The Performance

Nerves were extremely high last night before the Colab 'Pub Crawl'. We were well aware that our 3 pieces were unusual to say the least and that the audience may be made up of unsuspecting pub-goers who haven't bought into the performance. 
It started with our piece using the Wasted text. Unfortunately this was a tiny, cottage-like pub in the back streets of Greenwich. While it was great that it was packed with people, we had to scale down the piece to avoid injury!

Our 'Wasted' monologue, movement and music piece.

It must have been a success as we were asked to repeat it at the next pub! This had a fantastic space and audience.

The fantastic band in the Trafalgar
before our performance.

As a group we were more committed to the piece this time round and it made it much more effective. We decided not to perform the aggressive pub scene here. Our decision to do the comedic '50 Shades' piece was the right one. The audience were laughing throughout and I feel that the soundscape really captured their interest.

Our excited group outside the second pub!

The final venue, the Admiral Hardy was the busiest, loudest pub of the night. To our surprise, our opening soundscapes drew people in and both pieces held the audience's attention. We had planned to be scattered around the venue during our pub scene piece but this proved impossible on the night. It still worked, and we were pleased to be able to keep  together with all the distractions of a lively London pub!

My attempts at gauging the audience reactions were interesting. The most effective, thought provoking piece was 'Wasted'. I was really happy at this as we managed to combine music, acting and music to convey emotions, so we wanted to leave an impression. The '50 Shades' was seen as the funniest. I have to confess that a rather common reaction to our performances was the line "well that was weird". Fellow instrumentalists were also confused as to how I'd ended up in such a diverse project with musical theatre students!

I couldn't have asked for a better night and I loved being able to push myself as a performer, as well as an instrumentalist. Fantastic week.

Day Four

I was extremely nervous this morning as we have one day left to get all 3 performances ready. Not only ready, they have to entertain audiences in London pubs, who haven't necessarily bought into our performance.

We started the day with warm up games for quick reactions before ensuring the pub piece was fast paced and interesting.

We spent an hour on Wasted. I had previously been experimenting with basing melodies on modal harmony as I thought it would emphasise the single melodic line nature of the piece. The unusual modal colour would also contrast with the modern topic and style. We still kept the music simple, the saxophone emerged after the piece begun, I took over on the flute and we came together for the stronger ending. A violin provided either a bass or melodic line as needed.
The most challenging aspect was staying involved and moving while playing, especially when playing with others. I plan to use this communicative skill in my day to day playing. We worked on creating an interesting shape as a group and being braver with our movements.

We discussed what we want to say in the 50 Shades piece and why. These are important questions in every type of performance, not just Colab and theatre. We want to show real people and their views on culture, rather than making jokes about a film. This led to a hectic 10 minutes interviewing people around the King Charles Court building. 

We decided we were being too obvious and giving too much too soon. Instead we used the interviews; we exaggerated characters and had views ranging from 'It's disgusting' to 'I don't care' and 'love it all'. We tried to use the affectations and words of the real people. I used a glass to create a percussive tone and keep the fast pace. 

We also used ordinary words in the soundscape of grey objects to a heavy beat. We used the books for another sound quality. The entire piece ends with a sung chord on '50 shades of' but we still don't use the word 'grey', we just go into reading our books. There is a lot to be said for toning down a piece. It is so much more effective and funny for being based on recognisable characters and leaving somethings unsaid.

The group on our way to the
performance spaces (the pubs!)

After a long and busy morning we decided to look at the spaces for this evening's performance. The first pub, the Cutty Sark is where we will be performing Wasted, and is extremely limited in space. We know we will have to adapt the pieces for the spaces. The final pub, the Admiral Hardy, is ideal for the two lighter pieces. 

Day Three

We started with movement and acting warm ups. Again, not something I'm used to as a musician but I really enjoyed getting involved! This involved using imagination to transform the room into something crazy, such as candy floss, and playing off against each other. I thought the most useful aspect of these exercises was heightening the response, taking our actions to the extremes. This was loosely based on a Stella Adler workshop style and I think it would be relevant to all performers, not just actors. 

The improvising exercises were especially effective and getting us all to work together and come up with a lot of ideas.

One of the dancers in the group decided to lead a movement workshop, focusing on feeling emotions and letting the whole body move to it. We then came together to move in a group This was influenced by the movement work on monday, in which we followed one another's intentions. We decided we could use this movement and music to enhance text. We chose Wasted, written by a Lewisham based writer on current issues faced by many in today's society. The extract has a strong rhythm and emotive language that we feel we can heighten. The emotions we will use are helplessness, anger, euphoria and feeling out of control.

