CLAIRDELALUNESWORLD @clairdelalunesworld-blog - Tumblr Blog

PA 7033 Performance Practice 2. Devising and Adaptation.

SCRIBBLE AND BIBBLE AND THE TACO GRANDE

‘…for children, reality and play coincide and are fused…’

(Walter Benjamin: ‘Program for a Children’s Proletarian Theatre.)

My primary role in this devising process has been that of designer. My background as a muralist and artist and my interest in scenography meant that I had the resources to contribute artwork and a design aesthetic to the piece. I also took a performing role and played Rosie, the girl in whose kitchen the action takes place, the ‘author’ of the story and the mind from which springs ‘Scribble and Bibble’.

Early on the group established that we would like to experiment with an overhead projector and a ‘live’ drawing technique: live art in theatre! This meant that Scribble and Bibble could respond to Rosie’s drawings and in the moments when their worlds collide both the artwork and the action would illustrate and colour the scene. For me, the use of an overhead projector and live animated drawing juxtaposed the character of Rosie and that of her imaginary friends with the sheet providing the canvas for the infinite possibilities that Rosie’s mind can conjure.

I began to think about how I wanted Scribble and Bibble to look, bearing in mind they are the creation of an 11 year old girl. However, nothing drawn in the show was fully realised. Everything was discernible but ‘representative’ of the subject. Live drawing, especially on acetate where I could rub out and re-draw, or start again, means that the audience can't second guess where the story is going. It adds to the excitement and tension.

‘With its single chair, the space is far more beautiful empty than it could be filled by a set. A set by its very name sets limits on what might be ahead. An empty space releases the imagination to roam. A storyteller takes possession of the chair and we’re off…” (ALFREDS 2013: 35)

The quotation from Mike Alfred’s book ‘Then What Happens’ had a profound effect on how I went about designing. I believe that the capacity children have for imagining means that ‘less is more’. As a designer, I don’t want to do myself out of a job, but I think it is harder, but essential, to create a sense of place than it is to fill the stage with clichéd copies - representative design schemes with multi-use props are often more memorable and inventive than ‘replica’ sets.

The colours we chose reflected the Mexican theme of our story. These were chiefly represented by the fruits, vegetables and utensils on the kitchen table and the laundry hanging on the clothes airer. The edible props were decoration, but would also serve as vegetable foley in full production. Children respond to and gravitate towards colour. Colour is exciting but in or efforts to keep it uncomplicated the domestic backdrop was kept purposefully simple.

In our kitchen we wanted the set to include elements of what we collectively considered to be an ‘everyday’ kitchen: a table, chair, piece of black and white check lino and a clothes airer fixed to the ceiling. We felt strongly that any young audience member should feel that they could go home and embellish, interpret and play with what they had watched. We took it to the next level from play and ‘fused’ it into a piece of theatre we hoped would inspire the audience and spark their imaginations.

In keeping with our decision to make everything accessible and everyday, we looked in the kitchen for inspiration for the costumes. They can all be found in the laundry basket and on the clothes airer because children often play with what they find lying around. They can break through the physical laws of our world into worlds of their own creation often using the most mundane materials.

“…they (children) do not so much imitate the worlds of adults as bring together, in the artefact produced in play, materials of widely differing kinds in a new, intuitive relationship . Children thus produce their own small world of things within a greater one. The norms of this small world must be kept in mind if one wishes to create things specially for children” (Benjamin 2002:450).

Cartoons allow bodies to bend and stretch in ways not possible in the physical world. There are certain conventions in cartooning but no hard and fast ‘rules’. In the cartoon world children can process death and rebirth, talking animals, shapeshifting - let their imaginations run wild because cartoons can capture it. Cartoons were the inspiration we needed to strengthen the representation of our ‘unreal reality’, to engage the young audience with the fun and invention of live drawing and help them make the necessary leap into our world and to invest their emotions in our characters.

I watched lots of cartoons, from Tom and Jerry and Ninjago, to Adventure Time and Avatar. I listen to my children play and invent all the time with their friends and we have used much of the language, that they derive from cartoons in our devising process. Spending time engaged in observing young children play and devise amongst themselves never fails to impress me. It has been a pleasure to actively listen in on their imaginary worlds. They have been aware that I am listening and have loved the fact that their play and their ideas and imagination have been important to me and to the project as a whole. When we performed to an invited audience of about 17 children midway through the week, we all asked them questions and encouraged them to lead us and suggest scenarios, characters and style. We asked them what they did and didn’t like and what they thought we could improve on. The scary, goggly-eyed monster in the final piece was a direct result of that sharing. The children said my ‘monster’ spider-like hand was not scary enough and we needed one with blood and spiky claws and lots of eyes!

