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Introduction
This is a blog about my final third year piece of theatre that was cut short by the coronavirus pandemic. My group consisted of seven actors; Nesta, Emily, Nikita, Charlotte, Micheal, Woolf and me, Tic. We were creating an hour-long piece depicting the events of the London riots of 2011. We were going to do this, using aspects of physical theatre as well as written script to tell the event that caused the uproar and the stories of different points of view throughout that week of mayhem and what followed in the later years. To do this, we wanted to focus on the view points of police officers, rioters, shop keepers and public onlookers who had nothing to do with the riots.
Before I can get into detail of the production, I would like to make you aware of facts and figures of the London riots that my group and I put together to help us create our piece. All facts and figures in this post are referenced by Berman, 2014 and Drury, Reicher, and Stott, C, 2019
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Facts and Figures
Date outline of riot:
August 4- Mark Duggan shot dead by police in Tottenham whilst attempting to arrest him
August 6- Peaceful march turned to riots
August 7- riots spread from Tottenham to Brixton, Enfield, Islington, Wood Green and Oxford Circus (central London). Violence, arson and looting commenced and petrol bombs started to be thrown at police.
August 8- Looting, arson and violence in 15 large areas of London, one man found in Croydon shot, died later in hospital. One man assaulted in Ealing, died from injuries a few days later. Riots spread from London to Birmingham, Bristol, Gillingham and Nottingham.
August 9- Police numbers grew massively, quieting London down but riots had spread to Leicester, West Midlands, and parts of Manchester and Merseyside.
August 10- London stayed quiet, police started making hundreds of arrests.
Statistics:
13% of those arrested were gang members
42% of those charged were white
46% Black
7% Asian
5% Other
90% Under 21 years old
5% Over 40 years old
Three quarters of those that appeared in court had previous convictions or cautions from police.
One in eight of all crimes committed were muggings with 664 victims.
2500 shops and businesses were targeted by looters and vandals.
230 homes were targeted by burglars or vandals.
There were 3000 police officers on the first night, 6000 by the third night and 16000 by the fourth night of riots.
The Prime Minister (PM) David Cameron and the Mayor of London Boris Johnson, separately announced that they would come back to London from their holidays on the 3rd day of riots, after they had already spread to Birmingham.
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So why did it happen?
According to Keele University, the shooting of Mark Duggan was the catalyst for rioters and there was a lot of built up anger before- hand. There is overwhelming evidence that riots are caused by recessions especially when the poor and vulnerable have been affected the worst. In 2008 the bankers got off ‘scot-free while the poor lost their services and benefits through austerity. A sense of injustice prevailed.’ (Drury, Reicher, and Stott, 2019)
Then there was the loss of jobs, schools and educations funds were slashed and youth centres were closed, primarily as a result of the reduction in government funding for these areas. The majority of homeless people were made up of those who were both poor and/or black. They were seen as a danger and they were stopped and searched by police. People described these encounters as humiliating and made they people very angry. However, because they could not do anything physically to the government as a whole, the anger was directed towards the physical presence of the police as they were seen as the puppets of an oppressive government.
Then the Duggan shooting. His family asked the public not to get involved as they were waiting on responses from the police. No response was given. They then had a protest outside the police station, however, no police engaged with them. The family left the protest and went home leaving crowds of angry people now even angrier at the police, causing the first night of riots to start.
Keele University say: ‘the 2011 riots arose out of a combination of economic and social policies (riots were more likely to occur in more deprived boroughs), of policing policies (riots were more likely to occur in boroughs with higher rates of stop and search), and of a failure to engage with the community before and after the death of Duggan.’ (Drury, Reicher, and Stott, 2019)
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Story/Scenes for my final piece
For our final piece, my group had worked on a few scenes in detail and touched on a few other scene ideas here and there. This list of scenes and their synopsis is my idea of how the whole production would have come together. I will touch on certain scenes I mention here later-on in my blog in much greater detail.
Scene 1: Black stage, a single gunshot. News report of the death of Mark Duggan leads on to the memorial his family had. At the end of this will be an altercation between protestors prompting the police to make an arrest.
