Intensive Week - Working With Stan's Cafe
The Intensive Week
It is Monday, which means it is also day one out of five of our intensive sessions with James Yarker from Stan's Cafe. This essentially means that during what some may know as a reading week, or for De Montfort University students, cultural exchanges week, we will be working from 10 till 5 on our production of Live From the National Theatre. Having this opportunity to work intensively for the week will allow us to really push ourselves to create some fantastic work and present new and exciting ideas.
I should first introduce myself, I am Samantha and this week I will be writing an update on all the exciting things that myself and team get up to! As Lauren stated before, the two of us and Ryan will be updating you on some of the events that happen on the lead up to 'Live at The National Theatre'.
To begin each day we all sit together and discuss general plans for the day and the themes that James would like us to explore, followed by a yoga-inspired warm up with a follow up of energising name games. Likewise, to end each day we join back together and say one thing that inspired us, helped us or that we would potentially like to improve upon. Doing this became an essential part of our working process, as it really allowed for reflection and inspiration.
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Monday 26th February, Day 1.
This session seemed to be heavily influenced by the ideas of CCTV and missed connections. The first ensemble piece we worked on together began from a dark room and the single light of a laptop. James explained to us that as performers all we had to do was walk up to the laptop, in groups or as a solo, and look at it as if we were watching a selection of live CCTV footage and to make comments on what we were witnessing. Some of these ranged from a dog and cat chase to a man falling into a freezer at a supermarket. The first attempt was somewhat slow paced as we were all trying to understand the task at hand, but by the third run we were all getting involved and from an audience, perspective made the whole performance very believable.
The second ensemble piece we created was centred around sending and receiving messages on a mobile phone. Similarly to the first piece the room was black, however this time instead of using the laptop as a light source each performer held their phones in front of their faces. In stages, we would proceed to say messages that we'd previously searched in the past weeks and play received tones from our phones.
Both pieces were visually powerful and from the point of view of the performer, gave a lot of excitement around our performance and what the future for it held.
-
Tuesday 27th February, Day 2.
Today we stepped further away from missed connections and CCTV along with the idea of living in a Big Brother style world and moved further into advertisements and buffering.
The inspiration of advertisement came from a piece that was created in the session from week three where the premise was that the advert kept popping up at inconsiderate times. Our advert was a choreographed dance to the Back Street Boys that involved a lot of typical boy band moves and was added some exciting and fun relief to our day.
Buffering came in the form of a gif or a repeated movement. We began by simply walking around the room but adding in slight pauses, slow to fast paces, and repeated movements. From this, we all partnered up and made an exchange that involved some kind of buffering similar to what we had done before. Finally, the partners were put into the performance space and at random intervals had to start their gif movement. It was an interesting way of looking at just how we can incorporate buffered movements into our performance without trying to be conventional.
-
Wednesday 28th February, Day 3.
Wednesday's session began and James had arranged a camera and TV set up in the campus centre black space, with the idea of having A Midsummer Night's Dream being performed to a camera that was in a separate room but would be playing on the stage live in the performance. So we decided to experiment with how the actors on the stage in front of an audience would be able to maintain their attention. James has split the group in half and decided that the actors in the live space would simply stare at the audience in a welcoming manner. It was an interesting experiment as we were able to engage more with an audience than we had done previously.
From the gifs, James had decided that he wanted to see the backstories to the characters. Myself (Samantha), Ryan and Lauren wanted to look at trolling and the person behind the online trolls. We set up three mirrors in the space and used created a short piece that showed us looking into the mirrors and at our own reflections, as often trolls are unhappy with themselves and we aimed to demonstrate that. It was a simple set up, but it was effective and to the point. To further develop the piece James wanted us to delve further into each character and really show how all of us ended up the people we are today.
-
Thursday 1st March, Day 4.
In this session, we looked back at the missed connections and buffering from sessions one and two.
We began making a brand new ensemble piece which involved a one-sided FaceTime call. We split into groups of either solo or pairs and started scripting a short monologue of a call where you could only hear one person. Once we'd scripted them James had three people stood on stage with their iPhones and had them connect calls with the partners outside of the room whom then took turns to perform their monologues. All the calls ended up being very varied, which worked well, and the staging of the piece made a simple phone call seem very moving.
To end the session we went back to the buffering piece we had created in Tuesday's session and developed it further. We did this by adapting our gifs to match our new characters, this included people taking selfies, playing Frisbie, a proposal and even a fight. In between the abstracted displays and buffered movements groups began to perform their naturalistic performances. It created an interesting dynamic on stage as we were presented with these two very different styles.
-
Friday 2nd March, Snow Day.
Friday we all worked from home as the continued snow had made it that James was unable to reach us. It also came as a day of reflection on the past week. Working so intensily had been hard work for everyone but reflecting on all the work we created showed just why these weeks are so important. As a company we have now refined the themes we want to portay in our performance and just how we will move forward with it.
We hope you have enjoyed following our jounery so far and continue to keep up to date with our work!
