Year: 2017

The End of the Road

Emma Jane Haigh Costume Designer , ,

After months and months of the most intense process I have ever put myself through, Kalopsia comes to an end. I’m so pleased I had the chance to throw myself at such a rewarding project at the very end of my degree.

I took on a role which was completely new to me. Being Costume Designer has been extremely challenging at times, exhausting, time consuming and emotionally exhausting.

But OVERALL, more than anything it’s been an absolute pleasure. Seeing the professional photographs and hearing people’s kind feedback have made the entire experience so worth the hours of work I have thrown at it through the process. It has taught me that I am perhaps more creative than I first thought I was.

I couldn’t submit my final post without mentioning what a wonderful team I have worked with whilst creating Kalopsia. As The Pin Hinge Collective I feel we really put everything we had into our show and I’d really like to think that our hard work came across.

Our show changed and developed a lot during the process as we continued to better and fine-tune our understanding of who we are as a company. I feel that we began the process trying to capture too many ideas and by the end of the process we had sieved our ideas right down to create a much more clear and concise performance.

We sculpted the show to fit with our company’s ethos. The show remained about what makes us human and what makes us each unique individuals.

If we had the chance to begin the process again, I would try to balance my production role with my secondary acting role more. I feel like I could have spent more time working on my character and making sure I really knew her inside out. I would also have tried to come to a final show idea sooner than we did, I feel that if we had had more time to work on our final idea, our show could have been even stronger.

Thank you to the rest of The Pin Hinge Collective for helping me to finish my degree with a bang! I really couldn’t have done it without the lot of you. ph1

A Performer’s Perspective: Reflection

Emily Claire Bickerdike Marketing Manager , , ,

Throughout this blog I have discussed my role as Marketing Manager, and even reflected upon my abilities and tasks in this role. However, now that Kalopsia has come to an end, I believe it is important for me to briefly reflect upon my secondary role as a performer.

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(Howard Rees-Jones, undated, cited in Facebook.com, 2017)

Performing has always been what I’ve wanted to do. From very early on in my educational career, I knew that acting was the path I wanted to take. Since being at university I have involved myself in as much acting as possible, usually avoiding production/technical roles and focusing solely on acting. I knew that since my time at university was coming to an end, I should branch out and jump head-first into something different whilst I still had the chance.

This was my main reason for choosing the Marketing Manager role; whilst it was a large, very important, and time consuming production role, I would still have the time and flexibility to act in the final show I would have during my time at university.

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(Howard Rees-Jones, undated, cited in Facebook.com, 2017)

My character was Beth Campbell, a 23-year-old office worker with big ambitions to become the boss. Of anything. Of everything…? I wanted to ensure that Beth was a multi-dimensional character, therefore I undertook a lot of character profiling and found out things about her, that were hidden in the script, that I had not considered. I based Beth on a younger version of Louisa, Emma’s character. Lousia was the boss of the office, incredibly head-strong, and could come across as a bit of a ‘bitch’ because of her strong female presence *eye roll*.

I decided that Beth should be very similar to how I pictured Louisa was when she first got into business. Driven, with ideas and aspirations perhaps unreachable by others, a work-ethic that others could only dream of, and a lack of time/patience for anything that could disrupt that. However, the major difference I wanted between Beth and Louisa is that Beth still cared somewhat about being liked, whereas Louisa, I feel, had given up.

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(Howard Rees-Jones, undated, cited in Facebook.com, 2017)

Beth’s delusion/daydream took place during her speech after successfully getting the promotion at head office. She imagines herself as a Queen, the ruler, addressing her loving subjects; she is leading those that serve her into battle, willing to lay down her own life for her duty (or job). This shows not only Beth’s desire to be a leader, but also her superiority complex over those in the office, which slowly diminishes towards the end as she takes pity on Michael, who she knows is in love with her, and gives him one last nice gesture before she leaves. After all, she doesn’t have to put up with him trying to distract her any more.

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(Howard Rees-Jones, undated, cited in Facebook.com, 2017)

Upon reflection, I believe I could have done more physical work on my character. Our choreographer, Holly, gave me some Comedia del Arte characters to research and base my movement around, yet I don’t feel I gave this enough time or experimentation. If I were to play this role again, I would undergo a detailed exploration of these characters and find the features in their movement that I could incorporate in a subtle manner into my movement to create a more naturalistic portrayal.

All in all, I very much enjoyed playing Beth Campbell and would love to revisit the character one day if ever Kalopsia resurfaced. I believe it was a very fitting character to play in my final university performance; driven, headstrong, and sure of where she wants to be. Something I will take with me after graduation.

Works Cited:

Howard Rees-Jones, G. (undated) Kalopsia. [online] Lincoln: Lincoln Performing Arts Centre. Available from https://www.facebook.com/ghrjmedia/?fref=mentions [Accessed 29 May 2017].

A Moment’s Reflection

Sam Coggin Set Designer

Looking back on the process I had never imagined to create something as beautiful or fantastic as Kalopsia and I feel very proud of our debut show as a company. I feel the company’s work ethic and positivity has held us together as a collectively in trying new ideas and ways to create theatre. On reflection the performance was a huge success in conveying what we proposed in our ethos and mission statement through contemporary means of performance and an episodic structure.