Scene 2: The speech David Cameron gave is being read out whilst a split stage shows rioters watching on TV and a police officer listening on the radio. After speech, police officer receives call asking him to come in on his day off. Switch to other side of the stage where rioters are getting ready to go out again, joking, laughing, trash talking. They convince a friend to join them.
Scene 3: The police are getting fast track riot training and then briefed about the situation and the plans they have for that night of rioting.
Scene 4: Sound effect of BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) messages echoing around. Physical theatre riot fight scene breaks out.
Scene 5: Rioters meet up after the fight with police and talk about what they want to do next. They decide to target a shop that they can break into.
Scene 6: Shop keeper locking up the shop. He leaves, rioters enter with hoods up, throw things around the stage make loads of noise. (physical theatre used in creative ways to throw items around) Shop keeper runs back having heard the noise and attacks the rioters with a baseball bat. They run off and he calls his wife to tell her that they’ve lost everything and can’t afford to fix the shop.
Scene 7: Next morning, rioters wake to hear news reports of looted shops. They leave to get some food and alcohol.
Scene 8: Member of the public walking to shops, 3 rioters go up and beat him up and leave him bleeding on the floor. Other two go to ‘help’ him up but really one distracts and the other steals from his bag, taking wallet and phone. He is pushed to the ground again. News report of the attack played.
Scene 9: Rioters ready to go, police go to arrest- physical theatre styled riot scene in dark using poi glowing orange to symbolise petrol bombs thrown at police. Police get hold of one rioter and arrest. The others run off.
Scene 10: 2 rioters tell the ringleader that they don’t want to do it anymore, one has been arrested and they’re worried about themselves. Ringleader tells them to go. Once alone, they grab a drink, down it and leave the stage. News report of the last day of riots. Calm on the streets.
Scene 11: All walk onstage with electric candles opening up the back curtains to reveal a screen. On screen eleven main facts about the riots come up with each chime of Big Ben. Everyone stands still until the last fact comes up about the inquest result. Candles go out.
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Practitioners we looked at together
DV8:
· Physical theatre company
· Takes classical and modern dance and turns into physical theatre
· Attempts to push beyond the values they reflect to enable discussion of wider and more complex issues (such as the London Riots)
· Pushing boundaries- We thought their ideas of pushing boundaries was what we wanted to look at because the subject we are looking at is so personal and is still affecting people today, we needed to see how they pushed boundaries whilst still being respectful. How we perform our piece ethically is very important to us.
· Use of multimedia in performance- we wanted to use multimedia to show news clips, list facts and help get our thoughts or feelings across without the use of script to say exactly how we feel.
· https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY6rEZU9K8I – influenced movement for our fight scene- the idea of going off into pairs and working on little routines together seemed to work really well for us.
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Frantic Assembly:
· Physical theatre company
· Seeks out meaningful connections with the audience- We wanted our piece to have a strong impact on the audience, we wanted to connect with them and get them feeling how certain characters were feeling. Like the shop keeper, losing his only way to fund his family, we wanted the audience to connect with him on a personal level.
· ‘The Frantic Method’
· How movement can tell a story- no words needed. We didn’t want to focus our piece on script. We wanted the movement and physicality of our piece to help tell the story, using bits of script to give more of a character background when needed. We wanted to rely on the movement to tell the story and the script to explain the characters.
· ‘Telling stories in a voice we don’t normally hear’- everyone has heard the view points of the main police officers, some of the rioters and the politicians, but not many stories have been told of innocent victims, shop keepers, certain groups of police officers and the rioters points of view. From news reports, the rioters have been made out to be youths and gangs, but that’s not correct according to the statistics mentioned earlier.
· https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC9uJrY9Bh8 – this video helped us explore how we can move together and with each other and also helped us become comfortable with touching each other and working in close proximity.
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Green Street Inspiration
We also looked at the final confrontation in ‘Green Street’ which you can access here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zisPeVF4WaU We took inspiration from this fight because it is a very realistic fight and it has two distinct sides against each other. It also shows how younger people would fight and what they would shout and scream at each other, so it gave us ideas of taunting the officers, edging them to fight and throw a punch.
