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Flipgrid Video Material

Flipgrid analysis:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1pX4aFvquzH8stq_OEOQhTaWjFb8b856J

Flipgrid Week 4: https://flipgrid.com/+2021mp2a4/1450272a

Flipgrid Week 6: https://flipgrid.com/+2021mp2a6/fd9980a0

Flipgrid Week 7: https://flipgrid.com/+2021mp2a7/2e2d0d06

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Evaluation

Overall throughout this performance and its process, I feel I have expressed an equal amount of strengths and weaknesses, with the strengths actually being a result from those weaknesses. As I would typically take more of a leadership role when working in a group, I soon discovered that every other member showed significant factors of this role too. As a result, I often found that I had to reign myself in slightly to allow an equal balance of work to occur within the dynamics of the group as a whole. Having experienced this, however, it actually caused me to think more deeply about what I was contributing to the piece and allowed me to analyse the sections I focused on, such as the vote scene, to a further extent.

If I were to perform this piece again, I would alter the methods in which we edited the script. Although my group resulted with a script that we were extremely confident with and had edited and suited more to our needs within the ethical boundaries of verbatim theatre, I feel that we spent far too long dwelling on this. If we hadn't spent so much time in consideration, we would ultimately have had far longer to focus on elements such as character development.

One of the most important things I learned during the creation of this piece was the level of ability it takes to include both edited pre-recorded video and voiceover within a performance as intricately detailed and specific as My Country. Although I have used different technological software in the past, I was much less able to edit the recordings than others in my group. This is definitely a particular section more relating to digital theatre that I'd like to improve my skills on, as I strongly feel that it is something very useful to be confident in.

Having been allocated my own scene to focus on within the piece, I got a good taste of blocking and directing. Although I've done it before, I felt that this particular assessment was significantly more professional and that was apparent in the level of detail I put into planning the vote scene for my group. More specifically, the feedback that I received from both my lecturer and group was very positive and definitely encouraged me to be more confident in the ideas and opinions that I contributed throughout rehearsals. I plan to continue working on my directing skills to aid me in my future performances in university.

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Reflective Analysis

In Tom Marshman's piece of digital theatre Shakesqueer, he used elements such as music and movement to express the story and emotions to the audience. Whether that be himself moving within the frame or moving the frame itself around the room, it gave the audience the feeling of joining alongside to different settings throughout the piece. When Marshman was suddenly sitting in his wardrobe with various items of clothing behind him, it seemed to create a mystery for the audience as to what story the clothing held, almost like each was a separate chapter making us an entire book. Within the frame, Marshman gave hints to suggest the relevant subject matter or certain elements of his character. He also used the platform of pre-recorded video to add another level of dimension and another setting for the audience to witness, regularly switching between the two. His decision to include songs by artists such as ABBA managed to modernise the idea around Shakespeare and almost counteracted the history it holds.

Sharp Teeth Theatre's performance of Sherlock in Homes focused more predominantly on the level of interactiveness offered to the audience through the platform of Zoom. With it being a murder mystery piece, the audience were invited to question each character individually and then vote through a poll. This was a very clever way to overcome the obstacle of communicating with the audience when live theatre has developed in such a way in the past year that it would now not normally seem possible. The actors also invited the audience to use the chat box to give their predictions on who they thought the suspect might be, compared to the use of the chat box in Shakesqueer being used simply for praise from the audience and posing as a distraction from Marshman's work. Towards the end of the performance, one of the actor's laptops suddenly shut down. Luckily, it didn't seem to affect the structure of the piece, but it emphasises the unpredictability of live digital theatre as opposed to pre-recorded. This example also highlights how Zoom has had many positive and negative effects on our performances and how we experience them as a collective, and poses the question of whether this format of digital theatre will be apparent in the future and if so, for how long?

Within Chang and Eng and Me (and Me) by Wattle & Daub Figure Theatre, there are sections where Tobi creates various feelings for the audience, again through simple dramaturgical choices such as the framing. Right at the start, the audience sees the conversion of knowledge and questioning talking directly through the camera to them, making it very personal. It then progresses onto Tobi speaking over a Zoom call with another person to compare their views on the facts previously laid out. I would normally think of this as being quite confusing to the viewers, however the format in which they're portrayed on the screen shows another successful example of digital theatre. Additionally, during the Zoom call both speaker's faces aren't fully visible. This immediately caused me to notice that this clever choice of digital staging contradicted the dialogue that was unfolding, discussing the Siamese twins being joined together and close to each other their entire lives, yet the speakers are on separate sides of the screen and keep an essence of anonymity from the audience.

Bibliography:

Shakesqueer by T. Marshman (2021) Directed by T. Marshman (Accessed on Zoom: 27th February 2021)

Sherlock in Homes by Sharp Teeth Theatre (2021) Directed by S. Kempson (Accessed on Zoom: 4th March 2021)

Vimeo (2021) Chang and Eng and Me (and Me). Available at: https://vimeo.com/509816632 (Accessed: 11th March 2021)

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Research

With the genre for my piece, My Country, being verbatim theatre, it allowed me to research more into a style of theatre that interests me greatly. Verbatim theatre can be tracked back many years, being used as a tool to allow the public to express their views on issues that are important to them through the means of theatre. As people started to realise how useful verbatim theatre was when wanting to unfold opinions and dig deeper into their emotions, it ‘became a means to address this information gap and to reflect a more authentic form of personal experience to theatre audiences’ (Summerskill, 2021). Especially with subjects as sensitive as politics, specifically Brexit in this case, verbatim theatre is an extremely powerful method to ensure that the content is purely honest and can connect directly to its audience. I hoped that through performing a verbatim piece I could aid in educating the audience about wider views on Brexit and the United Kingdom as a whole.