We are thinking about moving the narrator to the centre of the group, to give the impression that our movements an expression of their emotions. Tomorrow we will work at staging and creating specific movements for emotive words or strong rhythms. I feel that the simple melodic lines work well. We decided to use a tenor saxophone for the female voice and a flute for the male to create a contrast in pitch and ensure the words are understood.

In the afternoon we explored different characters for our pub scene using conversations and hot seating. The different scenarios that we created mainly used current issues but it was lacking a good pace once the soundscape finishes. We worked on improving the pace of the piece using short snippets of conversation. This did make me a little more confident as a non-actor and the longer conversations were beginning to lose focus. I was pleased with the edit as the rhythm now fits the style of our soundscape that has a really strong beat.

Our third and final piece is based on people's different reactions to the book 50 Shades of Grey, as the film is coming out this weekend. Again we use a soundscape of different words and sounds related to the topic and try to move with the soundscape.

We staged this really effectively with striking, personal monologues from some members of the group however we felt that the end result was cringey. By moving away from the original comedic aspect we had discussed, the dramatisation was taking away from the actual content. 

Tomorrow we will look at reworking this piece. The Wasted performance is becoming really powerful as we are working well together and using simple music to enhance emotions. The Pub scene also has a nice pulse and rhythmic, light-hearted soundscape. Hopefully we can get all 3 pieces performance ready!

Day Two

Today we began to discuss creating music where all of us could get involved, rather than a single instrumentalist.

Our hectic brainstorm of what sounds we have available: 
mainly instruments, voices and found percussion.

This led to a soundscape, loosely based on our idea of setting a piece in a pub.

Other members of my group created my character,
using an adaptation of the game 'consequences'.

We then moved on to performing some really short memorised monologues to each other, playing games where we had to make eye contact with everyone in the room. When performing as a flautist I would never aim to do this however it led to some really interesting thoughts on how to draw in an audience to the performance. 

Today I had to get over my fear of delivering monologues to actors pretty quickly! We soon moved on to creating many characters as a group before writing our own monologue for them.

We decided we liked the potential of internal monologues. We gave ourselves just five minutes to write an internal monologue of a character you might find sat in a pub before hot seating to develop these ideas.

In the afternoon we moved on to experiment with sound, pairing off to create a series of question and answers. This surprisingly worked best when I was in a group with an MT using a packet of crisps and a water bottle and a dancer on a drum! We just abandoned any inhibitions and bounced ideas of one another. When paired with another melodic instrument, we found ourselves trying to discuss ideas and interrupting the creativity. We then experimented with movement and sound conversations. I really enjoyed this new approach to creating musical ideas, even if we didn't find any material for our performance in this short session. 

Day One

Day one of this year's project was spent discussing what we want to create at the end of the project and we spent a long time brainstorming ideas. We started with a rough description of what we want to achieve

"create a number of short performances using spoken text, poetry and monologues while incorporating live music and some movement and physical expression work."

As a musician I am looking forward to spending the week trying to enhance the text using music, as well as experimenting with other art forms. However, as a classical musician with two left feet, yesterday's email telling us to wear clothes we can move around in and to be prepared for a physical theatre workshop was a little terrifying!

We began the day with some movement exercises. Shadowing in pairs and increasing the difficulty until we were all moving in a large group, copying each other's intentions and moving as one without words. This was an excellent start to the day for me, proving that as performers we can all communicate through movement and preventing me from spending the week intimidated by my lovely group of dancers and musical theatre students!

We returned to brainstorming and looked at other groups, such as DV8 who are doing similar style performances. Here are the ones I found most effective, we spent a lot of time dissecting what made each one so powerful and entertaining. 

  

A shot of us creating our short piece in the 10 minute slot!

I could see us spending a long time discussing ideas, so we decided to just split into small groups and create something completely disposable. We knew we wanted the end piece to be relevant so we ransacked newspapers to find topics. Our group decided to use an advert for a free bird feeder, using text from the paper then building up to the speaker's excitement for birds and the freedom they had. I played the flute to create bird imagery, with trills and fast motifs that build in pitch and tempo. The speaker and I also joined the dancers in bird like movements and experimenting with the newspapers themselves to create sound.

The afternoon was spent on workshops that, upon reflection, weren't directly suited to our final piece, which is to be performed in Greenwich pubs. We spent an hour using technology to experiment with vocal effects before a physical theatre workshop. Although these skills won't be venue appropriate they encouraged the whole group to be creative in new ways and to consider what effects we can create.

Some shots of the physical theatre workshop. Slightly terrifying but a lot of fun!

I found that today encouraged me to think about aspects of performance that I don't usually come across as a classical musician. Including movement, extremely active warmups and space. I was really impressed with how we worked with each other, there are already a lot of great ideas in the group.