January 11th, 2010
Do you need room to rehearse next week?
Shared space – an invitation
Hello, as part of our ongoing commitment to finding new and inventive ways of supporting you, the theatre-makers of Bristol – we’ve come up with a new wheeze which we’re going to pilot until the end of January; and if it goes well - into the future.
This ‘Shared Space’ policy is a straightforward last-minute booking scheme where we let you know of any last minute rehearsal space in the forthcoming week– and you can book it free of charge.
How will this work?
Every Thursday we will publish our space availability for the coming week (on our website, on the Theatre Bristol website and their e-lists and other networks).
Space will then be allocated by us on a first come first served basis by 5pm on each Friday of each week.
Kate Yedigaroff
Producer – artist development
SPACE AVAILABLE NEXT WEEK:
Coopers Loft - Available Wednesday 13th January from 1pm-5pm Dimensions 10.05m x 9.75m x 2.28m (high)
Rehearsal Room - Available Wednesday 13th - Friday 15th January from 10am - 5pm Dimensions 12.05m x 13.10m x 2.43m (high)
If you wish to book please contact 0117 9493993 by 3.00pm on Friday 8 January and speak to Sarah or Frances on Reception and they will arrange this for you. Alternatively email stagedoor@bristol-old-vic.co.uk . Please mention if you have any access issues at the time of booking.
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December 12th, 2009
Press night for ‘Hansel & Gretel’ went off with a real bang on Wednesday night (09/12/09). And the positive feedback is already starting to filter back. With a four star review from The Guardian’s Michael Billington, amongst others, the box office is expected to be groaning under the weight of interest in coming weeks.
The show itself is an exciting mix of physical performance, music and mad-cap hilarity which breathes new life into the ‘Christmas Panto’ and offers a fun alternative for what has become, for many, a tired tradition. Pantomimes? They’re behind you! Kneehigh’s indelible mark is gratefully rubber-stamped on proceedings and, although some younger children (under 5s) may find certain parts a little scary, ‘Hansel & Gretel’ provides laughs for all the family. A beautifully maleable set provides unexpected moments of innovation, such as Gretel’s convoluted mouse-trapping device reminiscent of the Honda ‘Cog’ advert (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ve4M4UsJQo). With energetic performances, clowning and a soundtrack which is beautifully scored, this has to be the best Christmas show on offer in Bristol this year. And as if that isn’t enough, underneath the stage in the creepy ‘horse-shoe’ - there are rooms decorated in the theme of the show which offer something extra for intrepid explorers - not to mention a house made entirely of bread.
Be sure to book early to avoid disappointment.
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November 12th, 2009
The Bristol Old Vic is offering a fantastic opportunity to get backstage access to the cast and crew of Uncle Vanya on Thurs 19th Nov.
Starting at 11am, the tour is perfect for anybody attending the Thursday Matinee (who can really make a day of it), although anybody who has an interest in the deeper workings of a successful production will relish the chance to meet the Shakespeare at The Tobacco Factory team, including Director Andrew Hilton and Costume Designer Harriet De Winton. Members of the cast and technical crew are also available for a grilling.
To book tickets, please visit the ‘Shows’ section of the website, or telephone our Box Office on 0117 987 7877.
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October 20th, 2009
All this talk of making writers redundant – or making everyone into a writer – I feel a chill wind on the back of my neck – leads me naturally to The Factory’s sort-of-improvised version of The Seagull.
Sort-of-improvised?
The way it works is this. At the beginning of the show, the cast draw lots to see who will perform which role. Perhaps three actors are able to do Konstantin, for example. Every time, in other words, the ‘pack’ of actors is shuffled. No two shows will have exactly the same combination of performers.
The chosen performers then present Chekhov’s great play more or less in the order Chekhov wrote it – except that they do so, more or less, in their own words. They also use their own names and refer to the present-day world around them. (‘Moscow’ becomes ‘London’; there were some funny riffs on crop circles and Tom Baker.) There’s no set, a few chairs, a table, props borrowed from the audience and the actors are dressed in their own clothes. (A lot of them are wearing skinny jeans, as it happens.)
The effect is – at its best – to make The Seagull absolutely contemporary and wholly owned by the performers. It helps of course that The Seagull is partly about a familiar world of actors and writers, that there is an experimental play-within-a-play in it, and that the scenes have a slightly chaotic, changeable feel even in the original. But the urgency and immediacy of the performances was, when I saw the production on the Saturday, startling and deeply moving.
The moment in Act 3 when Konstantin (or here, the actor’s name, Tim) has his bandage changed by his mother (here, Amanda) was played with great stillness and tenderness; Trigorin (here, Jethro) had cool danger and offered a blistering, remarkable fluent justification of his life as a writer; Masha (here, Amanda) seemed fatalistic to her core.
How do they do it?
Each actor boils down their character’s words and actions to a list of units. Each unit must be further distilled into a single word: this list of words becomes the actor’s mnemonic for their performance.
Here, for example, is the beginning of the units used by Simon Muller, who played the doctor (Dorn in the original) on Saturday:
Enter
Hot
Accused
Middle Age
Do
Astound
Idealism
Honest
Improved
Clearly too, the actors must think deeply about their characters, and will have read the play in several different versions.
Yet what we see is, crucially, each actor finding their character in their own words and their own world. Inevitably, Chekhov’s precision and poetry is sacrificed (though there are moments of unexpected poetry); but the rhythm of Chekhov – the ways his characters speak and argue – and the peculiarly Chekhovian way of writing a character – talkative, querulous, changeable, selfish, philosophical – comes through very strongly. Chekhov’s characters seem absolutely modern. (Have we changed so little?)
