On Friday we launched our brand new teaser trailer. We wanted to give our future audience a little video to show who we are as a company and what we are planning to do in the future, without giving too much away. Hopefully our new slick trailer will spark interest in future theatre goers if we continue to advertise it in the coming weeks. Nearer to the time we will be looking to make another trailer about our rehearsal process and the new show we are producing on May 29^th . Through giving some backstage information we will hopefully entice potential audiences. Social media has changed the way we market performances, and now people expect and want to see backstage images and previews of a company’s work. It seems audiences of today need more and more nudges before they view a piece of theatre. Film goers often need to see a trailer a few times to be reminded of a film they wish to see before they actually book a ticket, so film footage and images of rehearsal process in some ways act as a film trailer. Now it is possible if you ‘hashtag’ correctly to get your piece out there to a wider audience and potentially inspire theatre goers to visit who without Twitter, Facebook and Youtube would not know who your company are.

We also have a new logo launching today which has been created by a graphic designer. This new branding represents who we are as a company. Although it may be simple with clear lettering and a black theme, it looks as though ink has been splashed onto a page. As we are looking at changing text, this effectively works with our manifesto and company goals. Keep a look out for our trailer in the tab above and our new logo launching on Facebook

Link to Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HandMeDownTheatre2014

After having our initial meeting and playing with some ideas, we first looked at trying to find a theme for our performance. Do we want to challenge the concept of beauty, or will there be elements of War for instance. There were definitely certain links that bought our texts together; however, we decided it was best to start by looking at one text in particular. The most interesting thing we played around with in our session today was the idea of taking one line of a speech and trying to present it with different emotion. We began by choosing the line ‘I have a dream’ from Martin Luther King’s famous 1963 speech. Not only is it a well known text, but the first line is also a string of words that can be perceived in many other ways. Through playing with this one line we were able to test out performing it in a completely contrasting way. One person quoted it in a hysterical way, the next treated it like a passing thought. There is even a famous ABBA song that is entitled ‘I have a dream’.

In the video above you can see the line ‘I have a dream’ also begins the song, much like the line begins the speech. Through taking this one line we were able to play around and challenge preconceptions and in some ways allow the audience to question if the famous speech is really what inspired the performance that would be occurring, or was it an ABBA song. It’s all about taking something people can familiarise themselves with, even if it may ne in a different form to those sitting next to them and changing it to allow them to inevitably question this. It may not be something that will stick for our future performance but it opened our eyes into seeing that even by taking one line (even half a line) you can change the preconceptions through both vocal quality, imagery and conviction.