Tag: Alice Barnett

Within Retold theatre I had two roles, therefore must look back over the process of both to show my opinion of the success.

From a marketing point of view I was pleased with the feedback and response we got from our posters and flyers. I overheard many conversations where the theatre companies were being discussed and ours was frequently described by the posters “that one with all the eyes” and people knew which performance were speaking about from the description of our posters. People have commented on how interesting and intriguing our performance looked from our marketing approach, which was exactly our intention.

From the point of view of an actor, I always am of the mind that performance can have always have gone better, and there is never a place where improvements cannot be made. However, having said this I feel that the final show was the best performance of Cagebirds that we had ever done. The energy was the highest it had been, as was the focus. I think part of the reason for this was the introduction of the audience, and knowing it was our last show – but also the fact that we were improving with every time we worked on the piece.

Personally I feel my character developed greatly in the last few weeks, there were certain changes that opened up doors for my character and this then allowed me to experiment more with my character, such as the idea of making my character have a bit of a God complex, and make them self important, and truly believe that they can help and cure the other birds of their vices.  The more human attributes, and more logical thinking pattern of my character meant that I was able to understand the motives and needs of my character a lot more clearly, and realising the revolutionary stance of the character and making parallels with real world examples of this behaviour. I spent a lot of time watching speeches online and taking inspiration from many different places:

This video, although from a film, shows the quiet passion and depiction of power through using quieter tones and the change in emotion without the change in volume. I tried to emulate the same intense passion that this character has, for my character in reference to freedom and escaping the cage.

This speech however, shows the more loud and excited passion for freedom. Within the second video clip however the audience react to his speech giving him more buzz and support and confidence in what he saying, whereas within Cagebirds, the fact the birds are ignoring my attempts to widen their mind means sometimes it was hard to reach such a level at the beginning, but by the end of the process I felt like I had managed to combine the two approaches to make a convincing revolutionary influence within the cage.

I think personally my performance improved greatly as the rehearsals went on and I thoroughly enjoyed exploring my character, the play and the allegorical context of the performance. I was proud of the end result on performance day and hope that the audience enjoyed the show, and enjoyed reading these posts from our company!

 

When the process started we wanted to make sure it was clear to our audience that the actors they were seeing on stage were pretending to be birds. We wanted the line between human and bird to be very blurred and so we had to do a lot of research into our birds and a lot of work finding ways of amalgamating bird like mannerisms into our voices and bodies.

Elsam suggests that “…an audience may sometimes forgive less-than-brilliant acting, but if you speak too quietly and deny them access to the story, they’ll not forgive that.” (Elsam 2006, p.81), therefore even with the distortions we were considering adding to our performance to extenuate the bird like qualities we wanted the messages we were trying to show to be clear. We wanted the audience to still think about what they were hearing, and be able to gain – even a broad – feel for oppression and the idea of being trapped.

We knew that even when playing a human, in a naturalistic play you have to “…keep your voice interesting by varying the notes” (Elsam 2006, p.84) but we wanted to edit this process to make the performance more absurd. I did a lot of research into vocal performances, as I speak a lot throughout the play I wanted to make sure that my vocal work would have enough range to keep the audience interested. Patsy Rodenburg noted that we “…live in a society which places value on not showing passion or joy in debate or ideas. More and more, the voice’s tendency is to stay trapped in the throat and chest only.” (2002, p.93). The range within speech is so important to get across not only meaning in what the character is saying, but their emotion and subtext. We experimented with a lot of ways of saying particular lines, and it could change the feel of an entire section of the performance. Rodenburg said that “…range can also reflect emotional and intellectual excitement in a speaking voice. If we sound dull it is either because nothing is going on inside us intellectually or emotionally…” (2002, p.96), therefore I made sure that the internal monologue of my character never stopped and throughout the performance I was thinking of ways to escape, and thinking of ways to get the other birds to react to me and to escape with me.