The hand manipulates the pen and therefore the squirrel! Using shadow play and an overhead projector gave us untold flexibility and a wonderful way of engaging members of the audience. I found it tricky, especially at first, to get the perspective right because you have to draw backwards if you keep you eyes on the screen. This was been quite a challenge in rehearsal. Amelia and Nat spent a lot of time dodging my hand, but the immersive devising week honed my skills and enabled us to troubleshoot and to get the angles of projection right. I made some pre-drawn, pre-cut pieces of acetate to punctuate the drama. This was both to add some flashes of cartoonesque immediacy but also to solve the problem of the shadow of my hand being in the way of the characters in front of the sheet. The OHP offers a myriad of opportunities for future development and I would like to experiment further with shadow, layers and scale: tiny squirrels in the distance, shadow puppetry and also textures, for instance, water and earth.

My character of Rosie was my first performing role since I was at school. I went to an all girls school and because I am tall was always cast as a boy so it was a thrill to finally play a girl! During the early workshops with Mary it was clear that the wild confidence of my youth had long since departed and left me apprehensive and certain that my total lack of stage presence and embarrassingly awful dance moves would be all too obvious.

I was very nervous on Friday night but once I got going and started to relax, I developed confidence in my abilities and, more importantly for a collaborative project, I realised how much I trusted my fellow devisers and how much the intense week we had journeyed through together had given me more than any ‘how to’ book could ever do.

When I plonked myself down in my chair on stage at The Egg it was not so much the air that was ‘vibrating with promise’, but my hand because I was so nervous and worried that any artistic skill I possessed would vanish and I would be left unable to exit stage left or right but wishing one of those trap doors some stages have would open wide and gobble me up. But then Amelia’s shadow began waving at me from behind the sheet and I remembered that despite our different artistic backgrounds and our dreams for the future, we were all there together with this lovely story we had bought to life and I was hugely proud to be there in that moment. So I checked the audience, danced like a banshee, remembered my ‘notes’ from Nikki and spoke my lines with confidence, and while my drawn lines were a touch tremulous at times, in the end, I surprised myself, had great fun and didn't forget what came first, the squirrel or the forest?

References: Mike Alfreds: Then What Happens. Storytelling & Adapting for the Theatre. 2013 Walter Benjamin, Ed. Howard Eiland:Walter Benjamin Selected Writings. 1913-1926 Vol 1. 2002.

ASSESSMENT. PA7033

DEVISING AND ADAPTATION

Bugsy set. A painted backdrop and a bar/bookstore. Keeping it simple but visually effective.

Initial drawing for Bugsy Malone set

A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings.

Devising with Mary....

★6 Lath Victorian Kitchen Ceiling Pulley Clothes Airer Maid Laundry Dryer Rack★ in Home, Furniture & DIY, Household & Laundry Supplies, Airers/ Driers/ Clothes Horses | eBay

Lucha Libre, or free wrestling, is - after football - the most popular sport in Mexico, and now it's coming to London.

Lucha Libre in London

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ll7PbKvWe4)

Francine Stock meets Barnaby Smyth from Foley to make sound effects with celery

Puppet evaluation. PA7023

“The artist has the possibility to create a much larger landscape with puppetry. The human becomes more human in that sense.”Julie Taymor.

That’s the thing about Walter. He seems more human than most, despite his chthonic heritage.

I knew from the exercises we had done making 3 minute clay heads that I wanted to make something, or someone, that was neither human, nor animal, but a ‘hybrid’, a puppet with obvious ‘roots’ but ambiguous ones.

So I started thinking about roots in both the familial and the earthbound sense. It was at this time that the character of a ‘mole youth’ was born, based loosely on Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of the child as a tinker and collector and my thoughts on the child’s innate magical, transformative qualities. I started sketching mole characteristics, adding ‘human’ quirks.

My aim was to make Walter entirely out of materials I found at home, including the mod roc, paint, dowling, chicken wire, hosepipe, insulation tape, wire and raw untreated sheep wool from the barbed wire at the top of our garden. His wire ‘bottom’ is filled with copper coins from our loose coppers pot.

The challenge was to reflect both human and mole biology. I had also cast a ladder as a theatrical device and wanted Walter to appear symbolic of a ladder himself: long, thin, limbs - not exactly your archetypal mole! I had thought of making him out of velvet, but my son made a waistcoat and I have not changed it, although he may acquire more clothing soon. I purposively did not want Walter to be constrained by stereotypes of the species.