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What we had worked on so far
We knew that we wanted to make clear how the riots effected people from different walks of life. We were going to look at the life of shop keepers, the police, the government, and the rioters.
We spoke about rioters and police more during rehearsals. We had an understanding that we would have 4 of us playing rioters as main roles and 3 of us playing police officers as main roles so that in the fight scenes, the police were always outnumbered.
I had recorded videos of my dad taking me down to the ground or arresting or disarming me in police style (he is a police officer) and taught those to my group in order to have some form of idea of police moves they may have used on the rioters. We thought we could use this as a scene itself, as a lot of police officers had to go through quick riot training in order to have the numbers needed on the street. I also thought that we could use some of the moves in the actual riot scene we created first when editing in the future (never got round to editing it)
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How our rehearsal process worked
During the first Friday when we discussed our ideas with each other about what we wanted to do for our piece, we all agreed on the one essential. We wanted to create a piece of theatre that looked at a real-life story and impacted the audience in a physical theatre style. Different ideas went around about the Grenfell Tower fire or the Borough Market attack, but the one that stood out the most was the London riots of 2011. This was because it could work well as a physical theatre piece and there were lots of different avenues we could go down to explain the impact of these riots. After that conversation, for health and safety, we made a note of who had what injuries and came up with ten guidelines for our group to stick to.
The Group Guidelines:
1. Contact us if you can’t be in- if you fail to do this, bring snacks to the next rehearsal
2. Hangovers are not an excuse
3. Practical clothing
4. Turn up ready to work
5. If you need a break, talk to us- we can support each other
6. Be understanding of each other- people have personal lives
7. Don’t be afraid to point out that things have annoyed you or upset you
8. Don’t close down issues that a brought up
9. Focus, concentration, teamwork
10. Have fun!
Once that was decided, we agreed to all come up with as much information about the riots as possible and meet for a feedback and rehearsal session the following Monday.
On our first rehearsal we met to work on a physical theatre piece showing a riot against the police.
Once that was done and we had received feedback from our peers on the scene, we decided to leave it unchanged for now and work on another scene for our second rehearsal, so we had something different to show next time. We started working on the opening scene with the march and tribute to Mark Duggan that his family did to Tottenham Court Police Station.
After that, we did a rehearsal workshop in which I showed my group different police take downs that my dad had taught me, and I had recorded. We got the crash mats out and learnt wrist restraints, take downs from in front and behind and pressure points causing the release of weapons. I would use one person to demonstrate on and then ask them to pair up and practice on each other and then I’d walk around making sure people were in the right position so not to actually hurt the other person.
The last scenes we worked on included the scene of David Cameron’s speech he gave about the riots. We decided to have three people reading the speech, overlapping and repeating. During this, we had three of us acting as the rioters watching the speech on TV, making comments, taking the mick out of what he is saying whilst drinking and smoking. On the other side of the stage, we had one person being a police officer at home, on a rest day, listening to the speech on a radio and making comments of how the police are trying their best and how they’ve never had to deal with something like this before. At the end of the speech, all three reading the speech say the final sentence in unison and left the stage, the rioters would freeze, and the scene would focus on the police officer. The officer receives a call to say he has to come into work and go through some riot training. He complains about not having a rest day and having to find child-care before he can come into work. After that scene, we started to look at the rioters. They all are joking and laughing about what people have done during the riots and all of them are excited to go out and riot that night. This scene had a strong structure to it, but the script still needed a bit of work and we were still editing it up until the last rehearsal. To see the script for this section please refer to apendix 1.
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Critical Reflection
Critical refelction of work we had done so far:
When we met and exchanged information, facts and figures, we decided to start off with a fight scene between police and rioters to explore how physical theatre can help us communicate meaning, helping us work on how to tell a story without script and how clear we can make the information we are trying to get across. This is important to our piece as it is what we wanted to concentrate on doing. We thought by starting off with something like this, getting feedback on how to make our story clearer would help a lot with the rest of the piece. We looked at different physical theatre fight scenes on Youtube for inspiration. Our group met that Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday so we had enough practice to perform five minutes of content to the class on Friday. We felt like we needed to rehearse this much during the first week because stage combat can be dangerous if not rehearsed properly and as we were also incorporating lifts, we needed to be extra careful. The feedback we got after showing the riot scene made us realise we didn’t want any well-known music in our piece, so we all agreed to work on different ideas for soundscapes which Michael would put together and create for us. This stops us from influencing how the audience feels through music they might know.
