Blog Notes from Week 3

Performance Ideas

Find dramatic moments to happen over your 1-hour period.

Props List.

Scripts.

Multimedia Plans.

• Equipment
• Idea
• Application

Immersive Theatre Company Research

Punchdrunk plus on more (from the list on MultiBRIT)

Immersive Theatre Companies

YouMeBumBumTrain

Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd created the company back in 2004 - an audience of one, a cast of hundreds. You have to be game, but not necessarily brave.
http://bumbumtrain.co.uk 

Artichoke

Artichoke are a creative company who help produce large scale public theatre and art - including the Sultan’s Elephant.
http://www.artichoke.uk.com/

66 Minutes

The production of Lebanese director Lucien Bourjeily, ‘66 Minutes’ is an interactive production in which the audience are placed as a group of tourists visiting the Syrian capital only to be arrested by the Syrian secret service.

Punchdrunk

Punchdrunk, created by Felix Barrett, have been creating innovative, immersive theatre, often in collaboration with major artistic companies such as the National Theatre and ENO, and film maker Adam Curtis, since 2000.
www.punchdrunk.org.uk

dreamthinkspeak

Tristan Sharps founded this company in 1999. A Brighton based group which specialises in site-responsive productions.
www.dreamthinkspeak.com

Secret Cinema

They create large-scale cultural experiences in abandoned spaces, fusing film, music, theatre and installations. Audiences explore ultra-immersive worlds where fiction and reality blur.

http://www.secretcinema.org/

Audience is the storyteller!

The audience is left free to roam the multiple rooms of intricately designed, theatrically lit stage sets. Creating hazy moments of sensory spectacle,

They can explore empty rooms, rummage in draws, read notes, letters and books. A phone booth that actually works?

Audience will be inside the space, walking through site-specific installations, choosing what scenes to see, changing and elaborating the text, creating movements and physically responding to actions to create site-responsive theatre. The performance will never be the same.

Combining text, movement, video, objects, sound, lights and visuals, we aim for a ‘total experience’, for ‘transportation performances’ that result in rendering powerful emotions and eye-opening adventures.

Immersive Theatre

Immersive Theatre is all about creating participative theatre experiences in which audience members give up their “observer’’ status to become co-actors and co-creators of the narrative and of the storytelling process. Our audience members are action wise performers who direct the story by taking decisions, choosing from infinite options and negotiating the process.

‘Immersive theatre’ has shifted the spotlight toward experiential design-led performance, in which the audience is the centre of the action. This proliferation of immersive performance work demonstrates a public appetite for hedonistic theatrical thrills, where the audience is offered an ‘authentic’ experience in a realistic staged environment.

1984 Rules of engagement

·     The audience must be dressed in boiler suits (or something cheaper, sash?)

·     The audience is given free reign to explore a massive set

·     The set engages multiple senses—sight, sound, smell, touch—and has an incredibly detailed design

·     The set must be large enough to get lost in or to feel totally alone at moments

·     The set lighting is typically quite dark with deliberate, staged pockets of light

Interesting Punchdrunk article.

http://behindawhitemask.tumblr.com/post/26321729941/sleep-no-more-as-social-experiment

How Do I Critically Evaluate Something?

How Do I Critically Evaluate Something?

Critically evaluating something means looking at all sources and evidence supporting an idea, both primary and secondary sources and on weight of the evidence, come to a conclusion. Your answer should totally explore the argument.

Evaluating your work

An evaluation is a piece of writing where you look at your project as a whole and discuss its successes and weaknesses. This can help others understand what you were trying to achieve. You need to be honest and use appropriate theatrical language. Evaluating your work is really important for getting the upper marks.

Evaluation Tips

1.     Evaluate using your past knowledge that you have accumulated on the course so far.

2.     Give your opinions and back them up!!!

3.     Add in extra research to broaden your knowledge.

4.     Use appropriate theatrical language.

5.     Evaluating your experiences and learning informs future progress.

6.     Include, copies of tutor observations, peer-observations, self-evaluations and feedback through the process.

7.     Showing a thorough and sophisticated understanding of the tasks and processes can guarantee top grades!

Evaluating your early work

·      What was the theme for the project?

·      How have you developed your ideas? How did your work change through the project?

·      How much reference material did you find? Do you think you should have done more or less?

·      What artists, companies or genres have you looked at to help and inspire you?

·      What materials, tools and techniques did these artists use?

·      How have your skills developed during the project?

·      Are there any aspects of your studies that you wish you had explored further?

Evaluating Rehearsals

·      Evaluate the rehearsal process

·      Regularly monitor your own progress and contributions.

·      What worked well?

·      What insights have you had?

Evaluating your final piece

·      You also need to evaluate your final piece. You should reference relevant work from your preparatory studies.

·      How have you used formal elements such as line, tone, colour and shape?

·      What materials did you use, and why? Did they work successfully?

·      What meaning and messages did you want to convey and were you successful?

·      Are you happy with your final piece? Are there any elements you like in particular?

·      Is there anything you would change? Why?

When you're evaluating your work, don't forget to say why and how you worked in a certain way.

 

Starter sentences and useful vocab

When we started devised practical work our teacher showed us... (Give details of the stimulus)

Vocab: image, poem, speech, appeal, news article, script, extract etc.

Our teacher asked us to...(Give details about what your teacher asked you to do)

Vocab:  short scenes, narration, titles, captions.

The topics/issues/themes were...

(Give brief details about what ideas your group had in relation to the topic/theme/issue)

Vocab: scenario, atmosphere, characters, roles, etc.

My first task was to...

(Give details about what you did, what strategies and elements you used and your intentions)

Vocab: characters, split stage, action/plot/content, contrasts, levels, movement/mime/gesture, conventions, spoken language etc.

The performance of …....influenced our devised piece in many ways

(Give brief details of what you saw and where. What influenced you? eg style, how characters were developed, set. How and where you decided to use the ideas in your own work)

Our chosen practitioner was.....

Vocab: style, structure, naturalism, episodic

We were asked us to think about...

(Give details of how your teacher asked you to think about your work)

Vocab: development of our work into... scene(s), character (characterisation), using symbols, cross-cutting, contrasts, lighting, marking the moment etc.

We felt, at this point, that...

(Give details of what decisions were taken, and why)

Vocab: plot (storyline), setting/situation, natural, naturalistic, narrator/narration, mime, voice-over, split-stage, levels, close or distant, sound and silence, freeze, flashback, cross cutting, costume, props, set, staying in role, focus, thought track, monologue, dialogue.

The difficult aspect of the work was...

(Give details of difficulties such as timing, maintaining characterisation, changing roles, staging certain sequences etc)

My role was communicated by...

(Give details of posture, expression, body language, voice etc with reference to a dramatic sequence in the work)

Staging our work we...

(Give details of acting area, proxemics, sightlines for audience, use of objects / set in performance)

Vocab: upstage, downstage, centre stage, language register, pace, timing, tension, structure, movement, stillness.

We discussed what technical elements we should use

(Give details of set/props, lighting, music/sound, costume/makeup)

Vocab: period, colour, fabric, garments, projected image, gobo, spot, black-out, fade-up/down, symbolic, intensity, atmosphere, location.

Performance

Our audience said that...

(Give some idea about the feedback you got from other people)

Vocab: Proxemics, audibility (whether you could be heard), masking (if someone blocks off someone else so they can't be seen), role, moving, characterisation, believability, impact, etc.