Collaborative Draft 2

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.

Practicing

Our devising group tried to run through all of the scenes from top to bottom and figure out if our plot really makes sense. We found our script pretty solid, but thought that other than our choice of wording and lighting, there was something big missing. When doing this, we realized that our play didn’t give the audience something to follow, it was merely a performance that could only really be watched and most likely lead the audience to be confused in regards to the plays purpose. Our resolution to this problem was to figure out what character this play revolved around. By analyzing our script, we decided it revolved around the character Sara. Sara’s character originally was addressed as a women who had been “cheating” on her husband, and recently got caught. This was a well structured character description, but it lacked substance. Why did Sara “cheat” on her husband? This is the question we sought to answer through description of Sara and her relationships amongst characters for the remainder of the script.

In order to answer the question of why Sara cheated on her husband, our group:

• Created a relationship between Sara and Marcus where it was clear that Marcus saw Sara as strictly platonic, but Sarah saw Marcus as much more.
• Explained that Steve is an alcoholic who never is really around for Sara.
• Gave a monologue to Sara so she could explain her longing for a relationship like the one Marcus and his wife, Natalie, has.
• Monologue at end of last scene to allow Sara to express final thoughts on the matter of relationships previously addressed in the play.

By doing so, the answer to why Sara “cheated” on her husband was because she longed for a relationship like Marcus and Natalie’s and specifically, a man like Marcus who is there for her, unlike Steve who is usually drunk and at bars.

Reflection of the performance and feedback received by audience

The acting itself was something I was fairly impressed with amongst my peers. Thankfully, the level at which our acting is at is fairly equal and leveled in regards to how we take up the stage with our voice, body, and overall expression of character. Though the lines that had been written specifically in the play were not recited word for word, it allowed each actor to have a general understanding of where the performance was going or needed to go (meaning the scenes were able to still flow smoothly). It is interesting how comfortable some of the actors are at improvising lines. Because of this skill I witnessed amongst my peers, I believe that it allowed for the reciprocation of said skill amongst me and the rest of the actors. I believe that I was comfortable and able to keep some scenes moving fluently because of my background experience in improve performance.

As stated before, the ability to flow through the script without reciting word for word was very successful in this devising group project. That being said, the lighting and music cues should have had more structure and preciseness. Next time, an exact run-through of when lights come on and off and when music turns up and down should be given to the light “manager”. This way, there is no confusion of when these timings are supposed to happen, less of a guess and check.

The devising group for A Peculiar Type of Love should have decided to have filmed at a further back location. As nice as it would be and was to see close up facial expression, it costed the group to lose the lighting that signified scene changes. An example is in scene 2 when Sara and Marcus are on the phone with each other in two operate locations. The lighting would have been important to have to show the different locations, but it was less recognizable because of the constant panning to opposite sides of the stage.

The last aspect of this devising project that should be fixed if to do this or another performance again, is the stage furniture. Next time, there should be a list of what is needed for each scene. It was almost a last minute struggle on the day of filming to find and figure out what was to be used for each scene. Being a black box, as talked about in class, it is hard to fit the furniture in the room that is used for furniture. Personally, I tend to prefer a black box over a proscenium stage so this problem in particular is less of a drastic downside in my eyes.

The final filming of A Peculiar Type of Love had its ups and downs. Even though the technical cues and furniture transitions could have been practiced and more precise, the acting and chemistry amongst the actors made the performance run smoothly. This devising project has been a great experience and opened my eyes to accepting ideas of others more openly and freely as well as helped with accepting the reality of time crunch in “showbiz” and really just everyday life. I think the message of the play came through strongly. This being that 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.