Although this helped greatly and made my speeches a lot more interesting to listen to we still at the beginning wanted more absurdity in the speech patterns for the cast. Elsam notes that “Once you become aware of vocal inflection in speech, you can start to use inflection consciously.” (2006, p.85) We looked at playing with the intonation of words and going up or down with our voices where it didn’t follow the meaning. This also added to the idea of the characters not understanding what they are talking about as they are birds and are merely repeating things they have heard without any real idea of the consequences. For my bird we played around with repetitive sounds such as any time my character says “I” I would repeat it. Although this sounded more like a stutter, which could have suggested nervousness to our audience and we didn’t want this impression of my character. We also looked at making any lists of words, such as “endless, beautiful, complicated, useless…” or “…comfortable, satisfied, non-communicating, slave society…” really fast to imitate the pecking of a woodpecker. However we lost some meaning by doing this, and we also enjoyed the sounds of the words when they were slowed down, and to some lists, such as “delegation, investigation, confrontation” there were pleasant rhymes that we didn’t want to lose.

We then however decided as a contrasting element that my character would have a much more human like speech pattern.  We still worked on keeping my voice interesting, as you hear a lot of it during Cagebirds, but we started to do work more on the emotions behind the speech and the loud and soft tones, than playing too much with an absurd way of speaking. One of the main pieces of feedback I received during the process was to “go for it” and exaggerate what we were doing, this worked fantastically in rehearsals, and helped with a lot of other blocking once we saw how the other actors would react to my speeches when they were exaggerated. Rodenburg notes that “The other potential hindrance to the range of the voice is the speaker’s fear of being ‘over the top’, or sounding too committed to the text… And range is vocal colour.” (2002, p.97) I definitely felt this worry at first and, as Rodenburg put it, I had to “…not let the voice of restraint whisper in [my] ear to stop [my] vocal experimentation.” (2002, p.98) but once we saw the reaction from other members of the group this was a lot easier to achieve. We worked with the soft speeches being almost whispered and the angrier speeches being bellowed into the faces of the others actors, this process meant we were able to scale my performance to the level we (‘we’ being the director, assistant director and myself) wanted it once we had produced the right level of reaction from the actors.

When we were working on bodywork, this again started a lot more birdlike and then progressed into something more human. When researching woodpeckers there were many videos with the pecking movements and when they actually moved position it was always with sharp fast movements, with twitching of the head and flitting from place to place.

We looked at the tension in bodies and ways of moving that didn’t feel natural to us at first, I found that Elsam defines the physical attributes that create a personality “…are tension, height, openness, space (or rather use of space) and eye contact…” (2006, p.45). I then looked at each of these in relation to my character, and found a way of holding myself and moving that was indicative of a woodpecker. I worked on holding the tension in my shoulder back so that my chest was exposed and moving my neck with my eyes as they moved, rather than smooth movements. I also spent the entire performance on tip toes giving my legs tension and a fidgety urgent energy to my movements, and a sense of height, and a suggestion of self importance. The use of space was also an interesting variant within my character compared to the other birds, I needed to use a lot more of the space than they did and I needed to behave as if the space was a new and foreign environment but still command it in a confident way.

 

Works Cited:

Elsam, Paul (2006) Acting Characters, A & C Black Publishers Limited: London

Rodenburg, Patsy (2002) The Actor Speaks: Voice and the Performer, Palgrave MacMillian

According to Paul Elsam, within his book Acting Characters, “…as part of the planning stage of acting, you should comb through your script to work out which types of power your character possesses. “ (2006, p.41). Within our performance power is a strong idea that is constantly fought for, or against, and “…power is at the very heart of storytelling.” (Elsam 2006, p.37) Especially with my character of the Wild One, who spends the entire play fighting for freedom and fighting against the power of the Mistress and the cage. The distribution of power is also very interesting within our performance as there is a hierarchy within the cage itself, and even though my character has an effect on the birds they rarely interact with The Wild One, making the power that my character holds within the cage interpretive and unclear from the outset.

