Current Issues Within Drama

So our performance is done. We arrived on the day of our performance with our bags of cardboard in hand, a back pack full of as many props as we could source and the hope that we would entertain whatever audience that we had. My partner and I had one goal in mind when it came to our performance, and that was to simply have some fun with it. And we did.

Although at the start of our dress run, our nerves were hitting new heights, we knew that if we adhered to the rules that we had put in place for ourselves, that we would come out of our performance happy with it. And I’m ecstatic to say that nothing went wrong with the dress run, which helped to settle our nerves a little bit. But we did feel as if we were missing something however, and we couldn’t quite place what that was exactly.

We spread our props along the floor, so that during the performance we would simply pick up our cardboard, show it to the audience, grab whatever prop we may or may not have needed, and go full steam ahead into which ever character we were performing within that minute. Having the props littered across the stage was an idea that we had wanted to use for a while leading up to the performance, however we couldn’t execute it until show day. We believed that by having these props all over our stage, and be reusing them, that we would then, in some way, be ghosting our own performance. Audience members would see props that had already been used minutes before in a new role, and in a new light, and that would directly reference what had already been seen by them.

As we performed our piece; ‘Something Long and Impossible to Pronounce’ to our audience, my partner and I realised what it was that had been missing from our performance all along. It was the people who came to see it; our audience. While we had had a great time rehearsing our piece and performing it in our living rooms, it was a fantastic experience to be able to show it to all of those who came along to see it. The feedback we have received so far has been positive, with audience members informing us about how engaged and entertained they were. We feel that because we had that audience there watching us, we were able to perform to a higher standard, and enjoyed the piece a lot more having finally got the chance to show it to the world.

What had been a kind of rocky process with a lot of decision changing along the way, turned into one of the most entertaining pieces of theatre and performance that I have ever had the pleasure of being involved in, and I would most definitely love to expand on our piece again someday if the chance ever arose.

All the way back when we started coming up with our idea for a performance piece, one certain thing that we had looked at in class had stood out to us since the very start. It was a piece by a group called Forced Entertainment, that was entitled; ‘12AM; Awake and Looking Down’. Forced Entertainment are a group of performers based in Sheffield, but who tour all around the world, who are; “interested in making performances that excite, challenge, question and entertain other people. We’re interested in confusion as well as laughter” (Times, 2017).  Their piece ‘12AM; Awake and Looking Down’ “is a physical and visual performance that explores the relation between object and label, image and text” (Times, 2017). Watching this performance is absolutely fascinating, as Forced Entertainment challenge what we know about characters, and labels, by giving their performers the exact keys they need to portray their character to the audience on a piece of cardboard. By having their characters written down for the audience to see, there is little to no guess work when it comes to audiences trying to figure out what it is they’re watching. They’re being told right from the start who is on stage and with this, they can form a small idea of what is going to happen.

We really adored this concept of showing, without telling. I particularly found it fascinating how Forced Entertainment could give you all the information required for a character, but still present it in a way which was entertaining and engaging. We wanted to know how we could take this blatant presentation of character, and yet still have a performance that would keep the audience engaged, and guessing. At which point, we thought to ourselves, why not create a performance based around the use of cardboard? The use of cardboard, specifically, to show character? What if we could tell our audience exactly what they were going to see, but still surprise them and keep them interested in our performance?

For a while we struggled to think of a way to do that. During a rehearsal however, during a scene between ‘The most hated man alive’ and ‘an arsehole’, when the time came to perform it, my partner and went straight into a scene about how the most hated man alive is really just misunderstood, and he does want people to like him but keeps messing up all his relationships. At which point, the arsehole would be unexpectedly nice to the most hated man alive. It wasn’t something that was planned, but it still fit in with what we had written on the cardboard. Sure, he’s the most hated man alive, but now the audience know why, it’s not because he’s a bad person, he does try, but it keeps going wrong. And we also had a character who we outright told the audience was an arsehole, but here he was being nice to this misunderstood man who is in many ways similar to him.

This concept really intrigued us, and we wondered what else we could play with in this performance. What other directions could we take it?

References:

Times, T. (2017) About. Available at: http://www.forcedentertainment.com/about/ (Accessed: 22 January 2017).

 

Although it may not have looked like it, from the selection that we eventually decided on for our performance, each and every character that we chose to portray in our performance piece was picked for a specific reason. With each scene that we created, we crafted an entirely new performance, with no two characters being the same. We wanted to play around with some differentiating scenarios and styles of performance too. For example; we had one scene in which a terrified foreigner laments about the safety of his family, and how he fears for his siblings as the bombs in his country fell, alongside the character of Mr Mayonnaise, a light hearted gimmicky character, who spoke in a singsong voice and spoon fed the foreigner mayonnaise. While this may just seem like nonsense, we picked those two characters to show the contrast within a true to our world character, like that of the foreigner, and that of Mr Mayonnaise, who is entirely an absurdist creation.

We set out, months ago when we first began to craft our performance, with the intention of simply entertaining people. We had written a list of rules for what it was exactly we wanted our performance to be. We wanted it to be fun, without stressing when making it. We wanted people to be engaged and entertained by it. So we started to consider during rehearsals what would be ‘fun’ for us to perform. And we managed to come up with a list of about sixty to seventy characters that we thought would be entertaining to act out.