Chris Pirie reminded us that puppets can be anything we want them to be. I believe that children particularly connect with them because their imaginations are not restricted. Even if they know what a mole looks like in real life, they are happy to suspend belief and make the necessary leap, in fact I think that is what they are looking for, something that takes them out of the ordinary, a kind of magic realism.

I made plenty of mistakes, usually involving drawing my own blood with a sharp piece of wire and/or gluing my fingers to my puppet. I rebuilt the wire torso three times trying to get the shape right, getting the hosepipe shoulders and pelvis to sit level and proud enough of the wire frame to act like joints onto which other limbs could be added. I attached Walter’s head to his body using a wire that ran from the neck up through the head cavity and out of the top. There I secured it to Walter’s earpiece bottle top that he has fashioned for himself to hide the bloody divot made when his ear was ripped off.

I need to pay further attention to his shoulder and hip joints and would like to make ball joints so the arms and legs have a complete range of movement. At the moment he can't tuck his knees up under his chin, or lift his arms up in front of him as if about to dive. I would like to add ankle and wrist joints too. His hands are hairy, but delicate and reminiscent of a mole's paw but less ferocious. He has elegant hands! When I re-build him I will make a ’T’ bar device to sit in his head to move him better, that will give me a lot more range and dexterity and make him easier to hold. It is important that Walter has a strong neck and the ability to look all around him, but especially up at the stars.

The time constraints fitted neatly with my aesthetic decision to ensure that nearly all of Walter’s body parts are visible and look handmade, as if he had built himself as he went along, attaching and adding component parts as he found them. He takes DIY to a whole new level!

In the early clay head exercises I had made a puppet with a crack down one side of its face that reminded me of Jekyll and Hyde. Tobi had suggested that I play with that device in my final puppet. When the mole catcher rips his ear off, Walter, being a mystical, gentle creature, adopts a look of tragic bewilderment on one side of his face. He is dark, torn and scarred. I wanted it to be bloody and the complete antithesis of his inherently gently nature. On the other side of his face there is a smile, a bright reassuring smile that invites you to smile too.

What I am most happy about is the way the different sides of his face are only apparent when you really look for them. They don't inform the reading of him head-on, but rather give him the look of part innocence, part experience.

His ladder like limbs mean he looks very characterful when he is cross- legged. I imagine him climbing his ladder with his knees poking out to the side as he takes each step. I feel that breath will play an important part here. The ladder is a symbolic device and his climbing of it to listen to the stars is almost ritualistic. Breath and repetition are crucial, so too is the way Walter reacts to any sudden impulses, or outside influences. He would ‘flail’ wildly then regain his composure, tai-chi style, set himself, steady his breath and carry on upwards.

His limbs also mean that he looks particularly unsuited to living underground, but this is where I think that some dramatic and comedic opportunities lie.

When I reflect on this long and engaging process, I have been very critical of my understanding of the world of the puppet, but it is through the process of construction, research and the writing of my script, in which Walter has a starring role, that I have learned to inhabit my puppet and that together we hope to create scenarios that children and adults can react to emotionally.

MATYA. PA7023 Assessed blog entry.

THIS IS WALTER.

My first TYA script! I have previously co-written two school plays with huge casts so I am excited, if a little nervous about embarking on this writing adventure.

It’s such a different process writing for children and writing for children to perform for other children and their families. Next I think I might try writing for children to perform for children!

This script was borne out of the desire to write a piece around my puppet, Walter. He was the result of the puppetry module requirements for the MATYA.

Walter just appeared! I told my boys that one morning, he was there in the kitchen by the toaster. He just ‘is’. They had seen me build him and watched as Walter took shape physically, so they knew that wasn't true, but they didn’t question it! I had the idea of him in my head. I just didn’t know what he looked like. So I suppose I am not entirely sure what came first, the puppet, or the story. Hmmm….

I filled several pages of a sketchbook for Walter the puppet and did some research into moles, particularly mole mythology. I found a story in French folklore where children wore little pouches of ‘mole parts’ around their waists, to ward off ‘worms and convulsions’. This is why Walter has his ear ripped off and partly why Wurzel, the West County Worm, tends to writhe and convulse when he is worried - although this device is used for comic effect in the script.

