to explore what was going to happen in the performance and also in our characters’ lives. Through blocking our performance and breaking the devising down into sections, meant that we could create little scores that made one big score for the use of memory and linear viewing. Personally, being able to visualize a performance through drawing is less time consuming and easier to grasp. I like to be able to visually view how the piece will fit together. Having to create a solo piece on one of my peer’s childhood experience, week 4, creating a score was perfect. I could visualize what I was doing and so could my director/partner Liam. Through further reading, I found an article written by Lawrence Halprin. “I found that scores are non-judgmental – this is one of their primary characteristics.” (Halprin, L, 2014, pp 39-47). As the life piece was personal and deeply involved in Liam’s childhood, giving the next person my score of Liam’s childhood memories enabled distance as my score didn’t specify a name or a gender. When it came to someone else having my score, they couldn’t tell it was Liam’s childhood score. When I took to the city of Leeds looking for inspiration for movements and natural shapes within the human body, I realized that scoring was perfect for documenting the fluidity of people, especially when moving together as one. I found one particular ritual that kept repeating very interesting. When a group of people had just come off a train, they would all bottle-neck to exit the train station. One big, dispersed group all came together as one mimicking solid particles, all moving the same way and in the same direction. I really wanted to capture the cattle like, bottle-neck when all rushing towards the exit. I found this would be a fascinating movement to try and create with my peers and to see if they understood the direction from my score. “The function of scores was to convey essential instructions along with a theme and/or intention for the performance.” (Worth, L and Poynor, H, 2004, pp 67). I drew the people from a bird’s eye view which looked like little dots, I then drew arrows to indicate where the people were moving to and how they were moving. When working as a group, we could definitely see the fluidity of movement within people throughout all our scores. It was interesting to see that my group understood my score and to see how they portrayed the drawings. “Although in practice some additional verbal direction might be necessary.” (Worth, L, and Poynor, H, 2004, pp 67). I thought it was important to be able to view my work on the source and see how others interpreted it, as they were interpreting right. I didn’t really need to give much feedback. There were other scores that were not as easy to interpret and needed verbal direction. With verbal direction, we can then begin to understand the score in more depth. A useable score, for me, would be easy to understand. Being able to look at the score and understand without much direction so if the person who drew the score was not present, other actors can interpret without needing guidance.
“What is the “self” that is performed?” (Heddon, D, 2002, Vol 5). Performing the self naturally, was always a challenge. Tending to go to physically heightened realism always felt like I was making a joke of myself, to my audience. Exploring and devising my physicality and the way I talk, was interesting but was always comedic. Using comedy would take away the vulnerability of being myself on stage. “In performances of the ‘self’, there are always, necessarily, (at least) two selves on stage at any one time – the self that is performing, and the self that is performed.” (Heddon, D, 2002, Vol 5). Performing myself was always to step outside my body and portray my physicality and colloquial dialect, therefore, making two very separate bodies – heightened realism and self-conscious. Creating myself as a stereotype and my naturalistic, everyday self – two bodies. “The ‘self’ is deliberately and perhaps paradoxically used in order to precisely go beyond the self or the individual.” (Heddon, D, 2002, Vol 5). Analyzing the techniques to perform myself, I would completely strip the character back and instead of looking at my physicality and the comedic elements, I’d now be looking for the sensitive thoughts and feelings that I have, but not necessarily show underneath the big, bold physical body. Being a bold, happy character, I’m always emotionally exaggerated and fill the space with my physicality, it comes natural to me. When I am not being observed, I am quiet and reserved, taking time out of my busy life to just be me with my thoughts. Adapting my devising material made me think deeply about sharing my actual thoughts and feelings with my audience. It has come apparent that I wouldn’t leave myself vulnerable as I once would have thought, but rather leave a personal connection with my audience, almost a naked performance of myself, and enable me to be honest and believable.
Through studio practices, I am already bettering myself as an actor and devisor through the duration of five weeks. My creative process has excelled and I am able to step back and evaluate work in front of me due to the use of scores. Using scores helps with performance memory and I am able to visualize each section of the performance due to scoring techniques, e.g. remembering diagrams/pictures from the score and connecting them with bits of performance. I am prepared to show the ‘real me’, the ‘non-observed’ me throughout performing the self which is a big step from using comedic elements to showing the fragile me through performing the self. Performing the self in this way is something I wouldn’t have done prior to joining the theatre and performance course. I know that I am making excellent progress.
