Blog 1 - Performance Company - Working with Stans Cafe

Performance Company – Weekly Blog #1

Introductions

Hello everybody and Welcome to the first post on our Performance Company blog!

Now first, lets get the introductions out of the way; my names Lauren Williams and I’m a 21-year-old student, in my final year, studying Performing Arts at De Montfort University in Leicester.

Now you must be thinking “that’s great and everything but what is the purpose to this blog?” Well I’m here to answer that for you all now!

Essentially, what this is is a logbook that will go alongside a module that Performing Arts students at DMU, can pick in third year named Performance Company. What this module entails is practically what it says on the tin…we, as a group of 19 students, work collaboratively to devise and stage our own performance, which will be put on in May.

However there’s a lot more exciting elements to this module than just that. Not only do we devise a performance and then perform in it ourselves but we also take up other roles such as Marketing, Tech, Media, Costume/Makeup, Project Managing and Set/Props. But the excitement doesn’t end there…

Possibly the most exciting part of this project is that we are working alongside industry professionals, in the shape of well renowned theatre company, Stans Café, or more specifically, their Artistic Director, James Yarker. 

So as I stated previously, this blog will act as a logbook, where you can follow along with us, on our journey to creating our performance. This is where you’ll get the behind the scenes scoop, pictures and videos of our rehearsal process and ramblings from myself and the two other members of the media team, Samantha Giles and Ryan Powell as we start this exhilarating adventure.

So sit back and relax, grab a tea or coffee and some chocolate biscuits as I start to tell you what our first meeting as a company was like!

Our First Company Meeting

So 1pm came round on Tuesday the 6^th of February 2018 and we were all excited and raring to go. For many of us this was the first time we’d seen each other in a while, as there are so many options for third year modules, so the excitement of being back together and working with one another again was very clear and present.

We didn’t have James Yarker with us today. Instead we had our module leader, Rosie Garton, introduce the module and structure of the project to us.

The first activity we did was to go around the class, with everyone answering why they chose this module and what are our expectations (if any) of what may happen during our time working on this module. I think its fair to say the overall consensus for the answers to these questions were this;

 The opportunity to work with industry professionals was too much of a big deal to miss. Not many final year students across the country can say they devised a performance alongside Stans Café. We were also very excited to dabble in areas other than performing, giving us the opportunity to expand our skill sets. For some of us creating our own companies/ being a part of a theatre company when we graduate is something we’d love to do so it would be silly to pass up this opportunity, especially when it gives us direct experience with working at an industry standard.

We also all know it’ll be a lot of hard work, putting in long hours and working intensively to create a final product we’re all ridiculously proud of but we know it’ll all be worth it in the end.

Once we’d discussed this as a company, we went on to read through the module handbooks; having conversations about how we’ll be assessed, attendance and punctuality and the workload we were about to take on. It was going to be intense, but I think we can all agree it will be an amazing experience.

After that, we split off into teams based on the other area we’d like to work in and be assessed in. These were;

·         Marketing

·         Project Management

·         Media

·         Costume/Hair/Makeup

·         Set and Props

·         Tech

And each team had to write don the roles and tasks this team would have to take on, then divide and conquer these jobs between all the team members, deciding who’s in charge of doing what throughout this process. We then had to write down our ‘Creative How’s’ for these jobs, so basically that would need to be done to complete these tasks. Once this was done, we all pitched these ideas to the company and discussed ideas to further these, as well as what we’d be starting on first.

We had a quick 15 minute break after this, were everyone went to get food, and us as the media team, grabbed members of every other team to interview them for the weekly vlogs which we will also be creating alongside this blog https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0Y3tB_ltAcLmOCXKFj450w 

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After the break we came back to brainstorm company names, so far we’ve come up with The Question Mark; Company; In Company With…; Pace Enterprise; A.R.T (Artistic Research Team); Semi Colon (to be continued;); DotDotDot; Soon…; Jambalaya; The Cap and the Gown; This is the end; Cliff Edge and Ellipsis but none really seem to be standing out as a crowd favourite…so back to the drawing board it is for that and hopefully in the next week someone will have a fantastic brain wave for a company name.

By this point we were very close to the end of our three-hour session so it was time to discuss our first interim assessment, which will be next week!! It’s all getting very real now, I know! For the assessment we have to work in small groups to complete our homework for James Yarker and creatively pitch an idea for our performance. So that could be done using video, sound or dance…anything creative and original to get your ideas across. Hopefully next week’s vlog will contain footage of that for you all to see!

So that’s me done for this week! I’m signing off here but I hope you all enjoyed reading this post and will continue to follow along with us right up until our performance dates

Lauren –xo