Is making a complete U-Turn the right decision? We’ve come to an impasse during the production of our show. It’s not quite working, we can’t see the show moving forward and it just isn’t right for us. The major issue is our topic, love is too large of a topic and is hard to narrow down a specific show. We as a group had to come to a decision, do we continue with the show in its current state and attempt to fix what we already have?

We decided, there was no point continuing with a show that wasn’t right for us.

Now we had nothing, and as lead writer and director I had to create a new show from scratch. Something I was incredibly worried about, we’d already been working on the current show for about a month.

I met up with Stage Manager, Dan and we worked on a brand-new show.

I didn’t want to scrap everything we already had, our first scene was an episode set during the 1950’s about an electrician, an assistant and a boss within an office. I stuck with the idea of an office and looked at television programmes such as ‘The Office’ and ‘The Thick of It’ a realistic office where crazy things often happened. However rather than having the things that were out of there actually happen, I decided on making them delusions. We had the title ‘Kalopsia’ already, meaning The delusion of things being more beautiful than they are. Which helped create this new pathway of a structured narrative that allowed us to create ‘episodes’ or delusions in our case that could play with form and visuals.

When looking at this new show, we also had to considered who we are as a company and what we intended to do. The Pin Hinge Collective what to pin together a variety of audiences, the world of contemporary theatre doesn’t speak to the masses or certainly doesn’t appeal to them. We thought about this when looking at ACE (Arts Council England) who intend on making ‘Great Art and Culture for Everyone’. That key ‘Everyone’ is exactly who we intend our show to focuses towards. We wanted to work on the contemporary episodic nature that many theatre companies seem to use, but then pin it all together with a structured narrative that the ‘Dinner and a Show’ audience is appealed to. We hope that our production can bring a show that appeals to more than one kind of group.

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].

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.