The Directors Dilemma

March 8, 2017May 28, 2017 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?

March 8, 2017 Emily Claire Bickerdike Marketing Manager identity, improvisation, love, psychology, role theory, story telling

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

March 8, 2017May 29, 2017 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

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

It must be love

March 6, 2017May 28, 2017 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.

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

February 25, 2017May 29, 2017 Emma Jane Haigh Costume Designer 1950s, Costume Design, human, Individuality, love, Office

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.

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.

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.

The Pin Hinge Collective

Theatre that pins together what makes us human

Year: 2017