Scribble and Bibble! - Devising Evaluation. Devising Blog- Scribble and Bibble The first step was to select a story. We as a group are aware that there is a lack of authentic children’s voices within TYA, something with Amelia spoke about in her research project in the first trimester. We wanted to try and rectify this, so for our source material sought out a story created by a child. The story Scribble and Bibble and the Taco Grande was part of BBC Radio 2’s 500 word story competition, and something we felt drawn to for a number of reasons. One was the playful nature of the characters in the story, and the possibilities that gave us theatrically. One was the fact that this story about Mexican wrestling squirrels had been created by a girl. As a group of women we liked the way this broke more traditional gender stereotypes which can be found in TYA. Though Scribble and Bibble are described as boys in the source material, we felt that the female author (and our female cast) gave us licence to make them girls. Each member of the group was drawn to a different element of the story, and a different theatrical possibility for it. We were drawn to the possibility of playing with the comedy in wrestling scenes, to the importance placed on “best friends” in the story and the way that mimics children of a certain age, and also to the idea that we could present children with something they could go home and recreate almost exactly. Our devising process began looking at ensemble work, and playing with chorus exercises like shoaling and compiling images. This provided us with a large amount of useful information about the two main characters. Playing as a chorus allowed us to find a group idea of the core of who Scribble and Bibble were, rather than relying on us trying to work it out individually. From the exercises we learnt that Bibble was full of false bravado, and actually needed Scribble for security. We learnt that Scribble had a lot of inner strength, and might be a none speaking character. Through the improvisation of a forest scene we discovered the potential for Scribble’s scribbling as a way of creating solutions. This discovery is what led in the end to the use of live drawing on stage to build the world for Scribble and Bibble. However, despite the useful information we found in our chorus work, as a group we all come from different backgrounds, and an ensemble piece was not what we felt most comfortable working on. We wanted to create a piece that drew on the various skill sets of people in the group, and with Clair’s artistic abilities coupling perfectly with the idea of having a drawn world it felt like a natural direction to take the show. My role during the process was to act as an outside eye and dramaturg. The role of dramaturg is one that is difficult to define. It can cover a myriad of things, but the best description I have found comes from Meghan Beals McCarthy, from Northlight Theatre, who says “A dramaturg is an information designer. […] The dramaturg decides what information gets to the audience and in what way.” (In Lorezell, ’09). As part of this I had the chance to evaluate the response of our sample audience during the devising week, which allowed us as a group to incorporate their responses into our work. Prior to the devising week we looking into a few different things to play with. We looked at Complicite’s idea of play being a core part of the devising process. The use of play is something we found was even more important to make use of when creating a show for children, as it encouraged us to keep the spirit of the child alive in the room with us, rather than getting to bogged down in serious, ‘adult’ stuff. During our week of devising in The Egg we fell away from play a few times due to time pressures. Inevitably this led to issues within the story that we could only solve by playing around the issue. We researched playing with shadows and interacting between drawing and real world actors. Quite early on we realised that while we really liked the use of an overhead projector to draw the world for the characters, as a visual manifestation of Scribble’s drawings, it wouldn’t work to for the actor playing Scribble to be the person drawing. To get around this problem we added Rosie – the author of the original story – into the production as a creator figure. The use of Rosie allowed us to delve more deeply into the use of a Kitchen aesthetic, marrying into our desire for the show to be easily recreated by children. However this threw up new problems around world mixing for us later in the process. We looked into Mexican wrestling and the culture behind it. We looked at the different languages of creativity children use and thought about ways to incorporate them into the performance. Our diversity as a group made it natural to try and add different ways of expressing imaginative worlds into the show, something that would hopefully allow all members of an audience to engage with a different character. The hope was that boys (particularly loud and excitable boys) would be drawn to Scribble and Bibble, and see elements of themselves and their play reflected in them, while quieter children – possibly girls who aren’t as interested in active play fighting – would see themselves in Rosie’s character. At the start of the week the scenes we were considering looking at were: the introduction to the world and to Scribble and Bibble, the conversation with Bibble’s mother about the forbidden forest, and the wrestling scene between the sparrow hawk and the taco grande (or at least Bibble’s take on it). These three scenes would – at full production – be the ones that posed the biggest theatrical problems for us, which is why our instinct had been to look into them first -that and the fact they offered us the opportunity to play with a lot of them Mexican themes we had researched into. As the week progressed though it became clear that for the purpose it was much more important for us to focus on the relationship between Scribble and Bibble. That was the core of the story, and we had to place it back at the core of our production. If we were to take the show to full production then these scenes would all be things we would spend a significant of time on, but it was clear that the friendship between the two Squirrel’s didn’t come across as strongly as it needed to when we looked at these scenes first. By encouraging Nathalie and Amelia as actors to be silly and play fight with each other they were able to carry across that playfulness into the performance. I felt that the most important part of our devising process was taking the scratch to an audience of 4-8 year olds. Our target age for the production is 4+ and it was really useful to get feedback from that age group, particularly on aspects we were unsure of. The feedback we received from the children both during the performance and in the discussion afterwards was unanimously positive. Something I felt was particularly significant was that some of the children were bringing things from the performance into the show, even when we were there. Performing to the target audience distinctly brought the performance alive in a new way, and it was obvious that a higher level of interaction with the audience than we had anticipated would be necessary at full production. It was also obvious though that that was something we would be unable to rehearse without an audience of children. It really drove home to me the importance of constantly showing work – especially work for young audiences – to an audience. The children initially found Scribble a more likeable character than Bibble – they thought Bibble was mean. This was something that had not occurred to us in rehearsal at all, but was obvious in front of the children, and a problem that needed fixing. We did this by placing the two on slightly more equal footing during their play fight. The other really significant aspect of the audience feedback we received for me was the difference between feedback from parents and children. Children wanted everything to be scarier – they wanted real monsters with fangs and poison and claws. Parents on the other hand wanted to tone down the scary factor. We added in a more realistic monster due to audience feedback, but if we were to take the production further we would have to think more deeply about the balance between parent and child input. It is very important to us that the child is authentically represented on stage, and that children in the audience feel their way of playing reflected on stage. But, due to the way theatre is set up it is also important for us to listen to the parents. In part this is because they hold the purse strings, but the other, more significant reason, is that we can never know the feedback we are getting from the children is genuine. Parents know their children better than we as theatre makers can, and we have to trust them to guide us when it comes to the long term impact of what we show on stage on an individual child.
