Month: March 2017

The Design to the Show

Jason Lodge Assistant Stage Manager

The Pin Hinge Collective, decided to challenge who we could split our show to hold Contemporary and story driven narrative. Therefore, the agreed design to our show would be a story revolving around workers in a office who are all going for a promotion. However, the contemporary element of the show, would be produced through the delusions. These delusions would consists of the inner dreams of each character, showing their wants, their desires and there true feelings. The delusions would be be used as cut a ways from the main story itself, giving slight breaks to straightness and realness that the real show will produce. Furthermore, the delusions due to them being dream like imaginations this would allow us to be more far fetched and creative with the break away, therefore giving our contemporary means purpose, helping us blend together our to different styles of the show. With this show design we know we would have a closer link to our shows title Kalopsia, with the wording itself meaning “The delusion of things being more beautiful than they are” (Yourdictionary, 2017).

Kalopsia Promo - Red

 

Works Cited

Yourdictionary (2017) Dictionary definitions Kalopsia. California: Love to know corporation. Available from http://www.yourdictionary.com/kalopsia [accessed 30 march 2017].

Kalopsia!

Image Danielle Louise Galley Stage Manager

This week has been one of the most important weeks so far. Director Dwain has already started writing the script for our new idea that has adopted a lot of the work we had already done. It is set in a modern office and we are going to explore the delusions or daydreams of all the people working within the office setting instead of staging the delusions of love as we had originally planned. This has enabled us to keep our show name and poster design for Kalopsia. We are aware that this change has put us slightly behind schedule so I have worked with producer Jay and Director Dwain to come up with a more intensive rehearsal schedule to keep us on track. We have also set a date for the script to be finished so all the actors have enough time to learn their lines. We have kept the ‘silent movie scene’ as our opening delusion and have simply adjusted it slightly to fit our new characters and storyline. The new idea has also led us to rethink who we are as a company. The office narrative that runs throughout the play is going to take the form of a traditional play format, however, for each of the delusions we want to experiment with different styles of performance. As our choreographer is a dancer we are hoping to experiment with this style in one of the delusions. Therefore, we aim to make Kalopsia as a whole a fusion of traditional and modernist theatre styles. We feel this gives us a more unique selling point in terms of any future applications to Arts Council England as well. We hope that this fusion will draw in different audience demographics. For example, the traditional comedy style of the office scenes will draw in the ‘trips and treats’ category as well as the ‘Facebook families’ and ‘up our street’ groups. At the same time, the contemporary style of the delusions will appeal to the ‘Metroculturals’ and ‘commuterland culture buffs’. The fusion will also mean we are introducing certain audience members to more contemporary styles of theatre that they might not otherwise choose to go and see.

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Show Name and Print Design

Emily Claire Bickerdike Marketing Manager , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Our show finally has a name!

Kalopsia

noun. The delusion of things being more beautiful than they really are.

We agreed that this Greek word applied well to our show as we wanted to show the side of love that isn’t glorified in cinema, the real, gritty, mundane, exciting, side of love. Kalopsia is what happens in film, our show aims to establish and combat that.

Now comes that all-important time to give our show a branding and a public-facing presence, as well as us as a company. We have sourced an in-kind designer to create our print for us, giving him designs we created ourselves for inspiration and allowing him to create the final image for audiences to see.

I mocked up some sketches of potential design ideas as follows:

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We had the idea of creating something that people associate with love, yet giving it a twist to show something less commonly seen in films, such as empty pizza boxes, tissues, remote controls, general mess, dirty underwear, etc.

However, the premise of our show changed somewhat during this process – we revisited the name ‘Kalopsia’ and its meaning and decided that rather than focusing exclusively on love as the form of ‘delusion’ we discuss, we wanted to look at the way people view their everyday lives and what delusions we imagine on a day to day basis, i.e. the way we perceive ourselves and the situations we find ourselves in, going back to the idea of reception theory that we discussed in our first rehearsal. Many of these situations within the narrative of our show will also focus on love, therefore we wanted to implement that into our print, yet also show more of an element of the human and humanity: each individual has their own delusions.