We started messing around with different ideas of how to stage the tribute and looked at the Flocking technique which is where the group has one leader and the rest follow moving around the space almost like a family of ducks on water. We also tried the Socking technique which is when the group are tightly compact together and weaving their way through each other, staying as close as possible and gradually moving around the stage. We did these to try and work out different ways to move as a group to symbolise the march to the police station that Duggan’s family did. However, after experimenting with those techniques, we realised that it looked unorganised and messy as we couldn’t get the right movement between us to make it look organised and serious which was the effect we were going for. We didn’t want a serious moment like this to look in the slightest way comical and some of the time when we were weaving through each other, it did and with such a serious topic, that was a risk we couldn’t take. We decided to change our ideas and instead walked freely around the space because it showed that people from all walks of life and from all around London came together to support the family of Duggan. We then decided to make ourselves look like a clock pointing at 11 o’clock, because that was the time the memorial for Duggan started and as the attendees at the memorial, we thought creating a clock with our own bodies would symbolise that there can’t be a memorial without the people to support it. We would then move from that position to a line at the front of the stage where we would pause for a few seconds before turning our backs on the audience and walking in a diagonal line crossing through each other. We planned on having some sort of altercation in the crossing because, as we found out through research, during the real protest, the police came out and tried to arrest people for a fight, causing the bigger riots. During experimenting with this, we decided to have the real news report about Duggan’s death at the start followed by the sound of Big Ben chiming for 11 o’clock. We found this created a strong sense of tension because of the eerie sound that Big Ben would make in a small, dark room where the actors are silent. We wanted to grab our audience’s attention at the start of the piece to get them emotionally invested throughout the rest of the production.
We wanted to look at police take down techniques because they can be helpful when creating another riot scene for our piece so the police can look professional. It also gave us the idea that we could create a scene out of this workshop itself, where the police are having riot training before the fight scene. This idea then became a set scene to work on as we thought we could help tell the story from the police’s perspective, showing different personal opinions within the police about the riots, as all we saw was the overall opinion on the news, nothing was ever made personal.
We wanted to highlight the issue of police being recalled to duty when they didn’t expect it because a lot of officers around the UK were told that their leave was cancelled, that they needed to do extra training and they needed to be prepared to deal with the rioters, leaving some of them to find child-care almost 24/7 for single parents, and not having a single day to rest properly before having to deal with some of the most dangerous people around London. We also wanted to show the other side, and when we looked at the rioters, we needed a bit of backstory why they were getting involved. For example, we had a group of rioters who convinced another that she needed to get involved with the riots to get back at police for putting her dad behind bars. Having that emotional connection was enough to get her on board. We wanted to show the carelessness of the rioters and how some of them we purely involved for the fun, which sadly, a lot of them in 2011 were. They saw a chance to rebel and completely lose control, so they did, and we wanted to highlight that.
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Soundscape for the beginning of our piece
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fhrHQX37rw&feature=youtu.be
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Practitioners I’ve looked at
Paper Birds:
· Devising theatre company
· Social and political agenda- I thought that their idea of taking something serious like politics and putting it in physical theatre is something that could really work with our piece due to the politics behind it.
· artists, investigators, entrepreneurs, educators- this is perfect for our piece. Not just are we performers but I have investigated backstories of people involved. I like to think that our performance wasn’t just telling the story but educating the audience to the events that happened and how it affects peoples lives.
· listen to personal experience to create work- I have done a lot of research into different stories of rioters, police officers, shop keepers and members of the public in order to create realistic characters with real backstories.
· explore voices from all walks of life- Looking at different people involved in the riots. Poor, rich, male, female, British and foreign people living in London.
· Devising workshop list- physical, verbatim, devising and theatre cards
· ‘Theatre Cards’ looking at emotional, physical, playful and thoughtful side of topics through improv.
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