Tag: Melissa Clarke

The Cage Birds – Rehearsal Process

Leave a comment

When I first got given my role as Guzzle despite the fact that I had to get used to the fact that I was going to play a bird which I had never done before, I also had to get used to the fact that the play is of an absurd nature. Over the Easter holidays we were given the task of learning our lines, however I found this task very difficult, along with many others of the cast due to the fact that none of my lines linked to any of the others. Everything that I said was completely random apart from the one section towards the end of the performance where the Wild One enchants the Guzzle to leave the cage.

Rehearsals started off with us playing around with our characters, and it wasn’t until we were all more familiar with our characters that we started to feel more comfortable with experimenting and trying out new ways of creating an absurdist piece. Becoming more confident with our bodies, and more confident with each other was a crucial turning point within our rehearsal process.

Our director wanted us to project our voices and create big creative movements with our bodies so that the portrayal of the birds on stage was one which was obvious. The people on stage were obviously playing the role of a bird and although we were still playing a human character the bird like elements where supposed to be ones which should stick out from the humanistic characteristics of the cage birds.

Another element to the performance which came out towards the end of the rehearsal process was the hilarity of the performance. At the beginning of the rehearsal period I personally didn’t see the play as one which was funny. However throughout rehearsal, our director highlighted that a lot of what we were doing on stage was funny and so this should be played on for the audience.

The hilarity of the play was not due to the fact that we were having funny conversations, it was more to do with the point that the play was so random that there was room to create humour from the actions us as birds where doing during the long monologues the Wild One had to perform. Once this became more apparent to all of the actors we felt that we could play on the humour the play provides its actors to experiment with.

For my character, Guzzle, I was constantly eating food throughout the performance. The way that I was able to make this funny was by playing around with the food. Tipping packets of crisps over my face so some crisps went down my top, throwing skittles in the air to try to catch them with my mouth (often missing), picking previous crisps spilt from my top out and eating them and also when going over to the other birds areas trying to eat their props. Eating Glooms ‘pills’ and spitting them out onto the audience and trying to eat Gossips magazines are just some of the things that I did with my character in order to develop it into one which fitted in with the humour our director wanted for the piece.

 

Lighting Designs and Plans

Leave a comment

During the beginning of the rehearsals process we hadn’t really decided how we wanted to have the lighting on the performance night. A lot of different ideas had been thrown around and then finally we had a meeting with the stage manager and technical director which helped us set how we were going to have the lighting.

Our original idea was to use different coloured lights which portrayed the different characters in there sections of the stage, during rehearsals we had spoken about how we wanted the set to be a visually stimulating as possible and so therefore we thought that coloured lights would be the most successful to bring this look to the stage.  We decided that the best colours to use would be the colours that our costume designer had chosen for each of the characters.

The colours for each character where as follows;

The Wild One – Light Blue

Thump – Orange

Gloom –  Purple

Gossip – Red

Twitting – Yellow

Guzzle – Teal

and

Gazer – Royal Blue

We wanted to create a system that would be used throughout the play, which would be that when each character spoke their individual coloured light would come up on to the stage to create a wash of colour over the stage which was positioned in a way that the light would make the base of the cage. Considering the set which created the cage, the lights made it just that little bit more recognisable. Lighting aided to create the look of the small cage on the big stage. Deliberately the cage was a lot smaller than the capacity the stage could allow it to be, and this was meant to highlight the fact that the ‘cagebirds’ where trapped within their tiny cage. Each of the characters had their own personal space within the cage, and although all of the birds are in the cage together they are still very much individuals within the cage. The different coloured lights for each of the characters helped to create another visual aspect to the performance, whilst also making it a little bit clearer to the audience the intention of the birds within the cage.

During the development process some of our original plans where changed slightly and the death scene had some added elements to it. However the original aspect of our lighting plan stayed the same and was still carried on throughout the performance.

