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.