Month: March 2017

Movements of Love

Holly Margaret Lomas Choreographer ,

The Pin Hinge Collective have established the theme of their first show: Love. Mundane love, ordinary love, real love. Our company is extremely interested in pinning together what it means to be human, and as we explored how one may discover their identity, we found that we have all had experiences with love – these experiences have shaped our lives and helped us discover ourselves. This, we recognised, is a universal wonder.

What better way to discover love stories than to recount our own? Each member of our company prepared short stories to share with each other, specifically about our experiences of love. We brought to the table a range of narratives, from inspirational lovers to adultery, to historic love and to listing the personal, little things in love that make us happy. These stories helped us to create a structure for our performance.

Love is a physical being, it exists not only emotionally but physically. As we worked through a storyboard, we outlined how a simple story of love can be portrayed through movement. To explore further into this possibility, I looked into Frantic Assembly, a physical theatre company founded in 1994. Their movement explores the energy between performers, something which is particularly interesting to me as Movement Choreographer. A movement story of love must inevitably involve a close connection between performers; energy must be ever present and must pass through each actor as they work together.

Here are some videos of the company exploring movement, and our recent experiments with physicality.

To find out each actor’s movement capabilities, we discussed who was comfortable with physical movement, and who has prior experience with methods of physical theatre. I then led a warm up and a series of physical theatre exercises to explore people’s flexibility, strength and abilities in physicality. These exercises included contact improvisation and lifts, as well as ‘push hands’ exercise, of which Frantic Assembly describes that it “helps participants get used to the notion of non-verbal and essentially physical communication between performers” (Graham and Hoggett, 2009, 105).

You can see from the two videos below the advancements we made in our rehearsal, going from three lifters to two lifters. These are developments we hope to continue as we move forward with movement routines.

As Movement Choreographer for The Pin Hinge Collective, my aim for future sessions is to build trust between performers, and continue with exercises such as ‘round by through’, which “requires fluidity and balance” (ibid, 131) and ‘hymns hands’, which is used “to show the flexibility of choreography” (ibid, 155).  Movement can show the strong emotional connection between characters, and has the potential to be a beautiful addition to our first performance as a company.

 

Graham, S. and Hoggett, S. (2009) The Frantic Assembly book of Devising Theatre. Abingdon: Routledge.

The Directors Dilemma

Dwain Brown Director

We have begun developing our performance and are focusing on the aspects of love and how that’s rooted in reality, and not what is seen on the cinema screen. We are focusing this ‘reality’ on stories we tell ourselves and that have affected us. However, this is an issue when it comes to emotionally performing as these characters.

“Diderot claimed that actors themselves should not feel any emotions whatsoever in order to able to evoke a maximum of emotions to their audiences” (Konjin, 2000, 146). This is known as Detachment Theory. Opposed to this theory is Involvement Theory “Which asserts that actors must indeed experience the emotions they portray in their characters; otherwise the performance will not be believable and will fail to move the audience” (Konjin, 2000, 146).

The Actors Dilemma, or perhaps in my case The Directors Dilemma.

As a director I fall under the involvement theory, believing that if an actor physically and mentally feels the emotions they are ‘portraying’ the audience will believe it. However I need to ask myself;

‘Are there dangers of being too emotionally invested in a performance?’

‘How much should actors become involved?’

These questions are incredibly difficult to answer and a definite answer does not exist. I need to tread lightly as I Direct my actors in a performance built on reality and true stories that have affected the performers in their own lives.

References:

Konjin, E. (2000) Acting Emotions. Amsterdam: University Press.

New York Method Acting (2014) What is Method Acting? [image]. Available from: http://newyork.methodactingstrasberg.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/WhatisMethodActing.jpg [Accessed 08 March 2017].

What Does It Mean To Be Human?

Emily Claire Bickerdike Marketing Manager , , , , ,

In the beginnings of our process we established that we wanted to discover what it means to be human, what makes people individuals, and how our individuality defines us.

From our discussions around this topic, we conducted an exercise using Wikipedia, whereby we would start on a page concerning something related to identity (e.g. fingerprint) and click a link to a different page from here; write down information on this; click another link; and so on.

What this left us with was post-it notes. A lot of post-it notes.

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Many of these post-it notes sparked conversation, and we believed lots of them could act as great stimuli for a show, yet two stood out in-particular:

Role Theory is the way our self-imposed ‘role’ in society (e.g. mother, teacher, etc) dictates the choices we make in life. George Herbert Mead, a psychologist and philosopher talked about the ‘self’ as a social process, where we ‘build’ our identities out of societal norms and assign these roles to ourselves through play as children. We learn to occupy a role, yet as we age we become less and less aware that we have fulfilled them.

