The aim of our community project was to create a performance that would appeal to the local community, in our case, Great Missenden. We decided that our piece should not only entertain but also make the audience aware of the history of their community.
Great Missenden is well known for both the train robbery and the life of Roahl Dahl' considering both of these options we discussed possible venues for the performance. Due to the recent opening of the popular Roahl Dahl museum, an opportunity arose for us to us the museum as our theatre.Therefore using Roahl Dahl as our stimulus. v After deciding on the venue we did however have to take into account that in a museum the audience would be constantly moving as they walked round the museum. When looking at the venue there was also no obvious seating area.
To over come these factors we made a decision, that our performance would be split into 5-minute episodes. Each completely different but relating to the same theme. This way the audience could watch a single scene that would make perfect sense as each scene tells its own story.Those audience members who decide to watch more than one scene would see a variety of performances, which they themselves could link together.
Background reading was conducted to find out more about Roahl Dahl, his life, and the books he wrote. The group then reunited for a discussion resulting in a theme that would provide a strong foundation for the construction of our episodic performance. During the discussion we discovered that Roahl Dahl was most famous for the children's books he had written. Many of these ideas originated from his own life experiences.Which he describes in his autobiography "boy".
All of his books portray a strong message to his readers....
/.... His books also strongly appeal to children because his writing challenges their imagination; he never undermines a child's intelligence and even uses inventive literature when describing things. These discussions lead us to think about our own ambitions and dreams, as children, and how alike they were to some of Roahl Dahl's stories.
We concluded that the theme of "children's dreams" would provide a good basis for our piece.Each episode could become a different dream and each dream could be presented using a different performance technique, to add variety. As we could no longer remember in enough detail our child hood dreams we visited the local middle school, where we interviewed group of thirty 8-9 year olds. By playing interactive games and asking them simple questions, whilst being filmed, we were able to compile a 30-minute video about their dreams and ambitions to revisit and use as a Starting point for each 5-minute episode.The venue, the Roahl Dahl museum, had a very strong influence on the style of our performance, as it is quite an unusual setting without seating, curtains, wings or main other performing art resources the idea that the performance would in fact take place outside was a challenge.
. We discarded the idea to perform a long narrative piece, as the audience is constantly moving and would. Therefore not understand the story line.When thinking about staging we realized that we could not use complex staging or lighting due to the lack of space, resources within the venue considering the above we concluded that our performance should have an episodic structure, it should contain short powerful scenes with both a clear beginning and end. Each scene making sense to the audience, even if they have missed the scene before'.
Erwin Piscator originally founded epic theatre; one of his famous performers Brecht took on Piscator s original ideas and used them in his own pieces creating a new form of episodic theatre.We used this idea of short powerful scenes as a basic structure for our piece. Brecht was in favors of, 'Epic Theatre', which he developed using the idea of, Alienation effects or, 'A Effects' as they are also known. The term itself is a translation of the German word, Verfremdungseffekt. Brecht encourages his audience to think rather than becoming over concerned with the plot. Brecht invites his audience to identify with the issues faced by the characters and not the characters themselves.
By making the characters within our piece already recognizable the audience are able to focus on the other issues within the piece. Having studied a degree in psychology he also adapted Piscator s original idea to make his plays more entertaining as we remember facts we find most enjoyable, in his theatre. If the audience are to remember the play they need to be entranced, using this idea we created scenes that were very active and fast pace so that audience would be drawn in and remember those parts which excite them.The play is a form of debate rather than an illusion. Brecht's concept of Alienation involved the idea of making strange. He aimed to take emotion out of the production and persuade the audience to distance themselves from the make believe.
He also encouraged the actors to disassociate themselves from their roles; all of this would make the political truth easier to comprehend. We chose to break up action with slides and music. Before each scene a short video clip of a child talking about their dream would warn audience members about the action occurring in the piece.This would discard any surprises or dramatic tension the audience may feel so they can concentrate on watching the show so the audience could think about its relevance and links.
Although our piece does not have a strong political message like Brecht we wanted to educate the audience about children's dreams. By using montage, with different styles of performance within different scenes audience members watching the entire piece could appreciate the theme by making their own personal linksWe needed to use all three art forms' within our performance to keep the audience entertained. Choosing a style was the starting point for each art scene and acted as foundation for improvising, we decided on street theatre. Street theatre originated in medieval Europe within the Christian church to teach about religion. Priests were the main performers and would re-in act scenes from the bible as they realized people would learn more effectively about the word of god if it were to be presented to them in an entertaining format over time.
