Month: February 2017

All You Need is Love – We’re Only Human After All

Emma Jane Haigh Costume Designer , , , , ,

As The Pin Hinge Collective, we knew we wanted to make a piece of theatre about what makes us human. What it is that ‘pins’ us together.
At this stage in time this was all we knew, but every process must have a beginning and this was ours.

After much artistic discussion, with a chorus of nine voices all with different ideas wanting to be heard, we came to the agreement that the show should include a plethora of human identities.

We asked the questions: What makes us human? What factors can influence who we are?

In response to our questions, we decided on four factors which can influence who we are as people.

  • Upbringing and Masculinity
  • Education
  • Disability
  • Relationships and Sexuality

After a lot of storyboarding and story-sharing, we created characters and narratives for each of our chosen factor.

We began by jotting ideas down for ‘Upbringing and Masculinity’. After hearing Dwain tell us a story from his childhood about a fishing trip with his dad, we were inspired to think about how traditional values of masculinity are imprinted in young boys from a very early age. We also spoke about how these traditionally masculine values are often passed along through the generations and can sculpt people into who they are.

After sharing an overwhelming amount of ideas and stories for each of the other human factors, we realised that we were trying to fit too much into a single fifty-minute show.

Back to the drawing board…

We have all experienced the feeling of love and that’s what all our ideas kept coming back to. Love.

With a completely new and inspiring idea, we each went away and thought about what the word ‘love’ meant to us. We brought back stories, scrapbooks and silly anecdotes to show our individual perceptions of love.

After being inspired by a story Emily told about her grandparents meeting and falling in love, we began to craft the opening of our show.

We wanted to create a physical movement office scene set in the 1950s showing a whirlwind romance between a typist and a handyman, eventually ending with the man leaving his wife for another woman.

As costume designer, I was immediately inspired by the 1950s setting. It’s an era which I have always been very interested in. I adore the hair, the clothes and the music!

I stared researching the typical office wear for women of the time. Pencil skirts were very popular for women to wear in the office, they showed off an hourglass figure and were often paired with cropped jackets.

typist

I decided that the typist should stand out in the scene and after discussing her character with the group, we decided that she should wear something more fun to match her personality. A pencil skirt would be too severe for her character and too difficult to move in for the physical nature of the scene.

Circle skirts were also very fashionable in the 1950s. They were long circular skirts often worn with petticoats underneath. Poodle skirts were also very popular for young ladies of the era. They were a similar shape to circle skirts, but were embellished with cute little designs in shapes such as martini glasses and poodles. I felt that a skirt in one of these styles would be very suitable for the typist character. It would allow easy movement and suit her sweet youthful character. I would pair the skirt with a button up blouse, typical of the era, in either white or a pastel colour.

circle skirt             poodle skirt

I researched how handymen would have looked in the 1950s, all the photos I found showed them in white or blue overalls. I decided that the handyman and the typist should be the only characters in the scene to have costumes which differ from the matching 1950s office wear which the rest of the cast would wear.

The ‘other woman’ is the only other character who would wear a stand-out costume. The handyman’s new woman would wear a very contrasting costume to the typist’s. Whilst the young typist would wear a youthful and innocent style, the new woman would wear a costume in a much sexier and mature style.

Wiggle dresses were very tight fitting, causing the woman to wiggle as she walked. The dress reached down to the calf in a typical 50s style. The new woman would wear lipstick in a sexy shade of red, demonstrating the contrast between her and the younger typist.

marilyn

The Devising Process

Danielle Louise Galley Stage Manager

We’ve gradually moved away from the “Fisherman Story” and started looking at something that we are all invested in – relationships! However, we were so attached to the Fisherman character he was carried through into our second idea. Having 8 actors in our company we’ve begun to develop four different couples and we want to explore “love in real life”. Our aim is to make the shift from the Hollywood blockbuster couple on the silver screen to the real life couple sitting on the sofa watching them. Instead of the Fisherman and his son we’re going to stage the Fisherman and his wife. It is important to our company that all of our characters are substantive and have therefore all brought in stories about our grandparents for material to develop these characters. We’ve described in our copy how our company intends to bring to the stage all the little moments in life and explore all the different things that make us who we are. We intend to create four separate storylines for each couple and we are going to explore different means of telling each story. For example, we would like to play with staging one couple in an upturned specially built bed frame where the audience will feel they have a bird’s eye view of the couple. This is also how we would pitch ourselves to Arts Council England (ACE) if we were applying for funding. We believe our show would appeal to a wide audience. We feel the subject matter would appeal to the ‘Dinner and a Show’ category while the different storytelling means would appeal to students and academics in the arts community. Based on our copy and ethos around staging individuality we came up the name Modus as in ‘modus operandi’. However, we received feedback in the seminar that the harsh sounding Latin word did not reflect our light and fun ensemble. After another week of discussing different names that might closer reflect our personality as a company. We have unanimously voted on ‘The Pin Hinge Collective’. ph2

Early Beginnings

Megan Avery Props Manager

Our company came together as part of the Theatre Company module for the undergraduate degree in Drama at the University of Lincoln. As theatre makers who were all interested in creating performances that celebrate life and individuality, we decided to join together to create the best group dynamic we possibly could. In our first meeting, we set down our group manifesto, code of conduct and how we were going to run our rehearsals to ensure our group dynamic was working efficiently so we could create a show that showcases our talents and gives our audiences something a little bit different whilst keeping them entertained. From our first meeting, we also assigned roles that we felt comfortable in and that we thought would give us a challenge. I chose props manager, as it’s what I’ve done in previous productions and I feel comfortable with organising this side of production.

Understanding the hierarchy within a theatre company
Our company hierarchy (Bickerdike, E. 2017)

Our first devising workshop we focused heavily on exercises that helped us all to discover who we were as individuals, such as how our personality and life experiences leads us to make choices in life. For example, one of the questions we focused on in detail was “Would you choose to be happy in a relationship with no money, or single with a lot of money?” From this we began to ficus more on love as all of us had been affected in some way, we all know what it’s like to be loved or to love someone else and it started us off asking questions about how being in love can change our personality and individuality. From this, we began improvising small episodic scenes which we decided were to become part of our first performance!

Building Worlds Exercise - Using the technique to generate materials and ideas
Building up our performance from improvisation and the Building Worlds Exercise (Bickerdike, E. 2017)

Along the lines of celebrating individuality, we decided to make our first show about love, using our own experiences and stories from our loved ones to create the story lines. Our main goal is to put a piece on the stage that reflects who we are as individuals and so our initial workshopping device is to write short stories that answer a question and then storyboard them from those initial ideas. From this, we have discovered our initial idea that we want to turn into an episodic sequence of love stories that develop and give an audience perhaps a different understanding of love. A different outlook on how love is portrayed on the stage. We believe that love is portrayed through rose tinted glasses in films and on stage and we were keen to change how people see this.

Week One

Image Danielle Louise Galley Stage Manager

In these initial few weeks, our company has found it very easily to allocate non-acting roles and begin to fit into them. We’ve already become a very cohesive ensemble and have found our rhythm in rehearsals. My roles within the company are lighting designer and stage manager. The workshop with Flickbook in week one was particularly helpful in our early devising process. They walked us through some activities they employ when they’re trying to make new work. This workshop helped us come up with some activities of our own including a quick story writing task orchestrated by our director Dwain. Afterwards, we all read our stories aloud and picked one to develop. We call it “the Fisherman Story” – a son and his father go on a fishing trip. Over the next two weeks, we developed these characters and added potential new ones to the story. During these early stages, we were not only trying to find the identity of our first play but of ourselves as a company.

 ph1