Due to the fact that one of our focuses as a theatre company is that we want to create visual theatre, lighting was one of the points for our performance which would be seen as important for the visual aspects. We wanted it to aid the set, and to highlight the choices that the set designers had made with their tech role. Considering the set was full of props, detailed and sectioned off for different characters we felt that the lighting would be best in a simple design, in order to not complicate the rest of the set too much.

I think that although there were some problems on the day with the lighting, they were not ones which couldn’t be changed and on the night of the performance the lighting designs assisted the performance in a complementary way.

 

 

Melissa Clarke – Actor/ Lighting Design

Leave a comment

Melissa is in her third year of studying Drama BA (Hons) at the University of Lincoln and is currently performing as an actor in Retold Theatre’s performance of The Cagebirds, by David Campton, whilst also being involved with lighting design.

Melissa has enjoyed being an actor within every module throughout her three year degree and hopes to carry on taking part in productions whilst going on to do her PGCE next year.

Throughout her university course Melissa has played various roles including,  Guzzle in The Cagebirds (2013) , Ugly Duckling in The Ugly Duckling (2012) and A Lord in The Taming of a Shrew (2011). Melissa has also gained basic training in stage combat and is qualified to use sword on stage.

 

 

 

 

Character Development

Leave a comment

As soon as Retold Theatre decided that the play we were going to put on was Cage Birds by David Campton within a week our director, Alicia Ravensdale, cast me as the character of Guzzle. My character within Cage Birds is on who finds her comfort in food, obsessively eating and creating her ‘nest’ with the remains of the one thing that keeps her ‘safe’.  Shortly after the casting, within rehearsals we were all told which type of bird we would be playing, I was given the challenge of creating my character on a Pigeon, and so this is when my research began.

I was lucky with the type of bird that I was given due to the fact that there is so many pigeons in Lincoln, everyday I was able to watch them as I was walking to and from rehearsals, in town or walking the dog. They are everywhere.  At first it was just something that I thought was quite amusing, and then I started to watch them in more and more details as I realised that studying the way that they moved was a crucial part for my development of my character. Watching the way they would approach other birds, watching how they went about getting food off the pavements, looking out to see how they behaved when they were being threatened, how they walked and the sounds that they make.

After watching pigeons in the wild, I was able to use this information within the rehearsal process. Taking the quick, precise head movements in particular. During rehearsals, our director specified that she wanted our head movements to be going on throughout the whole performance either increasing or decreasing depending on the situation that our characters where in. I thought that it was important that as an ensemble it didn’t just look like we were moving our heads for the sake of moving them, or just so it looked like we twitching nervously, and so one of the most important things for my character development was making sure that my head movements looked as close to a pigeons as possible. After all, we were all allocated different birds so therefore it should be obvious for the audience to see that we were not all the same and took the time to make up different visual ‘personality’ traits.

One of the biggest challenges of my character development, was how to make my whole body look as close to a birds as possible. Obviously it was never going to look exactly like a birds, because I am not one and I had to try to get over the restrictions my human body made for me. The main thing that I had to do with my body was to make sure that the way that my body moved matching my head movements. Quick, sharp movements with my body to create as much of a bird like character as possible. Whilst walking I needed to make sure that my all of my body was being used at the same time. My head movements, using my neck and back to ‘peck’ as I walked. As my character was constantly looking for food, and rummaging around to get it I needed my walk to portray this aspect of my characters. Therefore resulting in my bend as I walked.

Another aspect of my character that I needed to develop was my voice. The noises that I needed to make and at what points of the performance was most suitable for which type of noise. From my research I found out that pigeons made a ‘cooing’ noise and so this is the type of sound that I used for my character. Making sure that the noises made were when it was relevant for my character, for example when my character was in distress I would make more ‘cooing’ sounds compared to when it was content, in the case of Cage Birds this would have been when my character was in her section of the set within her nest.

My voice was also supposed to portray bird like characteristics, I would vary the tone and sound level of my voice depending on the situation my character was in, when my character was directly being approached by the Wild One I would make my voice quicker and higher pitched whereas in a more relaxed environment my character would speak slower and in more of a consistent tone.