Month: February 2017

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In The Beginning

As the process began for Theatre Company, we outlined our ethos in which we wanted to achieve as a theatre company. James Crawford and Josh Pearson had the idea of us using other peoples unwanted items, such as their rubbish to create all of our set, props, and costume. This led to us forming our company as Rubbish Theatre. Our ethos gave a very clear idea of who we were as a theatre company and how we were going to run professionally.

 

OUR ETHOS

Rubbish Theatre aims to create visually stimulating material through the upcycling of unwanted rubbish and items therefore giving it a new lease of life. Rubbish will continue to be multidisciplinary and innovative by upcycling previous material – Cinderella? We have a basketball carriage. What about Shakespeare’s Richard III with the rapture? Rubbish believes in the abolishment of boundaries. Our willingness to work with anything could be a disaster but we’re crazy enough to try it anyway.

Solid Seven:

Punctuality and organisation

Respect and support the team

PPP – proactivity, professionalism, and passion

Enjoy it

Give every idea equal opportunity

Democracy and cooperation

Leave your shit at the door

 

IDEAS

 As we had our ethos set, we now knew that we wanted our performance to be immersive for the audience, using their unwanted items to create a visually stunning performance. Knowing this, we were able to build on our thoughts for our performance. We were interested in pain and pleasure, a circus theme, theatre of cruelty, with a tribal essence. The playwright Samuel Beckett, and his theme of black comedy in his plays influenced us on what we wanted to create.

 

RESEARCH

After discussions on our interests for ideas for the performance our Director – Jacob Kay, set us a task. This was to do some research into madness. Everyone found many different ideas about madness and what it is. I found myself researching the seven sins, and what each of them means.

 

Pride is excessive belief in one’s own abilities, that interferes with the individual’s recognition of the grace of God. It has been called the sin from which all others arise. Pride is also known as Vanity.

Envy is the desire for others’ traits, status, abilities, or situation.

Gluttony is an inordinate desire to consume more than that which one requires.

Lust is an inordinate craving for the pleasures of the body.

Anger is manifested in the individual who spurns love and opts instead for fury. It is also known as Wrath.

Greed is the desire for material wealth or gain, ignoring the realm of the spiritual. It is also called Avarice or Covetousness.

Sloth is the avoidance of physical or spiritual work.

(Square Space, undated).

After collating our ideas together as an ensemble we decided that we would focus on different elements and signs of madness, which would form the basis for our performance. As we had already established that as a company we wanted to steer away from naturalism and realism, we thought that the best structure for our performance would be episodic, as this would allow us to use an eclectic mix of styles and themes within our show, in which the devising process allows for. As we couldn’t collectively define madness, we chose to focus on some of the signs of madness that our research showed us. These are: denial, sleeplessness, memories, sadism, and obsession – all of which we wanted to use as a basis for our scenes within our episodic structure.

Devising, as a collaborative process of performance-making, potentially enables the production of a different kind of performance structure that in some senses reflects its collaborative creative process – typically compartmented or fragmented, with multiple layers and narratives

(Heddon and Milling, 2006, 221).

 

 

Works Cited 

Heddon, D., and Milling, J. (2006) Devising Performance a critical history. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Square Space (undated) Seven Deadly Sins. Available from http://www.deadlysins.com [accessed 11 February 2017].

 

 

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Working with Rubbish

Working with Rubbish means I get to create from rubbish, giving me full creative reigns of all the unwanted items, materials and waste from my surrounding environment. This open opportunity also comes with its restraints, as does any upcycling or salvaging design process – the designer is limited to what they can source.

Using material flow as an organising production principle, itself rooted in environmental concerns, has brought unforeseen benefits. A set designed on the principles of low impacts – reclaimation, upcycling, repurposing and low wattage – can save money, sure, but it also brings new dimensions to design and artistic insight, before the production process has even begun.

(Johnston, 2014)

This brings me to my design methodology:

Source, salvage, design, experiment, finalise, source, build, perform.

Once I have everything in place it will be a matter of using whatever I create, mistakes included; this will echo our ethos, in showing that there is always beauty behind the face value of things, there is always endless possibilities and rubbish never really is rubbish.

When using reclaimed and recycled materials you never quite know what you’re going to find. My set design work can then be seen as a reflection of how Donyale Werle, a set designer based in Brooklyn, New York, sees her design process. For the show Peter and the Starcatcher, which ran at the Brook Atkinson Theatre on Broadway in Spring 2012, Werle’s set design process is described as:

on the very edge of having a very clear vision and not knowing at all what the outcome is going to be. What lies between this dichotomy are the materials that are available. This is the nature of creating the set out of salvaged and recycling goods. So the design can be seen as an organic process, in that it is determined by the elements found in the surrounding environment.

(Julie’s Bicycle, 2012)

 This is reflected in my set design process, which also runs in conjunction with Rubbish Theatre’s devising process for the show, If an Orchid Was All You Had. We are bound for an organic and experimental journey, which is certain to produce visual stunning and conceptual daring material.

First port of call – collect and source all possible unwanted materials and items. Once collected it will be a matter of working closely with our Director, Jacob Kay, and the rest of the ensemble to devise our piece based of the material we create but also the material we find.

 

References:

Julie’s Bicycle (2012) Sustainable Design: Peter and the Starcatcher. [online] Available from http://www.juliesbicycle.com/latest/case-studies/3583-sustainable-design-peter-and-the-starcatcher/ [Accessed 12th February 2017].

Johnston, S. (2014) Tips for green, more sustainable show. [online] London: The Guardian. Available from https://www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-blog/2014/jan/29/tips-green-sustainable-shows-production [Accessed 12th February 2017].