The original performance changed a lot in our four months, through stages of looking at love, illness, disability, background. Until we realised what all of these things came to create: Individuality. From that point on I feel we where set on a goal of showing each character’s uniqueness, their hopes and aspirations through a vast range of delusions.

We have received strong feedback on the performance from a variety of audience members; and although it is difficult to pinpoint our audience demographic, from those that where there including Lecturers, family and friends, students and peers. I feel that our audience fell under categories outlined by Arts Council England including Meteroculturals – “Prosperous, liberal, urbanites interested in a very wide cultural spectrum” (Arts Council England, 2017). As well as Experience seekers – “Highly active diverse, social and ambitious, engaging with arts on a regular basis” (Arts Council England, 2017).

From this demographic it is also interesting to see that a range of different age groups that came to the performance, outside of these two categories, but I feel that these built up the majority of our audience. However it is interesting to see feedback from a broad spectrum allowing us as a company to grow and improve with the feedback that we receive.

 

Arts Council England (2017) Culture-based segmentation. [online] Available from http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/participating-and-attending/culture-based-segmentation [Accessed 28 May 2017].

Learning to Fly

Sam Coggin Set Designer

For my character Thomas Clarke’s delusion, I was aspiring to better myself; and so within my delusion I became an astronaut reaching for the stars. We as a company are very focused on contemporary means of performance and wanted to explore as many ways as possible to depict each character’s originality within each delusion. Therefore for my delusion we decided upon showing this through physical theatre.

I have done a small amount of physical theatre, however it was not my forte, luckily several members of the company took part in the module last semester and where a great help in preparing me for such a physical and challenging scene. In preparation for this we watched a lot of tutorial videos by Frantic Assembly, in their workshops for Ignition and clips of their performance Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Time (2012).

We workshopped a lot of these lifts and moves however the scene was still struggling to reach its full potential. However on the 12th May we had our lecturer Diane Dubois come to watch the scene along with Téo Ghil, a lecturer who specialises in physical theatre. Thankfully he was able to give a lot of advice and guidance in how to progress the space walk by slowing everything right down and having a stronger focus on finding my centre and remembering to breathe, allowing for the space walk to appear weightless in anti-gravity.

This took a long time to perfect, in allowing each step to ripple through the rest of my body and carry me forwards, and so I had to regularly do stretches and exercises to build up my core strength and flexibility.

I would do these exercises before and during every rehearsal leading up to the performance and variations of this on days in between to ensure my control and balance over these movements conveyed the weightlessness and elegance needed within the scene.

There was also falls and lifts used within this sequence, one in particular that stuck out for me was the trust fall onto Dwain’s feet. This again took a lot of refinement and luckily we both have a strong relationship where we will push and challenge each other to do better. Therefore by the performance the fall to me seemed to last much longer, in knowing Dwain would catch me, and also in his precision and control that we had perfected in pushing me back up to my feet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7U2g0QKfgA&feature=youtu.be

Bickerdike, E. (2017) Sam and Holly’s fall. [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7U2g0QKfgA&feature=youtu.be [Accessed 29 May 2017].

Lomas, H. (2017) exercises 1. [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lK9TLXP2RE&feature=youtu.be [Accessed 27 May 2017].

Lomas, H. (2017) exercises 2. [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asAXayfMXyo&feature=youtu.be [Accessed 27 May 2017].

Lomas, H. (2017) space man walk. [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TqohtIbwaU&feature=youtu.be [Accessed 28 May 2017]

National Theatre. (2015) Frantic Assembly Masterclass: Learning to Fly. [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4mXhW7TXQ8 [Accessed 24 May 2017].

A Final Reflection

Megan Avery Props Manager

Overall, I believe our final performance was very successful. Despite all the problems we faced and the amount of times we felt it was necessary to change our performance to create the best show we possibly could, as an ensemble, we pulled together and put on a show that was incredibly entertaining and got an audience invested in the characters we had created. I believe we achieved what we had set out to do at the beginning, which was to celebrate individuality and involve other audience segments in contemporary theatre.

In terms of evaluating myself, I think I could have spent more time in the early stages putting together the paperwork for the show, however, this was difficult to do as we changed our show drastically in the first few weeks.

On the show day, we realised that whilst a lot of our audience was mainly university students, a large percentage of people who came were people who would be considered as ‘Trips and Treats’ in the Arts Council England audience segment questionnaire. These people aren’t necessarily interested in contemporary theatre and the arts, but they “Enjoy mainstream arts and popular culture influenced by children, family and friends” (Arts Council England, 2017).

Looking back on the entire process, had we come up with our final show idea sooner, our show could have been even greater and the characters explored even deeper. Despite this, I believe that as an ensemble, we created a fantastic show that really shows who we are as a company and showed how wonderfully we worked together as an ensemble. Whilst there have been a few disputes, I never believed we could have put on such a visually stunning and intricate show as Kalopsia. I am extremely proud to have been a part of the show and worked so closely with The Pin Hinge Collective over these last 5 months. Our debut show has taught me so much about the running of a theatre company and has given us all so much to take forward into the future.

The Pin Hinge Collective

Works Cited:

Arts Council England (2017) Culture-based segmentation. [online] Available from http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/participating-and-attending/culture-based-segmentation [Accessed 27 May 2017].