As we began to speculate about what kind of theatre we, as a company wanted to produce, the irony was that we almost unanimously decided that we did not want to devise a piece of theatre. Yet when we thought of analysing notorious monologues from plays, song lyrics and speeches, we developed the concept of exploring the power of the emotive word from these texts rather than the context in which they were written. Through doing this we hope to create new perceptions and interpretations of the extracts of text, that both contrast with the context of the speeches as well as each other.

What I mean by contrasting with each other is choosing monologues/lyrics/speeches that both link with each other no matter which century they were written in, disregarding the context and often the physicality of the text, and rather focusing on the tone that the text creates. This ‘tone’ that we are hoping to set up can be the tone that the text evokes, or rather new tones that we hope to create that may not be apparent when first heard in their familiar context, yet we hope to discover new ways that they can be interpreted. We hope to discover these through exploring different issues such as fame, freedom, sexuality etc that altogether create new dynamics of perceptions, challenging our audience as well as ourselves.

The conclusion to the beginning chapter of our process brought us to the decision that we would create a piece of devised theatre that uses fragmented pieces of text that would eventually be ‘glued together’ to create a new piece of theatre that is essentially verbatim. This ‘verbatim’ style theatre is something that I have been fortunate enough to see live this past couple of weeks at the LPAC. We have drawn inspiration firstly from Michael Pinchbeck’s performance The Trilogy , performed January 30th 2014, which  used texts of William Shakespeare’s to incorporate into his performance along with the writer Serge Gainsbourg’s album ‘Histoire de Melody Nelson’. These elements, although both contrasting, I felt worked well together as the exploration of the lyrics of Gainsbourg’s song and how they came to be written took the song completely out of context and created new perceptions for the audience, something I hope our company will achieve. Secondly Dan Canham’s performance Ours Was the Fen Country,  performed February 6th 2014 used elements such as dance for transitions as well as physically expressing the dialogue that was being spoken through the tempo of speech, all things that would be interesting to explore within our company. Our biggest challenge will be whether it is possible to create new perceptions of a text’s meaning when taken out of context, and whether these perceptions can in fact be understood by an audience by hopefully eradicating any preconceptions of the text in hand.