An initial idea within the group was to produce a performance that was built up from verbatim. We all agreed we wanted the piece to be relatively contemporary but include text that doesn’t restrict our audience to the younger age; we very much want to produce a performance that invites a wide range of audiences. Also the use of multimedia and live music and acoustics was something we would like to play with in rehearsals and see if we can incorporate into our work. Whether it is speeches, monologues, poems, or songs, we have decided to research well-known texts and subvert the meaning of them: “more and more artists interpret, reproduce, re-exhibit, or use works made by others” (Bourriaud 2002, p.1). We have begun by thinking how to perform these texts out of context and change how they were originally perceived; in a way the audience wouldn’t necessarily recognise.
I decided to start my research with some of the speeches that Hitler gave to the German nation. I looked at some of his writing from the Reichstag and then found a speech from January 1941 that he gave to Germany. In terms of performance, my instant thoughts were to make his speech child-like. Perhaps performing the speech on a playground set whilst skipping with a rope making the speech into a childish rhythm or a rhyme. Another idea I had was to use multimedia for this speech by displaying a visual recording or an audio recording of a child speaking the text. This completely takes away all meaning from the words, and something that was initially controlling and threatening becomes humorous and lovable; the exact opposite to how it should be heard.
The second speech I chose is from Marilyn Monroe about glamour, femininity and sexuality. My thoughts for this one turned to how the speech would be interpreted if a male spoke the text. Preferably read in an informal/conversational manner, a male in this persona would come across very different to a female anyway and this would be a complete contradiction to what Marilyn Monroe was speaking about. Initial thoughts are that Andy, our production and stage manager could either pre-record or perform this speech through live feeding from the technician box, showing not only his dominance from controlling the show, but also highlighting that he is the only male in our group.
Many contemporary theatre companies have influenced our initial ideas, one being Tim Etchells Forced Entertainment. A lot of their work is based around text including Speak Bitterness (1994) which saw the performers making confessions from text written in sheets of paper. Their work is “primarily text based and that it eschewed the fast-paced, physical and collage structures” (Etchells 1999, p.179). This is also something we wish to achieve: a slick production that uses different forms of performance made up of a bricolage of well known texts.
Ours Was the Fen Country by Still House was performed at the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre on 6th February 2014. Director Dan Canham includes physical theatre and the use of sound throughout his work and this performance saw both of these elements. The piece was made up of verbatim from the people that lived in the Fens, and this was either spoken by the performers or played out through speakers on stage. This overlapped with different melodies that related to what they were saying or how the performers viewed their personalities and characteristics as they were interviewed. The physical theatre aspect was to translate the words in different means as their bodies moved to the words in various shapes and paces. For example, they stomped their feet to the rhythm of a person’s voice creating an overpowering beat whilst we heard the interviewees voice underneath. This was quite an inspiring piece for our group to watch and to hear about in the post-show discussion. They discussed their initial intentions and their rehearsal process which was useful, and as their piece was devised from verbatim it was relevant to our group as we are using the same concept and hope to achieve a unique and intricate performance as they did.
Work cited:
Bourriaud, Nicolas (2002) Postproduction, New York: Lukas & Sternberg.
Etchells, Tim (1999) Certain Fragments, Oxon: Routledge.