The short plays became longer and more complicated; it became more and more difficult to stage them indoors. There was also the feeling that the action in some of the plays, such as the Slaughter of the Innocents from the Ordo Rachelis, an Epiphany Play, was too violent, too non-Christian, to be presented within the church. When the dramatic production moved out doors, the plays were presented in the vernacular (the language of the people) by laymen. Although the dramas were still religious, they were no longer a part of worship.Today street performance is used in many outdoor venues to bring together local communities. Street theatre would often contain short powerful scenes relying mainly on physical gesture and loud projection.
The theme of the performance would relate to the local people be action packed and entertaining. It would also be formed within the episodic structure as when a street performance takes place the audience is constantly flowing. Within the style of street theatre we also researched pantomime and mime and looked at how both of these styles related to our performance.To create our performance we first began improvisation for each section based upon the styles of street theatre, as this is appropriate for our venue as it is out side, with an uneducated audience (in the field of theatre) who are constantly moving. We researched pantomime melodrama and commedia del arte.
Focusing on the use of interaction relationship between the audience and the performers and exaggerated gesture both contributing to the fact that street theatre needs to be projected and fun for the audience to take part in.Looking in detail at characterization within commedia del arte we found that these characters stayed the same through out all situations. The use of stereotypical characters such as the lovers and the villain are useful within street theatre as our audience will be members of the community who may not be greatly educated in the field of performing arts so characters they recognize and capture their attention will persuade them to stand and watch.This is a necessity as our audience will be moving and they will only stand and watch when draw into the performance. In the pantomime we improvised around these stereotypical characters using the harlequin character as the narrator to interact will the audience the lovers to base the story around and the villain (evil stepmother) to provoke yet more audience response in the forms of booing and hissing. We also used the idea of stereotypical characters with the melodrama.
Basing the scene on the idea of the three witches from Macbeth each with their own individual characters chanting round a caldron, for those audience member who were not familiar with Macbeth we incorporated some ideas for Roahl Dahl s story withes this idea also aided us to begin improvisation of the language used. We based the structure of the poem around the original Macbeth chant " Hubble bubble toil and trouble... " but instead used inventive language that appears in many Roahl Dahl books.Improvisation within the dance piece also began around a recognizable figure of a tree, together the performer used their bodies in relation to create a picture of a tree which was recognizable to the audience from here an initial stimulus was created to represent "tree' movements that we developed and repeated throughout the piece.
We also drew ideas from the work of DV8 and lea Anderson and their use of post modernism. Post modern dance is a 20th centaury dance form.Using everyday day movement as a valid performance art and found new methods of dance composition thorough looking at different contracting stimuli and repacking them together, this can been seen within our piece because we have combined the idea of Roahl Dahl and taken ideas from children's dreams constructing a work of postmodernism. The idea of motif was also a good way of creating improvisation as throughout the performance it give the audience something to relate back to and is a good starting point for every section of the episodic structure.The motif of the bed was used throughout the performance every scene a performer would begin asleep in the bed and the action on stage would cause this person to be awakened and drawn into the performance. When improvising the stomp piece we created different rhythms as motifs and developed them to see how they could progress using different timbres, different timbres build up together created different textures to the sound and added to the build up of tension.
This same structure was used within the dance where by looking at how many dancers (like instruments) There where performing at once we could build up the tension within the piece.For example in the predator prey scene in the dance gradually more predators enter the stage to try and catch the prey as the number of dancers increases the tension to whether they prey will survive increases. In the stomp the rhythms of making noise within the class room scene being with one simple rhythm, which grows leading to a build up of tension before the character of the teacher discontinues the rhythm. This same structure is used throughout the piece. Due to the venue of the performance space became a big issue that needed to be considered when improvising the piece.We wanted to draw away from the proxemics of the proscenium arch too often used in seated audiences so we began to improvised using on the round.
Within the circus the ringleader who is the performance enzyme for the piece stands in the center on a rise platform when speaking to the audience all the movement and action occurs around this platform. This too can be linked to the rhythmic stomp where all instruments where set out on the round so all audience could see equally and the acoustics would therefore be spread equally throughout the audience.After we had created the initial improvisational structure to each piece wee began the rehearsal stage, which consisted of practicing improvised sections, altering any faults and adding improvements. In the later stage of rehearsal we were able to move to within the performance area and make any final improvements. When improvising the dance we came up with initial motifs, which we developed, into sequences, by changing the dynamics, order of action and relationships between dancers.