Federay Holmes, another one of The Factory crew, tells me that the actors feel an extraordinary closeness to Chekhov while improvising. They have to learn to trust to the deep structure of that writer’s thinking. (It’s very good for deflating the ego – I want to come back to this question of improvisation and ego in another post…)
I should add that the version I saw on Sunday – its particular combination of actors and the spur-of-the-moment choices they made – seemed less successful. Thus one of the deficits of improvisation…
Kate Yedigaroff, producer of Bristol Jam, who was also very moved by the performance on Saturday, suggested that it was both the truthfulness of the performances and the combination of vulnerabilities – the rawness of Chekhov’s characters echoed by the exposure of the actors in improvisation – that gave the performance its particular emotional charge.
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October 20th, 2009
The Secret (there is no secret)
So last night I went to see Cartoon de Salvo again, and I have verified that the whole show was COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.
Last night the title was ‘Mollusc and Patch’ (heaven knows who put that one forward) and the story was of rival oceanographers (one with a comedy German accent), a previously undiscovered coral and – best of all – a romance between two molluscs (on a patch of coral), aided by a surprisingly public spirited tiger shark.
They really are improvising.
So today I cornered Alex Alex (Murdoch) and Neil (Haigh) from Cartoon de Salvo and I asked them: just how do you make up a play, on the spot, in front of an audience?
They agreed to reveal all.
We begin with THE GOLDEN RULE -
Yes and . . .
This is the basic rule of impro. What it means is: whatever one of your fellow improvisers does, you have to accept it and then add to it.
Over time, adds Neil, you learn to not have plans in your head. ‘If you start trying to tell the story you want to tell, you’re f***ed.’
Keith Johnstone (the godfather of improvisation, apparently – I’m learning) said: ‘We say no to stay in control. People who say yes are rewarded with adventures. People who say no are rewarded with security.’ (Roughly. This is Alex quoting from memory.)
As you might imagine, it’s more difficult to achieve this than it seems, because it’s scary, and because the instinct to say no is very deep. When people are training, says Neil, they often think they’re not blocking and they are. There’s so much conflict taught in drama training. But in improvisation, it’s not very helpful.
No new trouble in the first scene
What this means is: don’t do too much in the first scene. Take time to establish who are you, where are you, what are the relationships, in as much detail as you can.
We want to see characters happy and healthy in their natural environment doing their thing – so we can start to care about them, before anything happens.
You don’t have to worry about creating the drama. Trouble arrives anyway. Because human beings are like that. They make trouble.
The first two scenes are really the ones you can learn techniques for. We did a four-day workshop in San Francisco (they’ve been doing long-form impro there for 20 years apparently. San Francisco is the mothership for long-form improvisation). By the end of the four days, we’d only worked on scenes one and two. We thought: this is a bit of a rip-off. But then, as they said to us, there really are no rules for the rest of the scenes.
We have spent a lot of time learning how to spot genre (American gothic, historical melodrama etc) as early as possible and using that to help us build.
In these early moments, the performers must make big instant decisions about the world, the characters and their relationships. A big decision (for example of the genre of the whole show) is a ‘call’; a smaller one is an ‘offer’.
Make names a something
Use character names loudly and clearly and repeatedly. You really need to remember the names, so that you can call someone on two scenes later.
A small tip, but a useful one, apparently, and something I notice The Factory did in their sort-of-improvised Seagull. (Of which more in another post.)
Stay calm: Oxygen is your friend
Good improvisers have the confidence to breathe, to be silent, to pause.
Central to achieving this is knowing that you can’t do anything wrong. There’s no such thing as a wrong turn. Mistakes are often the best bits of a show – things coming out of a mistake will often transform the story.
We were in one show all American women in a knitting circle. I used the wrong name for my husband and Brian picked up on it and said – did you mean my husband and then suddenly there was a frisson – was I being unfaithful?
Reincorporate
Generate each scene from what has happened in the previous scenes. That’s how you get satisfying story. By using things that have already happened.
Phelim McDermott said a great thing – an improviser is just a man looking backwards.
We’ve several times had the experience of a big, climactic scene and we can’t work out how to resolve it and then suddenly someone will remember something planted in the first scene.
Reincorporation is the difference between a story and a list of events. Or as Homer Simpson once put it at the end of a particularly self-referential episode: ‘That’s not a story, that’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.’
Train as an ensemble
Like a sports team. We played loads and loads of games, to enable us to really understand how the others think and feel. And to build trust so that you know you will be rewarded for being brave.
Jump and justify
If the story is flagging – hell, even if it isn’t – make a leap of faith, without thinking it out at all. And then you figure out why later. (This is the antidote to the ‘hesitancy’ which CdeS felt caused them problems in the middle of ‘The Black Toe’.)
We’ve all had amazing moments of flashes of insight, when something completely unexpected occurs to you.
In Plymouth we had a 1970s Cold War spy world – and it was a dual narrative. Alex and I were enemies throughout the story. I was travelling to Russia to get her out of prison. And then towards the end I suddenly rushed over and snogged Alex and it became clear that she was a double agent and we’d been in it together all along. The audience were convinced that we must have planned it, but we hadn’t.
Neil: ‘It’s having the faith that any decision can be made into the right decision. Which is sort of not true. But it is true. If you manage to persuade yourself that any decision is the right decision, then you will make the right decision.
On which suitably paradoxical note – true and not true – we will close the toolbox and thank Alex and Neil for showing us its contents.
As they said, one of the great things about this kind of show is it makes everyone in the audience into a writer: because we share in the process of story creation, every audience member begins to think like a writer.
For myself, I wonder what thinking about improvisation, or, indeed, actually improvising, would do to my own writing.
What is the relationship between Jump and Justify and Writer’s Block for example?
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