Walter’s ladder is central to his story. Walter Benjamin wrote “All great storytellers have in common the freedom with which they move up and down the rungs of their experience, as on a ladder. A ladder extending downwards to the interior of the earth and disappearing into the clouds…..” (Walter Benjamin. The Storyteller. Illuminations, Ed. Hannah Arendt. 1999)

I loved the symbolic opportunities the ladder presented both for Walter and the story and for the stage and set. I read a short article in The New Scientist called ‘How to think - About Alien Contact’ (18th December 2014). The article explained how a group of scientists are watching and recording the twinkling of the stars and suggest that alien lifeforms might be communicating with one another and with us. These scientist are sending back their own messages and the article refers to this practice as ‘Star- tickling’. It had to go in!

So I had Walter, his ladder, the stars and their stories. Now the hard bit. I had no real story, just snippets of ideas. I knew that Walter needed to change the lives of the other characters. I needed a baddie (The Void. D.Void)

and someone to save... (Pumpkin). I re -read extracts from How Plays Work by David Edgar and went over Hattie’s prompts and my notes. I applied the techniques I had learned to my ideas and found that slowly, as I became more confident, my instincts took over and began to directly influence the story and the characters. I stopped trying to ‘put together’ the perfect story- arc because I got frustrated when it didn't fit.

I have paid enormous attention to Hattie’s rule of 3 and particularly the need for the characters to change and I tried to allow my abstract side to flourish without ruining the simple message. The hardest thing is keeping it simple.

And the antithesis of simple? MIND MAPS! I loved doing the mind map. It inhabited the kitchen table for days. I tend to flood my brain with ideas and have huge creative energy that drives the research and development stage at maximum thrust. The mind map helped me make sense of it all. The need for story threads to connect and refer back and make sense would have been impossible for me without the mind map. It also helped clarify the central element of the story. I visualise scenarios.

The name Walter was inspired by Walter Benjamin, whose writings on childhood and the creative arts was a main focus for the Essay I am writing for the theory and history module of MATYA and Walt Whitman, because of his poem ‘ There Was A Child Went Forth’. That each sensation the child in the poem experiences becomes a part of the child and the level of absorption the child encounters was interesting and beautiful to me. Benjamin also talks about the absorption some children experience when reading a book.

I think that is how I wanted Walter to feel about the stars and their stories. Absorbed in the universe and the ‘mystical one-ness of all things deep down’ (David Foster Wallace, 2005). Walter is running through all of my MA modules in one way or another! I like that. Honestly, I don’t feel that this play has developed enough. I haven't had the time I need with the story or the characters yet and I am looking forward to continuing the journey.

My other major influence is David Foster Wallace. I read his Kenyon Commencement Address (delivered May 21st 2005 ) last summer and it struck a chord deep in me. So much in there resonates, but for this script I am trying to include elements of the following two quotations and I hope that in some small, abstract way, that I do them justice.

“But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know that there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer - hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: Love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.”

“..the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:”

This Is Walter.

THEATRE I HAVE SEEN RECENTLY - and taken my boys to.

The Magic Elves - Bristol Old Vic

Swallow and Amazons - Bristol Old Vic

Santas Little Trolls - Tobacco Factory Brewery Theatre, Bristol

101 Dalmatians - Tobacco Factory Theatre, Bristol

The Snow Queen - Pegasus Theatre, Oxford

Rumplestiltskin - The Egg Theatre, Bath

When I have my assignments handed in I will write some short reviews. I will say now that 101 Dalmatians was my personal favourite. My 12 year old son and My 10 year old son loved Swallow and Amazons the best. My 5 year old loved Santas Little Trolls the best.

As a falconer you are an heir of the ages. A minor page of history has turned back a thousand years...all the years between you and them disappear. Like you become them somehow. History collapses when you hold a hawk.

Helen Macdonald

H is for Hawk

I treasured it in the same way children treasure the hope that they may be like the children in books: secretly magical, part of some deeper mysterious world that makes them something out of the ordinary.

Helen Macdonald.

H is for Hawk

When I was a child I'd climb the hill behind my house and crawl into my favourite den under a rhododendron bush, wriggling down on my tummy under overhanging leaves like a tiny sniper. And in this secret fox hole, nose an inch from the ground, breathing crushed bracken and acid soil, I'd look down on the world below, basking in the fierce calm that comes from being invisible but seeing everything. Watching, not doing. Seeking safety and not being seen. It's a habit you can fall into, willing yourself into invisibility. And it doesn't serve you well in life. Believe me it doesn't. Not with people and loves and hearts and homes and work.

Helen Macdonald.

H is for Hawk

Walter the journey-mole. 'Moving up and down the rungs of ...experience as on a ladder.' A beanstalk 'extending downwards to the interior of the earth and disappearing into the clouds...' Hmmm.. I'm not sure Walter like heights. He is more chthonic than celestial, more local craftsman than seafaring trader.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

CLAIRDELALUNESWORLD