Author: Laura Spaven

Months and months equating to hundreds of hours’ worth of rehearsals, meetings and research was finally made worthwhile on Sunday night when Refract Theatre Company performed our debut piece, When You See It at the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre.

For the first time ever, I was able to sit back as an audience member and watch the show take place without the need to scribble down notes or constantly be thinking things through from a director’s point of view. Of course, these things were hard to escape, especially when unexpected mishaps happened on stage that hadn’t before, as is the way with any live performance. For this, I am grateful that I adopted Theatre Workshop Director Joan Littlewood’s ambition of wanting “actors who were equal partners with her in the creative process, who could explore possibilities in rehearsal and be able to adapt to change, respond to interruptions from the audience and cope if someone in the company messed up during performance.” (Holdsworth, 2006, 48). Overall, I was confident that the actors were rehearsed enough to problem solve any unexpected occurrences on stage, and it was a pleasure to be able to just enjoy the show that was existing in front of me.

As a company, we have stayed true to the original intentions stated in our manifesto. Storytelling is still just as important to us as it was from day one, and watching audience members laugh, cry, be both haunted and comforted by the love story of Billy and Dolly meant that we had ultimately achieved our goal of taking them on a journey. A particularly poignant moment was when a long moment of quietness occurred as Billy comes to the realisation that Dolly has died (See image 1). Within quite a sound-heavy show, the sudden change in pace and style could have easily disengaged the audience had the story not been gripping enough to carry them through the more reflective moments. As Mudford notes, “the silence in the theatre when ‘you hear a pin drop’ is caused by the intensity with which that act of imagination continues; the audience is quite literally in a state of suspended animation” (2000, 47). There was a genuine interest in the two characters.

Image 1 – Lone Billy. (Lincoln School of Fine and Performing Arts, 2015)

Unknowingly, towards the end of the process, the production had adopted one image in particular as it’s ‘mascot’ image. An interpretation of the two people shown in image 2 occurred during almost every scene, becoming a symbol of love, relationships, and also of life and death.

After discussing the image in detail by itself, assuming no previous knowledge, we came to realise that there are two ways it could’ve been interpreted; the people were either falling, or they were flying.

When You See It was a show that explored the personal, through Billy and Dolly, sandwiched in between large-scale universal images and events. It played with chance, coincidence and fate.

We have received excellent feedback for the show from lecturers, fellow drama students and local theatregoers of all ages, and are positive that, should the production be toured in the near future, it would be easily adaptable to any venue and appeal to a wide range of people.

 

 

Works Cited

Holdsworth, N. (2006) Joan Littlewood. Oxon: Routledge.

Lincoln School of Fine and Performing Arts. (2015) Refract. [online] Available from https://www.flickr.com/photos/61839232@N02/sets/72157653037257285. [Accessed 18 May 2015]

Mudford, P. (2000) Making Theatre: From Text to Performance. London: The Athlone Press.

A production and a performance may to a greater or lesser extent affect us like a dream. But every production has one thing in common with a dream. No one dreams yesterday’s dream: the essence of dreaming, whether by day or by night, is of the moment, images fusing from past and present in a new apprehension.

(Mudford, 2000, 23)

 

As Mudford states, no one dreams to replicate exactly what has already been achieved. Sure, a company can take elements of previous successes and look at adapting these into new and original projects, but companies must always be aiming to be innovative and provide something novel, however small, to the theatrical world. Mudford’s ideas of fusing the past and the present to form something new is particularly resonant with the way Refract are working. Whilst experimenting primarily with many different famous images, this is simply only the first piece of an unfinished puzzle.

 

It’s about layering preexisting theatrical elements in new ways.

 

Building up new and non-conventional combinations of everyday theatrical devices, such as music, projection, text, movement, live feed etc, allows the audience a fresh look at the matter being presented to them. Many productions begin with a pre-written script that acts as a basis, with other devices being considered later on in the process. However, in a similar way to how Tim Etchells, director of theatre company Forced Entertainment, describes his writing as simply becoming “part of the messy group process” (Billingham, 2007, 165), we are also working in a way that allows aspects other than script to become the foundations of a scene. Forced Entertainment devise in such an unstructured manner that written text would only linearize the process and limit the various directions that the work could take. For Etchells, the word ‘text’ has become something else. Forced Entertainment “have come to work with improvised text and speech [presenting] a shift in the work from an interest in writing to an interest in spoken language” (Giannachi et al, 2012, 189) This shift has meant that text has been transformed into other devices of communication, instead transforming ‘texts’ into different ‘textures’ within performance.

 

Text is used only when appropriate.

 

Being a company that uses image as it’s springboard to creativity, this often leads to the actors improvising with their bodies first and foremost. In a rehearsal inspired by street artist Banksy, I had pre-selected a series of his various artworks to use within rehearsal. Separately, I had written 5 pieces of short text and selected a playlist of around 8 songs, some lyrical, some instrumental, to use also. The actors were instructed to simply follow my every improvised command for the next 45 minutes.

