The theme that was the main focus of the piece was domestic abuse; it was also one of the starting points from where our devising process started. “Devised theatre can start from anything. It is determined and defined by a group of people who set up an initial framework or structure to experiment with ideas”(Oddey, 1994, p 1 ) Not only has domestic abuse become a political issue within society and media, it is also a socially tabooed subject which people choose to be oblivious to as it an emotional subject to discuss. The other themes which ran through the performance were issues of guilt and blame, showing an audience that it is so easy for you to blame someone else if you don’t know anything about the situation, but also allowing the audience to question what they would have done if they had been in the situation themselves as either the woman or a member of the community. The guilt and blame was evident in the performance by the ensemble being manipulated by guilt and the urge to conform to join into ensemble 1. From an outside perspective, looking in on the woman’s life the over consuming love has been turned over into something more sadistic and heart-wrenching to watch.
“The creating of theatre is a collaborative process, requiring the active responsibility of all those involved ” (Dennis, 1995, page 71)The shared experience started from the beginning of the devising process in the R stage as we all collectively developed what we believed to be a part of the women by bringing in items which we thought belonged to her. This began the devising process as a group this journey went through to the final performance where as the community our characters all were looking to blame someone. As a whole everyone decided to blame Dan for the disappearance of the missing women but to Dan he may have just not been drawn into joining the community for ensemble1, therefore leaving himself excluded from the community and becoming the only person at the time for the community to blame. This blame then shifted when the woman’s possessions are taken by Andy’s character and the community now want to know what is happening, this is evident by Dan’s character also analysing the situation and confronting Andy in their duet. Lloyd Newson asks himself the same questions when devising work with his performers, “What are they/we trying to communicate?”(www.Dv8.co.uk) this can be answered by the entire ensemble as we all felt that the theme of domestic abuse was one which needed addressing in a sensitive and poignant way.
The transition from the studio to the performance space was at first quite over whelming as the shape of the space was different, therefore changes had to be made to the performance, but this included adjusting ourselves to fit the space and did not require us to change the devised work as we had been aware and cautious during the devising process that the theatre space would be different and would require us to make mental and physical changes when it came to working in the new space. However in the new space, we had to tackle technical issues and had to be aware of lighting rigs and lamps being placed in the performance space, this required us as an ensemble to be collectively aware of what was around us, including the furniture. We had to adjust ourselves so we had enough space to work in, especially in ensemble 2 as we required significantly more room for the partner work. Our characters had to become more open to performance changes which were not an issue during the Score and Validate stages of RSVP as we were working in the studios.
A weakness that developed when moving into the theatre space was keeping the periphery alive whilst we were not in the centre of the space. During the first and second show this was an obvious problem to us all and for the third show we all developed our characters further by developing a character gesture which became stronger and more intent throughout the whole performance. This gesture added to the heightened emotion and was developed through the warm up. The warm up became longer and more focused once we had moved into the theatre space, the warm up built our breathing exercises, which aided us to get into our characters emotions and thinking and built our awareness. Dennis says that “breath will take an actor to the action, and will dictate how an actor will move only when the body is at its maximum awareness and responsiveness” (Dennis, 1995, page 110) The warm up also focussed on the building of a character and finding that emotion that is needed to work carefully and for a heightened emotional exchange between performer and audience.
The actor informs through his ‘physicality.’ Lights go up, the actor takes the space and is perceived by the audience, and theatre begins. A dramatic moment has been created and a response in the audience is imminent. Communication has begun. (Dennis, 1995, page 8)
A clear example of this happening is the very beginning of the performance where Sarah, Annette and Huma enter, their body language and speech is very natural as they all ask ‘Where is she,’ then the movement of the pedestrian gestures starts as they recite text, this is unnatural to a viewing audience so they straight away have some response, whether it is a negative or positive response comes down to whether they understand what is happening or if they decode something more from this section in a different interpretation. The space felt a comfortable move for us as a group as we were all confident in working in this space and this aided the work to develop that bit further.
As an ensemble, majority of the group felt the first two shows didn’t convey much emotion that the audience and each other could respond to, where as others felt the first two shows ran more smoother, showing that every persons gets something different out of a performance and each person is an individual and will feel different to other people as their characters may have fulfilled different needs and experienced different insights during the performance. Westergaard states that ‘Groups are complex. They are composed of a number of individuals, each with unique qualities, skills, personalities, experiences, expectations, insights and needs’. (Westergaard, 2009, pg 116). Throughout the performance you could see characters building and growing in their entirety, different emotions were sensed from my character to others therefore my character wanting to comfort others would be different every performance as it would be a different person and they would be feeling something different to the show before. This shows that “no two performances are exactly identical.” (Oida and Marshall, 1997, p 33). For the first show my character felt sorry for Andy’s character being pushed away from everyone as my character felt that he didn’t realise that the over consuming love had become suffocating and unbearable. Domestic abuse may start with physical abuse but then “He tries to make up for the brutal incident by showering the victim with gifts and affection.” (www.pattiaustin.com) The false gestures of love become a cover-up in our performance for something more underlying and cruel and from an audiences perspective I think the situation may look compulsive, as a result my character in the second and third show become angry towards Andy’s character and at one point towards the end of the performance when Andy was sitting near me, I felt the urge to want to hurt him back and make him understand what he had done to drive the woman to run away. Having the audience present gave the situation a different feeling, as if there were more people reading the diary extracts with us and watching what was unfolding. The character development for us all gave each character a different style of vulnerability and from an audiences perspective, Dawn’s character was the most vulnerable as she gave into Andy’s persistence by taking his hand, the vicious cycle of domestic abuse could start again with another woman now the missing woman had gone, but now the community had discovered Andy’s background they were reluctant to let Dawn go. I think the RSVP model did continue up until the last performance as our characters were kept alive and interactive with not only the other performers but the audience as well, the performers had to stay spatially aware at all times and their movement and reactions always had to have an intention, be committed and have a driving force behind the emotion. This made the piece real and gave the audience more to decode as they were watching and reading the performance and gave strength to the issues and themes we were addressing.
Bibliography
Dennis, A. (1995) The Articulate Body: The physical training of an actor. London: Nick Hern Books
Murray, S and Keefe, J. (2007) Physical Theatre: a critical introduction. London: Routledge.
Oddey,A. Devising Theatre: A practical and theoretical handbook. London Routledge 1994
Oida, Y. and Marshall, L. (1997) The Invisible Actor. London: Methuen.
Westergaard, J. Effective Group Working with Young People. (2009). Open University Press.
http://pattiaustin.com/the-vicious-cycle-of-domestic-violence (accessed 25/4/10)
http://www.dv8.co.uk/about_dv8/interview_in_conversation_with_jo_butterworth (accessed 25/4/10)
Lauren Walker 0803093
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