After being in talks with our designer regarding this, he sent us some mock-up images of potential designs:

 

We agreed that the anatomical heart both showed the idea of love, the idea of reality as opposed to the delusion (a cartoon heart – shown in the title) and the idea of humanity. We wanted to have the title of the show resembling a dictionary definition as we knew many people wouldn’t know what Kalopsia meant, and to tell them how to say it through phonetically breaking it up. We also agreed that having the definition under the title would also give people an insight into what the show was about, as well as adding a recognisable yet ‘quirky’ twist. From here, we are to finalise a design and get it completed, as well as creating the final copy and back of the flyers for our shows, and getting it all printed! We have set aside a printing budget of £100 which we will hopefully stick to, but since our designer was in-kind we have some leeway to go over this if needed.

 

Changing our Idea

Megan Avery Props Manager

Today our show idea took a big turn for the better! After having looked over our manifesto and the Arts Council England (ACE) funding policy, we decided to change who our show was aimed at and the kind of show we wanted to create. Whilst the ACE funding policy dictates that students creating shows as part of their course cannot receive funding, we decided to change our idea as part of following their funding guidelines. After taking part in their quiz to find out what kind of theatregoers we all were, we discovered we were all part of the audience segments that were “highly engaged” (Arts Council England, 2017) in the arts, such as ‘urban arts eclectics’ (Arts Council England, 2017). After looking through ACE’s five goals for arts and culture, we were particularly interested by “Goal 2: for everyone” (Arts Council England, 2017), which states that successful shows will show that “engagement levels have increased among those currently least engaged in arts and culture” (Arts Council England, 2017). Our goal from this point was to create a show that would actively engage the people who fell into the audience segments that were least engaged in the arts and theatre and show them contemporary theatre practices, such as physical theatre.

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Michael using the Candlestick Telephone (Howard Rees-Jones, G. 2017)

Changing our idea however, means that as props manager, I am faced with a difficult task, as a lot of our original ideas for props had now been changed completely. However, now our first scene consists of a silent film, I am able to still incorporate a lot of the props that have already been sourced into our new opening scene as they are from the same era we wanted to set our original show, such as the typewriter and candlestick telephone.

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Beth using the Typewriter (Howard Rees-Jones, G. 2017)

We still want to keep our original ideas, but the way we have decided to present them has changed. We have now decided to present a straight naturalistic play set in an office, following the lives of seven ordinary people but celebrate their individuality by allowing them to drift into the delusions of their own lives. We’ve began by introducing Michael, a character who’s delusion is a silent film that shows how he wants to be perceived as a hero who manages to save the ‘damsel in distress’ and she falls in love with him. However, it becomes clear that this girl in the office doesn’t have much time for him and he immediately comes back into reality.

In order to come up with the best props to dress the set and to show the characters personality, I asked our director Dwain Brown for ideas and suggestions and took away what he said to come up with some ideas. I looked at pictures of how offices were set up and what I really noticed is that they are all very similar without too much personality and I really wanted to emulate this to the best of my ability to highlight the changes in props and set when the delusions are taking place.

office setting ideas
Looking at prop ideas for the office

In terms of the props for the characters, Dwain gave me ideas of each character profile and as a group we came up with these ideas:

  • Joanna : A stress ball/elastic band ball, to show an audience how worked up she gets as a result of the ‘war’ she has with Beth and a photograph of her father on her desk to show the importance she places on her family
  • Louisa : A mug that says ‘World’s Best Boss’ to show how much she values her career and how people see her
  • Beth : We decided on no personal props as she makes herself distant from everyone else due to her wanting to advance in her career and not stay in the office for very long
  • Michael : Michael also didn’t have a personal prop as we wanted the focus of him to be all about Beth
  • Simon: Simon has an apple that he eats during the lunch scene which is a deep red, to show his menacing nature. He casually eats this as he hurls insults at Michael and Tom
  • Zoe: Zoe has a clipboard and a pen shaped like a flower to show her organisation and cutesy character traits.
  • Tom: Tom has an engineering textbook in his toolbox that he reads to show his aspirations in life and that he is a character striving for better.

Works Cited:

Arts Council England (2017) Goal 2: for everyone. Available from http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/our-mission-and-strategy/goal-2-everyone [Accessed 20th March 2017].

The Dilemma

Danielle Louise Galley Stage Manager

This week has been a tough week for all members of the company. After an ultimatum from our producer that he was unhappy with the episodic structure of our four love stories we have decided as a group that after this weekend we must have a new idea to work from or stick with the idea we currently have. Due to the time constraints, a few members of the group are concerned about starting afresh as we have just been working on a scene that we will love. We call it the “silent movie scene” – this love story takes place in an office setting in the 1940’s. I’m meeting with our director over the weekend to discuss solutions to our producer’s queries.