Of course, like any piece of performance, ours developed from this massive list of characters to a set list of thirty characters. Fifteen for myself, and fifteen for my partner. As we had gone through the process of rehearsals, we realised that it would be more engaging for us as performers and for the audience, if we didn’t just constantly perform stuff we thought was humorous or entertaining. If we were to truly be engaging, we had to have a nice mix of styles in our performance, and perform it with the intention of ‘ghosting’. We hoped that audiences would be able to relate to these characters, and this changed the performance altogether. And so we incorporated characters such as ‘A man on the brink of suicide’ and ‘an anti-Semitic headmaster’ into our piece. We tried to cover as many bases of relatability as we possibly could, even if they weren’t all positive aspects.

Cutting certain characters was a hard decision to make. We had spent a good time choosing this list of sixty to seventy characters that we agreed would be entertaining to perform, and by the time we had performed, there were probably only fifteen of these characters left from the original list. However, that was not a bad thing, and the decision was the right one to make. Where we could have included some characters, we feel as performers that the ones we did pick were exactly the right choice.

Sorry Romeo. Sorry starving artist. Maybe next time.

With our performance piece, the main aspect that we are tackling is that of ‘Ghosting’. In his book The Haunted Stage; Marvin Carlson describes the phenomenon of ‘Ghosting’ as; “the identical thing they (the audience) have encountered before, although now in a somewhat different context” (Carlson, 2003). With this in mind, we chose a performance piece by Forced Entertainment called ‘12am: Awake & Looking Down’ (ForcedEntertainment, 2014) as our main influence to ghost. That performance can be found at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljsUnsNcSjk. When watching it for the first time, my partner and I really admired how much the performers managed to portray with just a bit of cardboard, some costume and no dialogue. We believed that Forced Entertainment used descriptions of people that the audience would recognise on their cardboard. The performers would pick up a piece of cardboard with a simple character description on it, and then perform it for a short period of time. After a short while, the performers would then change the character all together, to project something that was completely new, while still staying the same. It was the same performance, but different each time. Carlson states in The Haunted Stage that; “On the most basic level all arts are built up of identical material used over and over again, individual words in poetry, tones in music, hues in painting, but these semiotic building blocks carry much of their reception burden in their combinations” (Carlson, 2003). Forced Entertainment took these characters that people have experienced in their lives, whether it be through books, television, real life or however the audience might have recognised them. With these recognisable characters, they created a fascinating piece that manages to entertain consistently.

With that being our main focus of ‘ghosting’, my partner and I then began to think of how we could take influences from their performance and turn it into our own unique piece. We have been given a fifteen minute window to perform in, and in which we thought it would be entertaining to do fifteen separate performances in that period of time. Theatre makers in our modern age always have to be aware of engaging an audience. If they aren’t engaged in a two hour long performance, then they might not exactly gain anything from it. We’re hoping that within our fifteen performances, there will at least be one minute where we engage our audience, and that they are simply entertained, even if it is for just one minute. If the audience do not like what is being shown, then they don’t have to worry about sitting through it for the entire duration of our piece, as it will be replaced by something completely different in no time at all.

So to expand on ‘ghosting’ we crafted together a list of characters that people have experienced in everyday life, or are aware of in some context. We tried our best to have as many different styles of acting expressed through these characters, including some physical theatre, absurdism, naturalism and so forth. With these different styles all thrown together in one big amalgamation of performance, we’re hoping that audience members will be able to watch one minute of our piece and remember a time when they have experienced one of our characters in some capacity.

We made the decision to not have purely theatre references in our characters, as not all audience members would be able to relate to those. There were only so many times in rehearsals that we could recite a monologue from Shakespeare, or interact as characters from Waiting For Godot before we realised that not everybody would recognise what we were doing. We’re hoping, that by having made that decision, it will be more recognisable to a wider range of people.

 

Bibliography:

Carlson, M. (2003) The haunted stage: The theatre as memory machine (theater: Theory/text/performance). Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

ForcedEntertainment (2014) 12am: Awake & looking down (clip) Essen, 2014. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljsUnsNcSjk (Accessed: 11 January 2017).

I and my fellow performer got together to attempt to devise a piece of theatre that follows a couple of our own set ‘rules’. There is a lot of pressure on performers to be ‘interesting’ when it comes to theatre. After all, if what you’re doing on a stage isn’t somewhat engaging, people won’t bother coming to see it, or might leave halfway through. To combat this, we have come up with a series of performances over the course of a 15 minute time period. Each performance will be short, and will last anywhere from thirty seconds, to a minute or maybe even two if it’s particularly interesting to the audience.

We really wanted to take what people know, and try our best to stage that. Through the technique of ‘Ghosting’, we have written down lists of characters that we feel everybody will have at some point in their lives experienced. Not necessarily exclusively theatre characters, but modern day one. An alcoholic, a man who can’t say no, the most hated person in the world, to name a few. But, we thought, why not go one step further? Wouldn’t it be also interesting to stage non-humanoid characters too? Why not perform for a minute as a chair, or a table?

Taking influences from a performance by Forced Entertainment that was called; ‘12AM: awake and looking down’, we intend to use similar techniques that they used in our performance. Not only are we then ‘ghosting’ every day characters, we are also ‘ghosting’ Forced Entertainment.

One such thing that influenced our performance was their use of cardboard to indicate characters. Whenever Forced Entertainment would change characters in their performance, they would pick up a new sheet of cardboard with a short description of their character written on it. Liking this idea very much, we drew on this to find a way of getting across clearly when we changed characters in our performance.

During our first rehearsal, my partner and I would pick up random bits of cardboard, all of which had a different character written on them, and perform them for a minute or so before throwing them behind us and grabbing a new one.

We are still struggling with a name for our piece, however, with more rehearsals in sight, we are hoping to create some kind of interesting performance that will be enjoyable to our audience, even if it is only for thirty seconds.