This inspired us to complete a writing task. We sat for five minutes continually writing, answering the question “who are you?”

These stories were read out, ideas were circulated and themes dissected. All of our stories were very different from the last; some were fictional, some were anecdotal, some were poetic, some were very brutal. What we found from these stories was that we tended to discuss what we believed our roles, goals and aspirations were in some way. From this we developed exercises to determine our opinions on certain statements about ourselves. One of these exercises was walking around the room and sitting down when a statement was read out that we believed to be true to us, e.g. “I base my happiness on others.” We also stood at either the left or right sides of the room depending on which option we would choose, e.g. “A job you hate with brilliant pay, or a job you love that pays next to nothing?”

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It wasn’t until after a long time improvising and playing with these ideas our stage manager, Dan, made a brilliant point:

“Every one of you keeps talking about love.”

A career or love?

Love or money?

Unrequited love or forbidden love?

It was from there that we knew we’d cracked it. Each and every one of us knew what it was like to be in love, or be loved, or know someone who was in love. It is a universal concept that we all had first-hand experience in and spoke about all the time in casual conversation, not just when work-shopping ideas. How did our different experiences of love make us who we are? How were they similar to other people’s? How were they different?

We decided to bring this idea back around to our aim of using narrative-driven performance and story-telling; so that’s exactly what we did. Told stories.

The stupid things, the annoying things, the brilliant things, the ‘insignificant’ things about love. Things that only you and your significant other do (or so you thought…). The things that make you laugh. Your daily routine. Your favourite memories together. Anything and everything about love. The every day love, the outlandish love, the lack of love.

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From these stories we created improvisations, from these improvisations we started to see characters, and from characters, well, who knows where we’ll end up next…

The Beginning of a Collective

Jay Charles Petherick Producer

Despite having assigned roles within the theatre company, we hadn’t created the company itself at this early stage. Thus, we began discussing a variety of components that we knew were key to establishing a strong, coherent company. These included; an ethos/mission statement, company name, logo and a code of conduct that each member of the group would be expected to adhere to.

Eventually, The Pin Hinge Collective was born.

The Pin Hinge Collective - Company Logo
The Pin Hinge Collective – Company Logo
Our Ethos/Mission Statement
Our Ethos/Mission Statement
Our Code of Conduct
Our Code of Conduct

One thing that very quickly became clear, was that we wanted to create a company that celebrated individuality within our shows. We regularly drew upon the ‘anthropological nature’ of human beings and what shapes us as individuals. We often discussed what it is that defines us and how we are affected by our surroundings and upbringing. In many of our preliminary sessions I was responsible for running ‘material generating’ exercises that helped us to form and develop ideas.

Gathering Materials - A collection of stories and resources we used to generate ideas
Gathering Materials – A collection of stories and resources we used to generate ideas

In one session, I used an exercise that I had learnt during a workshop lead by playwright Rob Drummond, he called the exercise ‘Building worlds’.  During this rehearsal, we made significant developments in creating a narrative/plot line for our piece. I explained to the team that they must spend five minutes continuously writing, simply answering the question “Who are you?” as this question related to our company ethos. Once they had completed this task, I read out each of their stories. Some consisted of true events, some were made up, some followed a narrative, whilst others just consisted of random thoughts.

What was striking was that nearly all of them touched upon our aspirations within life. However, this did not just refer to success and wealth, but towards our aspirations and expectations of love as well. This was a key moment for us, as it was at this point that decided that our show should focus upon storytelling. We were curious about the topic of ‘love’. We wanted to investigate how each of our experiences and understandings of it differed. Thus, we continued to develop upon the idea with further exercises that drew out answers based on our own beliefs.

Building Worlds Exercise - Using the technique to generate materials and ideas
Building Worlds Exercise – Using the technique to generate materials and ideas
Building Worlds Exercise - Using the technique to generate materials and ideas
Building Worlds Exercise – Using the technique to generate materials and ideas

It must be love

Dwain Brown Director

As a group we are focusing on true stories from either our own experiences, however all of these stories in some way end up been about love in some way or another. Perhaps this was simply because everyone followed by example or is it something we as a group are heavily focused on? We’re all in our early to mid twenties and coming to the end of our university lives. Many of us are thinking of our futures and the people we love and if they will be coming with us or going our separate ways.

This is a prominent thought in all of our minds, so we decided to base our performance entirely on love. We have begun by creating our first episode called ‘The Electrician’ which was created by merging two stories. One by Emily, who told one of her grandparents and one I told of my personal life. We created a silent section (or at least no dialogue), that would rely on physical theatre and would be set in a 1940’s where two people would meet and fall in love, it would quickly move through their lives in a comical fashion.