Within rehearsal we ordered the sequences of action to create a flowing piece.The movement of the tree diverged into crawling bug movement into predators vs. prey and finally back into the original tree motif. The Structure appeared very successfully and was repeated within the stomp as an A B C A formation when looking at it in musical terms. During the rehearsal period we had some complications with the lack of pace within the circus scene and the pantomime.
Which is unacceptable as this may cause the moving audience to loose focus or even with draw themselves from the audience.To add to the pace of the pieces we found accompaniment helped a lot the use of set music allowed action within the pieces to only last for a certain length of time within the pantomime so not to bore the audience. The use of comedic sound effects within the pantomime added to the humor and would keep the audience entertained. Within Rehearsal we had to consider spacing throughout all the pieces, how characters would enter and exit relationships between characters and how this would affect the spacing on the stage.Within the dance we looked at how Lea Anderson used space within her piece finding that her dances were not performed in the usual theater situations most of the time out side just like our performance at the Roahl Dahl museum to try to appeal to a wider audience not just those who pay to go and see the royal ballet perform. She wanted a new understanding of dance.
In her dance devised from the painting the garden of ....
.... she uses tessellation. This would work well with our piece because of the lack of stage space a pattern of tessellation lets the dancers perform large movements but as a group take up the least amount of space.
Her use of correlation was very interesting and good use of outdoor space, which we incorporated into our piece. Within the mime we considered how toys would be arranged within the room using this as initial setting for space. Using the idea of a toy-making factory we produced a human conveyer belt. When we finally began to rehearse within the venue, we realize that our prier rehearsals did not take into account the true limitation of space and acoustic surroundings.Within the stomp we discovered that simply hits tables and chairs with our hands did not create the same affect as within the hall to over come this problem we attached several coins to the palms of our hands, which added to the projection of the scene. Within all drama pieces we found that the outside conditions decreased the projection within our voice, so throughout rehearsals we ensured that all actors were space in positions, which most benefited the audience, the monster in the pantomime originally with a hunched back talking to the floor became a hunch back with neck twisted upwards to enhance projection.
It is very important that the audience hear all dialogue spoken especially within the comedic scenes or else the jokes would become lost and audience members may loose interest and move on. Due to the effectiveness of scenes changing in the outdoor venue we also made a slight alteration to the ordering of the scenes to insure that the strongest scenes came at the beginning, to encourage the audience to stay and watch, and the end. So the audience will be most likely to give good reviews.On the day of the performance the audience was not as large as hoped, however there was a large variety of age groups which was very good to see, as we wanted our performance to be entertaining for the whole family. The change to the sequence of scenes proved very effective as they were so entranced by the initial dance seen that they did not move on afterward, although slightly contradicting the idea of a moving audience, it was nice to see that they were enjoying it enough to stand out in the cold for an hour.
The five-minute breaks creating the episodic structure also proved effective, as Brecht would call a reflection time.Especially for the children as they used the empty performance space to try an imitate action that had just occurred on stage, proving that the children were not only entertained but wanted to have a go at it themselves. This shows it was most likely that our aim to imprint a lasting impression was successful. Although the adults within the audience did not show their appreciation in such a physical manner however their comments afterwards were very positive and they even took part in the audience vocalization during the pantomime.
However I do think the venue its self may have been a slightly poor place to perform a street theatre piece.The entree fee to the museum meant that it was not members of the public that could walk past freely and glance but only those who wished to visit the museum. The performance space was also lacking in recourses we had planned to use lighting and more complex sounding however this was not catered for. The idea of using slides between each scene picturing the student whose dream became the stimulus for the scene also failed. These are considerations that need to be thought out more carefully before performing at an unusual venue again.
Overall the performance was a success the structure and integration of arts forms was very successful throughout the performance, the melodrama combined acting with music, the stomp contained both music and dance and the tree dance became physical theater using all three art forms. All sections drew some inspiration from Roahl Dahl within the pantomime we repackaged short clips of his books into jokes and we created out own Roahl Dahl language within the melodrama. Each scene stayed faithful to the idea of children's dreams as each was created around the dreams of the young students we had interviewed.