Katie Mitchell believes that before too much work starts on a performance you need to organise the information about the text, and the world the play is set in,“…about what exists before the action of the play begins will help you map the physical, geographical and temporal certainties of the play…” (2009, p.12). However not much is shown about the world of the play, the given circumstances are quite scarce within Campton’s play.  Mitchell suggests making two lists about a performance, one of certain facts and one of questions that have been brought up. The facts of Cagebirds as I can deduce are as follows:

• There are a group of characters in a confined area with a locked door.
• There is a woman, seemingly referred to as the Mistress, who is in charge of the locking them in the room.
• The Wild One is introduced who doesn’t want to be locked in but has no choice
• The Wild One tries to convince the other characters to join together and escape.
• The Wild One creates unease in the enclosure
• The Thump kills the Wild One
• The Twitting is confused and is more taken in with the speeches of the Wild One.

The list of facts about Cagebirds is pretty small; a lot of what is put into the performance had to be the questions. Very little is given away about any existence of the world before or after the action of the play, so all the information has to be taken from the script. I couldn’t discover the reasons that Campton had my character behaving the way they did due to her past, so we were able to come up with our own concept about what has happened previously. “A concept is something that the director imposes on a play. An idea is what the writer focused on whist writing the play – either consciously or unconsciously.” (Mitchell 2009, p.47).

“For an actor, awareness of power can really help to clarify why your character behaves the way he does, and why others allow him to do so.” (Elsam 2006, p.41) so it was important that I found out the exact reasons why my character was behaving in the way they did. The first point was “…conflict in plays often comes from a character losing, or gaining, social status” (Elsam 2006, p.20) so I looked into this. For The Wild One her status is put into question from the minute she enters the cage. She refers to the place she was before and asks the mistress “Why have you brought me here?”  Showing that the Mistress had power over the character to make her do leave the place in which The Wild One felt happy.  Therefore as TWO enters her status is already impaired by the mistress.

There are many different types of status, as Elsam says there are three types of status, social, verbal and physical, and “…when you pull together the three types of status which a person uses …you’ll have a pretty sophisticated understanding of that person, and your feelings towards them.”  (2006, p.36) from this I tried to work out how my character felt about the other birds and how I should react to them.  From Elsam’s six “types of power” I went through and worked out my character’s status, and this also helped with working out how to perform certain extracts of the speech.

The six types of power as discussed by Campton are: “ Agreed Power – power which a person is allowed to use as a result of their position within a culture…Abuse Power – power which a person uses to force another person to do something…Reward Power – the power to supply something which is valued by another person…Knowledge Power – power which comes from having information or expertise which is needed by someone else… Connection Power – power which comes from being close to someone who has power… Personal Power – power which comes from a person’s attractiveness to others, because of their looks or their personality…” (Elsam 2006, p.38)

The clearest powers that my character posses are abuse power and knowledge power.  The abuse power isn’t fully used by the Wild One, but she does try, she feels bad about trying to force Twitting to act as she tries to justify her actions “I wouldn’t force you to do anything…I might try to persuade you, but that’s different anyone is open to persuasion.” Shows that she is exerting this type of power even if it is to no avail. The knowledge power comes mainly with the Wild One’s conversation with Twitting, but because my character posses the knowledge of the outside world, it has a slight effect at different times over the other birds, especially during the speech about “…out there, where the sun shines and the wind blows.” Where we showed this power by having the speech delivered subtly and yet having all the birds totally focused on the Wild One.

Elsam also provides a character profile within his book, which I found really helpful to fill out, as it showed me patterns about my character.

The piece I found most useful, as my character isn’t discussed much by the other characters in the performance, was the character traits located at the bottom of the image. They suggested how stale/neurotic and how extrovert/introvert a character is. The traits listed that I felt most applied to my character are the following:
– Lively
– Talkative
– Leader
– Thoughtful
– Active
– Optimistic
– Impulsive
– Excitable
– Restless
– Moody
– Anxious
According to Elsam’s profile this meant my character was a lot more extrovert than introverted, and slightly more neurotic than stable. This fit with the idea of my character that I had got and therefore this pointed me in the right direction for how to perform as a character with those attributes.

 

Works Cited:

Elsam, Paul (2006) Acting Characters, A & C Black Publishers Limited: London

Mitchell, Katie (2009) The Director’s Craft, Routledge: New York