Reflection on ensemble practice
Working as ensemble there are many voices, opinions and ideas to be heard. Personally, I find this helpful and sparks meaningful conversation within a group creating ideas for a potential performance piece. “Devised work provides an opportunity for marginalized voices to be heard.” (Feffer, L, 2009, pp. 46-52). When ideas are sparked we can start to score and block a performance by choosing a theme as the first building block to devising. Once our group had chosen our theme, old university friends, it was easier to spark characters and give a story/meaning to performance. Learning about scores helps in this way as we have been able to write ideas down, freely, so that we are able to view the creative process and make sure every idea is used in some way. Every idea that was thought was wrote down on the mind map. This meant that every idea was always there to refer to, if needed. When we can see the ideas on the score, this helps to then spark more creative and stylistic ideas.
As my ensemble was exploring site-specific theatre, invisible theatre and immersive theatre, we started to brainstorm ideas, thinking about where would be the best space to stage the performance. We wanted a performance space that would work in all weathers, all costume and for all the audience. If our audience is comfy, warm and content, we thought this would create a better atmosphere for the performance and our audience would be able to relax and fully immerse in the performance. After discussing many spatial options, we had decided to devise in the Old Bar pub, on campus, as this space is warm and inviting for everyone. We had chosen to perform there because we could use a whole area, set back from the actual pub itself which gave us the perfect performance space with lots of seating options for our audience. This set back space allowed the performance to be site specific and personal for our audience. As our performance was also invisible theatre, this space was perfect because for any other person that didn’t know about the performance would have been able to be immersed just as easy as the audience that knew about the performance, due to all the seating and the intimacy of the piece.
“Performing Site-Specific Theatre engages with theatre and performance that is grounded in an in-depth exploration and expression on spatial practice.” (Tompkins J, 2012, Pg. 1). As an ensemble, we wanted our audience to feel themselves in the chosen environment. It was important for the audience to feel like it was the ‘norm’ to be there, for students, this is somewhat true and the audience could relate to the space. Most people think the pub to be a happy place where one can relax, have a good time and socialize with friends. As we see our audience and friends, we thought this to be the perfect performance space for our piece containing three old friends.
Our next task was to develop characters – characters that our audience could easily relate with or instantly feel like they knew, thinking into stereotypical characters with friendly personas to invite and engage. Originally, I had the idea that we could perform the self, but in the future, being able to use our actual aspirations for life as our characters stories. I thought this was a great idea that had lots of potential to be comedic. When putting this idea into practice, we struggled, we thought that the piece was too positive because if we were playing ourselves as we aspire to be then we wouldn’t be open to joke, there was no fluctuation between serious and immature, the story lines were flat. This idea was limiting as we don’t actually know what our future will hold but can only hope for good. Knowing that our audience knows our aspirations, this worked well with following the idea of not knowing what our futures actually hold. We brainstormed character profiles and came up with three scenarios. These scenario characters were still us, but instead of sticking to what we actually aspire to, we decided to create ourselves as polar opposites, apart from Chloe, so the audience could still relate closely with the performers.
Having thought of such characters, we were then able to use our audience, as stimulus, to spark conversation between our characters. We thought this was a useful way of engulfing our audience into our piece, by actually talking about things that only that specific audience would know. We used a couple of audience members in our conversation which made our audience feel involved with the piece as they could laugh and engage along with us deeply. In this sense, our performance was immersive. We were always thinking about how our audience could relate to the content. “’Immersive theatre’ has become a widely adopted term to designate a trend for performances which use installations and expansive environments, which have mobile audiences, and which invite audience participation.” (White, G, 2012). We had decided that it would be more natural for our audience if Maeve (having a bold, relaxed character) invited the audience into the space and welcomed the audience, allowing them to make choices about where the audience sat themselves, in the space, and tell the audience a little bit about her character before introducing myself and Chloe to the performance.
