Thou Shall Laugh

We wanted to take well known Shakespeare monologues and put them in a modernised context. It’s strange, as we read or listened to the words, we found that it could be very relatable when put in a context that could relate to people’s everyday lives. Inspired by the television show, Mock of the Week, we set this piece up as a stand up comedy night. We used the format of Mock of the Week, in the way that they have a part where a subject is called out and they have to improvise about this. Continue reading

Tonight Matthew I’m going to be…

The acoustic night was a huge success and allowed us all to promote the production and was a great way to get people who do not usually attend the LPAC to come in and buy their tickets. This marketing tool allowed the team to cocialise and build relationships with members of the public, getting a great response from the audience. Using this tool, has enabled us to understand the importance of marketing ourselves and creating a fun event for members of the public to come and join in. In the future, Hand Me Down will be able to do a variety of events in different locations, allowing us to build relationships with different venues, which creates good communication for our company.

Here is a few videos taken from the night, to give an incite as to what we was doing. And the type of stuff that Hand Me Down will do in the future.

 

One: Change is going to come

 

Two: Ava Maria [in the style of Beyonce]

 

 

Selling Out!

After ordering leaflets we decided to place them in key locations around Lincoln. With posters around the university campus, we now wanted to attend the Odeon. As the Odeon presents live theatre already within its screens, hopefully this would be the right target audience for our performance.

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It seems our advertising has been working successfully through social media also. With two weeks to go there are only 18 tickets left for our 90 ticket capacity. . Now that we have posters and leaflets in a range of locations, as well as advertising through our acoustic night we have also released another trailer.

With this trailer rather than create intrigue, I wanted to show more of our process. With devising, we have had an exciting time creating this piece and we wanted to reflect this within a rehearsal trailer. The song playing over it is also from our piece. We didn’t want to give too much away with the lyrics, however, wanted to create a light atmosphere for our viewers. In other news we are also awaiting to appear on radio to advertise our performance details.

Very Hungry for something…

Working as a company that deal with various texts, ranging from speeches to lyrics; it is our mission statement that any form of text is able to be decontextualised. Looking closely at children’s texts, it is obvious that there are morals and themes underscoring many books and nursery rhymes, and so the concept of bringing a children’s book to life was emerged. Reading the notorious ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ by Eric Carle, it was clear that the repetitive formation of the text that is at face value, surrounding the subject of hunger, had the potential to be adapted theatrically given the storytelling tone throughout.

We also felt from the text that there is a sense of preaching, whereby this caterpillar is a symbol of gluttony and rebirth (as the transformation is towards a butterfly), and therefore staging the scene as a spiritual style ceremeony seemed fitting. Yet as Director, I wanted to make it clear that our interpretation of the text and of this ‘hunger’ that the caterpillar is experiencing can be perceived as a search for something that cannot be fulfilled, or even that this sense of gluttony is a metaphor for wealth/fame/power (intentionally preceeding the following ‘Fame’ scene). Thus staging the narrator as one performer on a platform, whilst 7 other performers made their way from the surrounding stage towards the ‘Preacher’ as the text proceeded would look aesthetically effective, as would be the case where all attention is on the speaker as in a ‘spiritual ceremony’. However without making the transition from religious connotations to explicitly religious, it was important that I maintained the physicality of this scene as suggestive and relevent to the metaphorical aspect we identified.

Picture by Andrew Tinley, ed. by Stephanie Alcock 12/5/2014

Picture by Andrew Tinley, ed. by Stephanie Alcock 12/5/2014

A Picture Paints a Thousand Words

Promoting and Advertising our show Take Me By The Tongue has needed a lot of work. From getting our name out their to the distribution of posters and leaflets have all been big tasks. With the help of social media on our hands it makes it ten times for efficient and easier.
With our posters printed we wanted to spread the word around the university campus because we felt that our main audience members would be students as we are a performing at the LPAC which is a on university campus theatre and it is easily accessible to those around.
Our posters stand out with black and creme colour schemes with bold text. we placed them all over the university where we felt they would get noticed.  Our designer put recognizable faces on our poster which also links with our performance. There is Shakespeare and Pitbull , and on a different design of our poster we also have Marilyn Monroe. This mishmash of famous people is surely bound to get the interest of passes by and make them think how do Pitbull and Shakespeare go together in one performance?
With so much happening on campus already for example , sports and society events we face the challenge of whether our poster will get noticed, this is a factor which theatre companies face on day to day basis they need to spread the word of their performance but face other companies doing the same thing. 7

However saying this we have had people comment that they have seen our posters around university and have said how good they look. This has also helped with ticket sales and we are more than half way there to having a sell out performance.
You can also find us in the LPAC’s end of year show  booklet and our leaflets are around the Zing Cafe in the LPAC so keep an eye out. 
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