Collaborative Draft 1

Collaborative Theater Project

Olivia Williamson (HL)

1. My personal context

My strengths within the devising process

When in the creative process, I am able to close my eyes and see this whole new world setup right in front of me. The way the light will hit the actors face and the color of his button down shirt are created by this imagination of mine that lets loose when inspired. Personally, a lot of inspiration is pulled from my experiences in life in regards to what details have made me feel a certain emotion led me to a specific expression. The theater course has allowed me to understand that some of these experiences are universal amongst peoples. When the audience sees dark green lights, they may feel scared. When the audience sees bright blue lights, they may feel at ease.

When this new world is created within my head, I then am able to write it in words. This, I believe happens to be a strength of mine and can benefit my ensemble as well, being able to right an outline of the script and create the base of our storyline for our collaborative theater project.

Professional Company: Reckless Sleepers

After an intriguing lesson in theater class, I decided to further my knowledge on the prior discussion about the vast amount of devising companies. The professional devising company I came across was Reckless Sleepers.

The company decided to do this performance where about 15 women sawed wooden chairs that they were sitting on. The video I watched of this was about 10 minutes long and showed the women doing this performance in various locations. For some reason, even though the idea explained in words seems quite simple, this performance was undeniably intriguing. The women kept a center of gravity revolving around the chair even though they were falling all over the place. Nonetheless, they still appeared poise and mannered as well as strong, fierce. There were constant emotional outbursts from the women within the middle of the performance. At the end of the performance, the women stood up with the same strong look on their faces. No doubt, these women  managed to send a passionate, bold message to their audience. I found this very impressive because their was so much emotion felt by the audience by their performance even though the reason as to why they were cutting and falling of chairs was unknown. This way of expression reminded me heavily of Stanislavski and how his form of directing allowed or his audiences to feel so moved by his characters. For this reason, I found it important to study Stanislavski a bit further.

My experience of Konstantin Stanislavski directing style

“Our demands are simple, normal, and therefore they are difficult to satisfy. All we ask is that an actor on the stage live in accordance with natural laws.”

Konstantin Stanislavski (Jan 1862-August, 1938), born in moscow, Russia, was an actor, director, producer, and inventor of several acting methods. Stanislavski’s famous most method is known as the Stanislavski system. This system is as follows: when an actor goes on stage, he is not starting a new action or life, but continuing it from prior circumstances. It is with this way that realism can be embedded throughout the performance. Stanislavski's method is something I want to incorporate into the collaborative theater project.

B. Formation of group and exploration of the starting point

The formation of our ensemble was dictated by our teacher. All Ib year one were to work together for this collaborative theater project. For this collaborative project I will be working with:

• Me (Olivia)
• Linda: a great character actor, great improvisational skills.
• Ray: Clear voice and projects well on stage, can respond to the emotions of other actors on stage well.
• Willjam: great improvisational skills, lost of experience with playing naturalistic characters.

The four of us will be sharing the roles of writing, directing, and blocking, etc., but are aware of our individual strengths and will each work on specific aspects more dominantly throughout the collaborative.

The inspiration for our collaborative group project titled, Love is Complicated is derived from the stimulus, the painting the hole on the wall. We gathered our information and ideas about the theme of the play by recalling what we see and what we think of the art work.

The very first thing that we realized/noticed about the painting is the distinctive red balloon. Obviously the balloon used to belong to the human figure on the left side and now the balloon is gone, we can tell this by looking at how the hand of the “human” is trying to reach for the balloon. Also the balloon has a shape of a heart, which is possibly referring to love. Combining love and the sense of distance/abandon, we’ve decided that our topic will be about the sad reality of love.

This piece has allowed the members of our group to explores themes of the following:

• The longing for love
• Heartbreak
• Unfaithfulness
• Betrayal
• Love is complicated
• Devotion

Audience: teenagers, adults, and old people.

Why is the story important?

This story is important to us because it is another way to perform our reality of relationships. Also, it is anyway to express our feelings about love, betrayal, sadness, and suspect. Telling the stories of relationships from the third person point of view is very interesting too. Feelings and thoughts that we would not be able to understand in reality could be expressed and found theater.

Target Audience

The ideal audience for our piece would be anyone who has began to experience or has experienced love. Our piece does touch upon some heavy topics so for this reason young adults and up are more likely to understand the message behind the performance.

Intentions

love is complicated. Sometimes things don't change in love even when painful, sometimes things don't make sense, and sometimes people may come to their senses about certain things. That's life and that's love.

• A way to perform some type of reality of relationships.
• Express our groups  feelings about love, betrayal, sadness, and suspect.
• Telling the stories of these relationships from the third person point of view is very intriguing for our group as the feelings and thoughts that we have on this matter of love would not be able to be expressed to its fullest potential if not for theater.