To conclude, when working with Chloe and Maeve in the Old Bar, we were quickly able to generate ideas to use in the performance by brainstorming and acting new ideas out, seeing what would work and what wouldn’t. One idea would spark more ideas and we had a lot of information and ideas to work with. All of our thoughts we developed and worked on in some way, in this particular case, we didn’t really scrap any ideas. By developing ideas and working with what are group had already thought of, allowed for us to explore every option. In our ensemble, no ideas were left out, we tried to use everything that our group thought. I found it easy to let go of a strong idea when it was developed into other
Blending practice and theory
“Verbatim theatre is a type of theatre-making where the text is generated from interviews with 'real life' people.” (A guide to creating verbatim theatre, 2014). When exploring verbatim theatre in ensemble, it was important to choose a subject that we could find facts and interviews whether they be articles or actual video interviews. When we were brain storming ideas, we thought if we picked a serious/taboo subject we would be able to find lots of helpful sources to explore through verbatim theatre. I found this task the most engaging because we were able to pick a subject that had been recent in the news and was interesting to explore. Having a very outgoing group that likes to create heart-hitting performance that creates social activism, we decided to look into the taboo in the media. Creating social activist performances by using a topic in the media, was something that, as an ensemble, we could explore deeply having lots of sources to use and manipulate to work in our performance, whether that was interviews or facts and ‘real life’ opinions. Sexual assault in Hollywood and the performing arts was the subject matter we chose to portray using verbatim.
Choosing sexual assault in Hollywood, then lead us to an interview about Thandie Newton’s experience with sexual abuse on the casting couch. Using an interview in video form was easier to grasp the emotion and her physicality at the time of interview. We could then communicate this with our audience. I found this interview very interesting and the interview we used to explore verbatim theatre. Listening to the interview deeply, we were able to hear the fluctuation in the notes she used when talking about her personal experience, but also the way she said the words her the natural pauses that she used when portraying raw emotions through her words. As ensemble, rather than reciting it between two people, as the interview is done, we would use every performer, so we could all feel and portray the emotion of the interview to our audience. We did this in a stylistic fashion for our audience as we were vertically sat in front of them, they had nowhere else to look apart from us. Performing straight in front of our audience, enabled full emotional connection between performer and audience, we wanted them to feel the emotion that we as performers felt from Newton’s interview.
Whilst researching further into verbatim theatre, I found a video by National Theatre. “At every stage of the process, be as accurate as you possibly can and question whether you are making a decision that is imagination or based on the evidence that you are presented.” (A guide to creating verbatim theatre, 2014). This was not the case in our piece. When we devised the scene, which was taken word for word from the Thandie Newton interview, we recited it with her natural pauses and emotion in her voice. We did not stage it how the camera captured it. We did this deliberately, as part of ensemble, we wanted each person to be a part of the scene. Creating a verbatim scene which obtained everyone in the performance, concluded with a scene where all performers faced the audience and we all adopted the role of Thandie Newton. If I was to do a verbatim piece again based from a video interview, I would devise and perform exactly like the video was displaying. Showing the audience exactly how it was when filmed; analyse lighting, costume, space and body.
As David Hare said, in interview with the National Theatre, “If you simply write from your imagination, you write from the recollection of people’s way of life, but if you go out and collect evidence about people life, things are revealed to you which are completely extraordinary in which you don’t see coming.” (An introduction to verbatim theatre, 2014). In our piece which we devised, we left a lot to our imagination and to our audience. Analysing our piece now, we focused on stylistic properties to make our audience feel through music or silent acting. I would like to apply myself to a more fact based and true verbatim theatre styled piece, in the way of collecting more interviews, finding more facts, and trying to find some ‘real life’ people to speak to about our chosen subject. If we were to collect other people’s thoughts and feelings about the piece in the local area, not only are we performing the true words of ‘real life’ people, but we are taking the subject into the community and spreading social activism.
Turning to Lloyd Newson’s, DV8, verbatim performance of Can We Talk About This, I found the performer portraying Ann Cryer truly inspiring. The physical theatre movement is incredible; how the male dancer simply moves the female performer so effortlessly, balancing her on his ankle, whilst she has such dedication to the character, eye contact is never broken between her and audience. The clever choreography and trained body, makes the female performer look like she is simply sitting on a chair. I would love to use verbatim theatre in this manner and congregate dance and the physical. Watching Can We Talk About This, made me aware that verbatim acting can be exact in dialogue and body language but can be totally different in staging, space and contact with other bodies on stage. When creating a verbatim piece again, I will delve more into the physical and explore how the performer using the verbatim technique, can be manipulated or moved whilst naturalistically performing. I adore the naturalistic character and the stylistic working together, this makes the audience feel unusual and an almost distrust for the performing person, recreating the interview/information.