Directing actors around the space I find is a little bit like conducting an orchestra. You need something gentle to kick start the action, or music. In this Banksy rehearsal, it was a series of easy physical instructions. Then as your orchestra begin to warm up, you add in more and more people, and maybe another layer of meaning to ensure the audience that the company still have more to offer, for example, the introduction of a piece of music.  A steadily increasing shift in tempo begins to build up the on-stage image and suddenly you begin to see the full cast functioning as an ensemble, or an orchestra, instead of individuals. It was at this point, as the action was occurring on stage, that I then deprived them once again of that ensemble-feeling. This time, by giving one individual a set of different instructions and some text to read out.  Everything that had happened previously was then linked directly to this piece of text; a new instrument was added that was unexpectedly louder than the others. Once the text had been read out, the movement felt emptier. Then, like the end of an orchestral piece, I began to find some harmonious way of rounding-off the workshop. It eventually finished by winding down the high-speed movement, drawing out cast members one-by-one to return to their seats offstage, leaving one sole person at the end with one final piece of text.

 

Constantly shouting new instructions and gaining an instant response on stage allowed me to envisage exactly where the workshop was heading. In a discussion afterwards we all agreed that we loved the use of attaching seemingly unrelated pieces of text, for example one was about the workings of a pinball machine, to the movement on stage, and how it challenges the audiences to dig deeper into how the text and movement are related. (see image 1)

 

 

Suddenly, it isn’t a pinball machine anymore, its life. You’re the small metallic ball, making its way as successfully as possible down the table with various obstacles and distractions along the way, only to end up in the same place you started.

 

Refract will be continuing to adopt this layering process of theatre-making, introducing a live video recording and experimenting with live music.

 

 

 

Works Cited

Mudford, P. (2000) Making Theatre: From Text to Performance. London: The Athlone Press.

Billingham, P. (2007) At the Sharp End. London: Methuen Drama.

Giannachi, G., Kaye, N. and Shanks, M. (2012) Archaeologies of Presence. Oxon: Routledge.

Stencilrevolution (2015) Follow Your Dreamsn Cancelled by Banksy. [online] Available from

http://www.stencilrevolution.com/banksy-art-prints/follow-your-dreams/ [Accessed 20 March 2015].

Whilst struggling to finalise an idea for a through-line to run throughout the full production, it was a cast member that suggested taking another look at the previously researched images of a couple, who, in the midst of every change in season, photographed themselves poised  in the same positions for several consecutive years (see image 1). As you scroll down the pages of the slowly aging couple, the viewer can’t help but begin to wonder about everything the couple has experienced together. Hints of story, character and mood are all suggested through the still images, sometimes purely by the couple’s surroundings, with weather and distance being of particular importance when considering these factors. As a company this opened our eyes to the power of still image, none more so than the shock of the final image; the man, standing all alone. The uniformity and consistency of the images made the loss of the man’s wife even more poignant, simply because we had grown comfortable with seeing her and were therefore expecting her.

 

It was decided that the concept of a constant symmetrical image was what our currently promising, but widely fragmented show needed, and thus, Billy and Dolly were born.

In keeping with the regularity of the recurring image within Billy and Dolly’s unfurling relationship, I took the directorial judgement of deciding that Billy and Dolly should also be consistent between ensemble segments in the way that they move together. Working together with the actors, we devised three set movements that would be reoccurring through; an extended leg elevation, a slight skip when travelling greater distances across stage and a spine roll upwards to pre-empt new movement.

When thinking about the specific movement of Billy and Dolly, much of it was inspired by the theatre company Theatre Ad Infinitum, a company that claim to “create performances that harness the universal language of the body” (Theatre Ad Infinitum, 2015), often using physical theatre in order to present their story. Translunar Paradise is a production that works with mask and movement and tells the story of an elderly couple (see video 1), as the recently deceased “Rose revisits her widowed companion to perform one last act love: to help him let go” (Theatre Ad Infinitum, 2015). With no speech at all throughout the show, and the only sound being the live accompaniment of an accordion, the show effectively portrays and tackles complex areas around “life, death and enduring love” (Theatre Ad Infinitum, 2015).

 Video 1, Translunar Paradise.

When viewing the production at Hull Truck Theatre back in 2011, it was a show that moved me in a way that theatre never had before. It was simple. It was quiet. And it was real.

This is exactly what Billy and Dolly need to become. Near participants, constant observers, of the events unfolding around them.

 

 

Works Cited

Thedmo (2014) An Elderly Couple Took the Same Photo Every Season. [blog entry] Available from http://imgur.com/gallery/XyA2s [Accessed 25th February 2015].

Theatre Ad Infinitum, (2015) Theatre Ad Infinitum. [online] Available from http://www.theatreadinfinitum.co.uk/ [Accessed 1 March 2015].