Another genre that My Country falls under is political theatre. As a whole, this form of theatre ‘offers a unique forum for the political by involving audiences in a perceptible, if ephemeral, social reality through the operation of its conventions’ (Kritzer, 2008). Without wanting to be too controversial or to allow my own political views to waver how I was portraying my character of Cymru, I had to bear in mind how much I wanted to strike the audience and allow them to widen their vision on how effective political theatre can prove. This form of theatre also ‘offers a medium for exposing problems’ and ‘advocating action in public or private life’ (Kritzer, 2008), allowing the audience to see a reaction to politics that the media may not normally openly portray.

Carol Ann Duffy, the playwright of My Country, is best known for being an award winning poet. She is particularly well known within younger generations for her work Mean Time that was included in the A-level curriculum within the UK. In this work, she once again focuses in on themes that may be challenging for the readers and widen the ways in which they view or consider these issues.

The context of Brexit overall was a particularly difficult topic to grapple with. McGeever and Virdee’s article (2018) supports my group’s focus on themes by highlighting the ‘striking confluence between English national feeling and the longing for Empire’. This suggests that a large proportion of the population would likely agree that the sense of belonging within your home nation was an overruling factor when it came to the emotions emerging from the Brexit referendum.

The realm of digital theatre was another obstacle that I had to overcome. Online theatre can make us feel part of a community and allow us to collaborate with each other on more levels, however it can also have an ironic tendency to remind us how separated we are from one another, as Tannahill (2015) highlights how digital theatre can interfere with ‘the chemical ingredients of performers and spectators’.

The first company that influenced the development of My Country was La Jolla Playhouse with their piece You Are Here. Within this performance, they used Google Maps to explore the streets around the world and gave the audience a sense of freedom and limitless possibilities. We wanted to incorporate this in the introduction to our piece and tie the audience to the various locations mentioned within the script as much as possible. The second company that influenced my directing and decision-making was Frantic Assembly. Their use of physical theatre within all of their work inspired me to use as much physicality in my frame as I could throughout the scenes and the range of issues covered.

My Country Research Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X5ibI5xWIoWm3bK9W6aAgplQtarR-Hq5gq8m9uGf1u4/edit

Bibliography:

Frantic Assembly (2021) Productions. Available at: https://www.franticassembly.co.uk/productions (Accessed: 15th April 2021)

Kritzer, A.H. (2008) Political Theatre in Post-Thatcher Britain: New Writing, 1995-2005. Palgrave Macmillan.

McGeever, B. & Virdee, S. (2018) ‘Racism, Crisis, Brexit.’, Ethnic & Racial Studies, 41(10), pp. 1802-1819. doi:10.1080/01419870.2017.1361544.

Summerskill, C. (2021) Creating Verbatim Theatre from Oral Histories. New York: Routledge.

Tannahill, J. (2015) Theatre of the Unimpressed. Coach House Books.

You Are Here by La Jolla Playhouse (2020) Directed by M. Splint. Available at: https://lajollaplayhouse.org/wow-goes-digital/you-are-here-edu/ (Accessed: 8th March 2021)

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Performance Overview

The primary question that my group wanted to face the audience with was 'how united are we as a United Kingdom?', and used the idea of patriotism as the main theme throughout the piece. As the process of rehearsals panned out, we also encountered and embraced themes such as the imbalance of European politics, the delight of 'Britishness', and the humour woven through the script in scenes like the feasts. More specifically, for my non-verbatim character of Cymru I tried to highlight the theme of a more relaxed position within the group of nations gathered by Britannia. This is partly due to the fact that throughout the Brexit campaign, Cymru consistently held a relatively neutral stance between wanting to either leave or remain in the EU.

As a very eager and out-spoken group, we encountered countless creative visions for this performance. One of the main issues we discussed on numerous occasions was that we wanted to avoid making our performance seem as if we are attempting to sway the audience's political views or decisions on the topic of Brexit. More so, in fact, we wanted to have the chance to highlight the intricate levels already existing within the political views of the various nations and emphasise how something that's meant to unite us can actually have a reverse effect and separate us. Our most significant creative vision was the idea of creating a Facebook page which we could then link into the performance itself by using it for transitions and other theatrical mediums for our audience to interact with. After playing around with this idea for a few weeks, and deliberating the pro's and con's of different ways to include it, we came to the agreement that it would be too much of a risk of taking away from the dramaturgy. As My Country is a verbatim piece, we needed to continually remind ourselves that we are representing the voices of actual people and do them justice.

During the rehearsal process my group and I faced many dramaturgical decisions which shaped our overall performance, especially the emphasis around giving each nation their own characteristics. Firstly, we relied on different angles towards the camera to represent the different views of the characters. As Cymru, my physicality within the frame was more relaxed, which I portrayed through often resting my chin on my hand. Secondly, we also used costume to differentiate the verbatim and non-verbatim characters, agreeing to use a denim jacket to solve this as it's a simple and unisex item of clothing that people of all ages often wear. Another significant dramaturgical decision was to receive Britannia's politician lines from a kind of 'higher being' through using voiceover to remind the audience that we don't necessarily have to see the power to know it's there.

There were also key moments within the rehearsal process that led to further creative breakthroughs. For example, James and I originally planned for the immigration scene to consist of each of us shining a torch on ourselves and for the lights to appear in colours depending on our view on immigration. However, after much discussion, we realised that using colours such as blue and red would be misleading for the audience as it could relate to colours of political parties. We wanted to avoid this, so instead we agreed to stick with white light and use various other techniques with our torches such as flashing around the room.

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Rehearsal Footage

Google folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1NOsuTIbk1_VKT4buxCfnTRyQzrXdKR1J