On your mark. Get set. Devise! by Ashley Miskoff
Hello there friends, Ashley here. Today’s post will delve into the delightful, delicious, de-lovely world of de-vising! That’s right folks, today marks our very first day NOT spent as a whole but rather split up into our three perspective devising groups: Site-specific with Bairbre Ní Chaoimh, physical theatre with Jenny Macdonald, and playwriting with Declan Gorman. As a team of eight plus our facilitator, we are charged with working collaboratively for five full days to create original works to be shared at the end of next week at the Samuel Beckett Theatre (well, besides the site-specific group, which will…well…be presented at a specific site that is not a traditional theatre).
I’m in Declan’s playwriting devising group, which by the end of today had been renamed to the “Spoon-shaped Spaceships”(try saying that three times fast, it’s fun!). Anyway, the Spoonships and I met at rehearsal room 191 to begin work.
Side note: Room 191 used to be a horse stable at Trinity back in the day. We were first introduced to this space as being dark, dingy, and dungeon-like, needless to say we were all super thrilled to be spending the next eight plus hours devising theatre there.
Lacy and Natasha walking in for the first time!
But in reality the stables weren’t all that terrible- they even had a non-functional spiral staircase!
I think it’s a part of the appeal. Artists tend to do their best work when given barriers to overcome (i.e. money, time, space…money). Besides, when have artists ever been given nice things anyways? #thestruggleisreal
The Collective Characters
We began our process by drawing portraits of each other. The caveat: we weren’t allowed to look down at our paper. So in pairs we had to do our best to capture our partner’s features by visualizing our drawing on the page. This task proved a challenge but also pretty hilarious. I wouldn’t classify myself as a visual artist (in any way) so for me anything other than stick figures and smiley faces gives me anxiety. But I found this exercise pretty freeing. Knowing that these drawings weren’t meant to be perfect and that none of them would actually look much like the person, allowed any inhibitions I had melt away. Fortunately for my partner Zak, his portrait came out pretty spot on. The resemblance is uncanny!
Some more beautiful portraits!
When we were finished, Declan extended the activity by having us choose a random portrait and give him or her a name, age, and occupation of sorts. Our very own portraits were now beginning to take form into all new characters. Then we passed around the portraits to the person next to us to add on where this character was born and where they live now. Around and around the characters went, being passed along to someone new adding on more information about this character’s life. Some of the questions we were asked to think about and then answer for our characters were: earliest memory, most embarrassing moment, biggest fear, and when they are the happiest. When each of us had contributed we hung up our gallery of characters on the wall to get a better look.
And just like that we created eight interesting and dynamic characters that may or may not be used or provide inspiration for us in our original play.
This was an excellent activity to set us up for collective creating. We all contributed to the life of this character individually yet built upon the ideas of others to further the story of that particular character. The end left us with 7 entry points into this character’s life that we could (and did) expand upon later.
A few of the other exercises that came out of our collective characters were:
Creating gestures/movement/ dialogue based on one of the facts about a character.
Creating three tableaux (beginning, middle, and end) based upon one of the stories we found to be intriguing about one of the characters.
Creating an improvised realism scene using dialogue based on those three tableaux
A big part of this process has been exploring dreams. We did a few exercises exploring our own dreams and the dreams of our peers and then somehow combining them to make one big mess of a dream. Reflecting our own dreams provides an excellent entry point for story ideas. Because anything could happen in a dream, we are not stifled by the limitation of space and time, rather we are given the freedom to explore unknown realms and stream of conscious thinking and writing. This in turn makes for very entertaining and fascinating stories, to say the least.
After lunch, Declan gave us instructions to go out on campus and fetch two found objects; just as long they didn’t appear to belong to anyone and could fit in the door.
This was our exhibition of found objects!
Collective Character, Dreams, and Found Objects
Between fleshing out our collective characters and exploring our own and our group member’s dreams, we did spend some time writing and creating stories. After all, we are the playwriting group. We were asked to free write a dream from the perspective of one of the characters that somehow included one of the found objects. After seven minutes we shared our dream stories and Declan extracted two juicy lines from our dreams and wrote them down.
In groups, we then created an abstract physicalized piece based on one of our lines from the character’s dream. Since it was the last activity of the day, a few Spoonship members were getting a little slap happy and had the case of the giggle fits. While it was quite entertaining, Declan could tell we just about had it for the day and released us from our first day of work. Thank you Declan and I apologize to my fellow Spoonships for the uncontrollable laughter that ensued from my piece. “I was sucked into my computer”.
Devising day one was officially over but the night was still young! Even though we were all exhausted from the day’s work, celebrations were to be had for one of our very own, Shannon’s Birthday! To commemorate this momentous occasion some of us celebrated with dinner and a show in typical theatre student fashion.
We saw “Once the musical” at the Olympia Theatre.
We even got a chance to visit the onstage bar at the interval for some pictures and a beverage.
Personally, this was my fourth time seeing this show and it never gets old. It was also very special to see it in Dublin where the show takes place. New meaning emerged for me having now spent almost two weeks in this city. I felt clued in on some of the inside jokes and references that only true Dubliners would pick up on. Every time I see a production of this show I feel inspired and invigorated for my own practice and for the field of theatre in general. At its core, “Once” is about life and love and all of the complexities that it brings. To paraphrase theatre professor Debra Bruch, the theatre helps us to discover and understand ourselves, our relationship with our world, and with others. By exploring the human condition through theatre, we begin to examine who we are in relationship to where we are. To quote the birthday girl, this show “gives me all of feels”. And I couldn’t agree more.
After participating in many devised physical theatre pieces thus far on this trip, it was exciting to see similar techniques used in this show. Now to only convince Delcan to allow our group to write “Once the musical the sequel” we’d have a show up and running in no time!
For now, I’m excited and energized to continue the process of creating original projects. I can’t wait to hear from the other groups to see what they are cooking up. I’m sure that by next Wednesday we will be very proud of the work shared.
I’ll leave you all with some classic Cole Porter to get you all pumped for the next four days of work. “It’s delightful, it’s delicious, it’s delectable, it’s delirious, It’s dilemma, it’s de limit, it’s deluxe,” it’s DE-VISING!
