Until yesterday a lot of our meetings have involved discussions about our ideas, but very little practical devising. One of the first decisions we made in our devising process was that we were going to use various forms of text, such as speeches, monologues, lyrics and poems and re-contextualise them. Our first task therefore was to individually seek out texts that we could use as stimuli in our workshops.

Unsurprisingly a lot of the texts that we bought in had linking themes. Ideas such as power, beauty, and dreams came up a number of times, and when analysed outside of their original context, a lot of these texts had underlying themes of feminism, though only a few of us had actively sought to bring that topic in for discussion.

Though we have work shopped one other idea before, based on Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, the result of that session was a scene that we do not see ourselves using in our performance, though some of the elements of it may find there way into the final piece at some point.

The result of Fridays session however, was much more promising. The workshop involved us playing with one of Marilyn Monroe’s speeches about natural beauty. We have been playing with the idea of adding a multi-media element to this particular scene, while exploring a feministic take on the opinion Marilyn was expressing on beauty and sexuality in society. While I do not want to divulge too much information on the scene itself so as not to give too much away before the performance, I am excited to say that that workshop has set the ball rolling for what we hope will be a very exciting piece of work.

Image taken by Lizzy Hayes, 2014

From the first company meeting it became apparent that each member of our company has experienced successful and enjoyable devised work, created using a collaborative workshop process, and we were all keen to continue in that vein.

We were all aware however that these previous projects had many differences to the project our company was about to embark on. Previous projects were often smaller, and involved fewer people, meaning that only three or four people had to make the artistic decisions, not eight or nine. It soon became clear therefore that in order for us to create a good, strong company that could produce art of a good quality we would need to allocate jobs to each member of the company. This by no means renders us a company under a dictatorship, but instead that the ideas that we come up with as a collective can be filtered through a hierarchy of decision makers.

Having stated near the beginning of our process that I was interested in looking into how the theatre company would be run from “back stage”, and all of the admin and rights involved it seemed appropriate that I should be allocated as producer of Hand Me Down Theatre.

From day one the experience has already been a massive learning curve. I have never individually produced a whole show before, though thinking about it, I have helped in producing many of the shows or pieces I have been involved with in the past…I just wasn’t aware at the time that the jobs I was doing came under the title of “producing”.
One of the first things I did once allocated as the producer was borrow “So You Want To Be A Theatre Producer?” by James Seabright. The contents page alone opened my eyes to the wide range of responsibilites that I am taking on, but the prospect of learning about these areas of the theatre in more depth actually quite excited me. Bring on the next three months I say!