As Director of Hand Me Down Theatre, it is my job to maintain the progress of the script and that each scene I direct coincides with the company manifesto. Framing our piece at the beginning of the process, we outlined the main themes we wanted to explore. Yet deciding on an innovative opening scene is something that needed to be perfected in order to shape our piece and lead into the rest of the performance. Therefore deciding on the initial idea of exploring the absurdity of modern song lyrics in pop culture, we decided to introduce the 8 performers of the ensemble that would be performing in this opening scene.
Opening Scene Script
Experimenting with a confessional and therapy style scene, we created an intimate performance whereby each character was drawn from our interpretation of the song lyrics. Our initial catalyst for this idea was Pitbull’s lyrics:
Me not working hard? Yeah right, picture that with a kodak. Or better yet, go to Times Square and take a picture of me with a kodak. Took my life from negative to positive. I just wanted y’all to know that.
It seemed that whilst these lyrics are completely ridiculous out of context, and arguably within their context, we were able to interpret them as a kind of confession when delivering them. And so this led to the thought of creating a dialogue constructed with lyrics that made no sense at all yet when delivered in a context they would seem understandable, almost Dadaist. Rudolf Kuenzil defined Dadaism as questioning
the myth of originality, of the artist as genius, suggesting instead that everybody should be an artist and that almost anything could be art. [and]… Dada works still have radicalism and freshness that attracts today’s culture jammers and disrupters of life as usual. (2006, p. 14)
Essentially this is an element of what our opening scene consists of. We shared this scene in our class workshop, mainly consisting of spoken lyrics acting as dialogue throughout the 10 minutes by 8 performers, each adopting a trait of a character, e.g. an alcoholic or sex addict. The feedback we received of this scene was constructive; elements such as the rhythm of the piece leading into a crescendo needed improving as well as not revealing too much a sense of the piece at the outset. Before sharing this scene the following week, I essentially changed the scene completely, creating more of a dialogue at the beginning to ease into the scene and then slowly interjecting lyrics of songs that led to a montage of songs. The crescendo that we hopefully achieved was through the rhythm of the words being interjected at a consistent pace by every performer.
Yet as the scene was staged by integrating the audience into the circle we created to try and replicate the atmosphere of a therapy style session, the characters needed to be more relatable to the audience and less extreme if this is the style that we are going to maintain. However, experimenting with the idea of staging our performance as a promenade would mean that the audience would see this scene from another perspective; observing in rather than being included. Thus this would allow the scene to be more effective in terms of challenging the audience to observe from an outsider and listen to the words of the piece rather than being caught up in the surrealism of this scene if they were included in the circle, as our objective would be lost.
Works cited:
Kuenzil, Rudolf (2006) Dada, London: Phaidon Press Ltd.
Shaffer, Smith (2014) AZ Lyrics, Online: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/pitbull/givemeeverything.html (accessed: 31 March 2014).
