Natasha Wisdom as Sister Lucy and Matthew Slight as John in Ups & Downs, the Studio Piece
in Summer 2009
The First Week
Or part one of the ‘creative splurge’ as I described it so poetically in the first entry. As unattractive as it sounds, it’s a fair representation of what it’s like. Every rehearsal is different, the actors pour out new characters and storylines and then, as quickly as they’re established, they’re put aside and we move onto the next one.
Each cast member suggested a basic setting at the beginning of the week and every rehearsal since we’ve taken one of those one-line settings, developed it within the group, created characters, plot details and locations, thrown them out onto the stage and stood back to see what would happen.
Only one of the eight or so settings we’ll be exploring will be taken forwards, making this part of the process tremendously inefficient. But it’s also tremendously necessary and carefree. All we need to get from these two weeks is one idea with a germ of merit within it.
Much devised theatre starts with a concept or a theme or question in the director’s or writer’s head. They use the actors to help explore that notion and through that exploration a piece emerges. In previous years I have done the same – in a limited fashion – suggesting settings that might be interesting and appropriate for the age range or gender mix of the participants. This year, however, we’re starting with nothing that the cast aren’t bringing themselves and it is glorious fun.
In the first week we’ve created a dysfunctional family who’ve fallen from riches to rags due to a generation-old curse; we’ve adventured in a distant, surreal land of rebellion, twisted scenery, swamps, taverns and a movie studio; we’ve explored a story of alien and paranormal incidents that ended up as a cross between the X-Files and ALF; and we’ve convened an activist meeting of the militant Condiment Liberation Front who’ve brainstormed their plans to douse their targets in ketchup, mayonnaise and HP sauce to further their cause.
And there’s more to come in week two…
Creating Character
At the core of any story is character and so I thought I’d spend some time writing about how we go about creating our characters as part of the devised piece.
- Inspiration comes from restriction.
There are people out there (I’ve met one of them) to whom you can say “Make up a character” or “Make up a story” and they can stand up and produce – off the cuff – a fresh and fully-formed concept or plot. The vast majority of us would blank, play for time, hem and haw, and either give up or haltingly produce something that, on reflection, we would realise was hopelessly derivative of the last book we read or film we saw.
Given the opportunity to create from ‘anything’, the vastness of the possibilities makes our imagination seize up. We need a focus, a hook, some spur to tell us what our character is (and thereby place restrictions on what it cannot be) to get our imagination working again. We don’t need it to give us the answer; we just need it to provide structure for our minds so we can find the answer for ourselves.
The focus can be almost anything. When I started with the devised piece, I used tarot cards. They fit my purpose quite nicely as their meaning is open to interpretation (there’s no right or wrong) they have a relatively clean visual image, normally with a human focus, and – especially with the Minor Arcana – there are small additional elements on them that the actor can choose to concentrate on or ignore. In our second year we moved onto using general works of art. The actors found some of the more abstract ones difficult at first. How can you create a character from a picture if you don’t understand what the picture is? The point is, though, not to correctly ‘interpret’ the picture, but rather to use whatever you get from the picture to inspire yourself.
Over the course of the last year I ran a series of workshops where one of the topics was the character creation process. The participants created characters using a variety of different methods: through random draw of predefined relationships, through random story fragments, through the inspiration of a picture and finally through the inspiration of a single word. The single word proved the most popular because they felt it gave them the most freedom to create their characters as opposed to trying to flesh out a character that they felt had already been created. We started this iteration of the devised piece using a single adjective as a focus, but found that even a single adjective provided too much of an answer. We found that starting off knowing that a character is ‘devious’ or ‘trusting’ left us trying to build a character around the adjective – so that everything about them was pointed towards that attribute. The adjective became a fixation rather than a focus to kick-start our own imagination, so now we’ve stepped back even further to use non-adjectives.
It may seem difficult at first, but for a deviser in the right mind-set even a mundane noun such as ‘chair’ or ‘carpet’ can trigger a series of creative sparks to allow them to start building a character. The less ‘obvious’ a word is at describing a character, the better it can be as a focus to allow your imagination to run riot.
- Inspiration comes from trying to reconcile the irreconcilable.
The ever-present danger in quick creation is, as we reach for the character, we take grip of an archetype. And from that archetype we slip into cliché. When I first tried exploring a fantasy setting I had no less than five actors create a fairy-tale princess character (though it ended up entertaining enough with all five of them competing for the attentions of the lone dashing prince).
In truth, no character will stay cliché after the subsequent weeks of development, but even at an early stage we can move away from the obvious by adding a contrasting focus. When I used tarot cards, each actor drew two – and it was then their challenge to include aspects of both. When using a single word, the other members of the group ask the actor diverse questions about their character to provoke them to explore an aspect they wouldn’t have otherwise considered. The harder it is to reconcile the two sources of inspiration, the greater the imagination churns and the more surprising the result can be.
Next time: The Second Week