-
It is Monday, which means it is also day one out of five of our intensive sessions with James Yarker from Stan's Cafe. This essentially means that during what some may know as a reading week, or for De Montfort University students, cultural exchanges week, we will be working from 10 till 5 on our production of Live From the National Theatre. Having this opportunity to work intensively for the week will allow us to really push ourselves to create some fantastic work and present new and exciting ideas.
I should first introduce myself, I am Samantha and this week I will be writing an update on all the exciting things that myself and team get up to! As Lauren stated before, the two of us and Ryan will be updating you on some of the events that happen on the lead up to 'Live at The National Theatre'.
To begin each day we all sit together and discuss general plans for the day and the themes that James would like us to explore, followed by a yoga-inspired warm up with a follow up of energising name games. Likewise, to end each day we join back together and say one thing that inspired us, helped us or that we would potentially like to improve upon. Doing this became an essential part of our working process, as it really allowed for reflection and inspiration.
-
Monday 26th February, Day 1.
This session seemed to be heavily influenced by the ideas of CCTV and missed connections. The first ensemble piece we worked on together began from a dark room and the single light of a laptop. James explained to us that as performers all we had to do was walk up to the laptop, in groups or as a solo, and look at it as if we were watching a selection of live CCTV footage and to make comments on what we were witnessing. Some of these ranged from a dog and cat chase to a man falling into a freezer at a supermarket. The first attempt was somewhat slow paced as we were all trying to understand the task at hand, but by the third run we were all getting involved and from an audience, perspective made the whole performance very believable.
The second ensemble piece we created was centred around sending and receiving messages on a mobile phone. Similarly to the first piece the room was black, however this time instead of using the laptop as a light source each performer held their phones in front of their faces. In stages, we would proceed to say messages that we'd previously searched in the past weeks and play received tones from our phones.
Both pieces were visually powerful and from the point of view of the performer, gave a lot of excitement around our performance and what the future for it held.
-
Tuesday 27th February, Day 2.
Today we stepped further away from missed connections and CCTV along with the idea of living in a Big Brother style world and moved further into advertisements and buffering.
The inspiration of advertisement came from a piece that was created in the session from week three where the premise was that the advert kept popping up at inconsiderate times. Our advert was a choreographed dance to the Back Street Boys that involved a lot of typical boy band moves and was added some exciting and fun relief to our day.
Buffering came in the form of a gif or a repeated movement. We began by simply walking around the room but adding in slight pauses, slow to fast paces, and repeated movements. From this, we all partnered up and made an exchange that involved some kind of buffering similar to what we had done before. Finally, the partners were put into the performance space and at random intervals had to start their gif movement. It was an interesting way of looking at just how we can incorporate buffered movements into our performance without trying to be conventional.
-
Wednesday 28th February, Day 3.
Wednesday's session began and James had arranged a camera and TV set up in the campus centre black space, with the idea of having A Midsummer Night's Dream being performed to a camera that was in a separate room but would be playing on the stage live in the performance. So we decided to experiment with how the actors on the stage in front of an audience would be able to maintain their attention. James has split the group in half and decided that the actors in the live space would simply stare at the audience in a welcoming manner. It was an interesting experiment as we were able to engage more with an audience than we had done previously.
From the gifs, James had decided that he wanted to see the backstories to the characters. Myself (Samantha), Ryan and Lauren wanted to look at trolling and the person behind the online trolls. We set up three mirrors in the space and used created a short piece that showed us looking into the mirrors and at our own reflections, as often trolls are unhappy with themselves and we aimed to demonstrate that. It was a simple set up, but it was effective and to the point. To further develop the piece James wanted us to delve further into each character and really show how all of us ended up the people we are today.
-
Thursday 1st March, Day 4.
In this session, we looked back at the missed connections and buffering from sessions one and two.
We began making a brand new ensemble piece which involved a one-sided FaceTime call. We split into groups of either solo or pairs and started scripting a short monologue of a call where you could only hear one person. Once we'd scripted them James had three people stood on stage with their iPhones and had them connect calls with the partners outside of the room whom then took turns to perform their monologues. All the calls ended up being very varied, which worked well, and the staging of the piece made a simple phone call seem very moving.
To end the session we went back to the buffering piece we had created in Tuesday's session and developed it further. We did this by adapting our gifs to match our new characters, this included people taking selfies, playing Frisbie, a proposal and even a fight. In between the abstracted displays and buffered movements groups began to perform their naturalistic performances. It created an interesting dynamic on stage as we were presented with these two very different styles.
-
Friday 2nd March, Snow Day.
Friday we all worked from home as the continued snow had made it that James was unable to reach us. It also came as a day of reflection on the past week. Working so intensily had been hard work for everyone but reflecting on all the work we created showed just why these weeks are so important. As a company we have now refined the themes we want to portay in our performance and just how we will move forward with it.
We hope you have enjoyed following our jounery so far and continue to keep up to date with our work!
-
Please check us out on our social media to find more updates:
Snapchat: dmu3rdyrblog
Twitter: @I2eye18
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