collaborative practice workshop

What we did:

After being split into groups we were assigned a workshop. The first workshop we had was: ‘using ‘heroes’ as a theme create a short piece clearly conveying a character to a target audience. ‘ The first point of call was getting the group to know each other quickly.  After this had been done we worked out what each other’s disciplines were. This gave us a list. like this:

Pip: Props design

Holli: Costume design

Tyrone: Acting

Robyn: Tech

Charley: Musical theatre

Rachael: Musical theatre

Kelsey: Hair and make-up

Paul: Acting

Joe: Tech 

We then talked about who or what we could have for our hero. This took place in the form of a round table discussion. The job of director within our group fell to me and I began making some notes on the discussion. Out of the carnage emerged the idea of using David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust as he was a hero and was very musical, theatrical, he used make up and inserting costumes. So now we had a hero, we had to decide on a target audience. We setteled on doing a children’s tv show.

            From here we decided what each of us could do. We found videos for the designers to use. Then tasks were delegated using each of our skills.

Pip and Holli – design costumes and scenery.

Robyn and Joe – arrange some lights for our show.

Charley and Rachael – devise a dance as the backing dancers.

Tyrone – learn the dance and help devise it.

Kelsey – make up and hair for Ziggy.

Paul – write a song for Ziggy and the ‘ziggettes’ to dance to.

We decided to take an hour from here to design, script, write etc what needed to be done and then take lunch and meet back in the studio at 1pm and work on what need to be sorted out. When we got back everyone work very well with each other making sure that all the costumes and make up were done in time and that we got rehearsal time. 

What was good what was bad about the process:

            I think the process worked out pretty well all told. I had worked with everyone (with the exception of Kelsey) in the group on one show or another (Pip and Holli - Unit 4, Robyn and Joe – Unit 3, Charley and Rachael – Spring Awakening and Tyrone – more or less everyday.) so taking the role as director I knew how people worked and was able to give people jobs and know that they would be accomplished within the timescale required. And having picked a very specific character it made sure that everyone in the group had something to do with their discipline so they would get to have a valid input to the group. There wasn’t really any miscommunication between the group we all knew what was going on during every stage of the development of the piece. 

What research informed this practice:

On the actual day of this workshop there wasn’t any time to carry out research into devising practice, as we had to create something to show in 3 hours. Therefore I used research I had previously carried out in unit 4 (a devising unit) to inform how the piece should be devised. One of the things I used for my performance was viewpoints, looking at how the tempo, duration, gesture and special relationship of the performers could shape the piece. I also thought about how other theatre companies worked for example forced entertainment I read an article on how they put together the show ‘the travels’ (2002) they ran ideas until they got bored of them and then tried something else. The problem for us trying this was our timescale. We only had three hours to put something together so we really didn’t have the luxury of trying something then scrapping it and trying something new. We had to make a decision and run with it. Given more time I would have liked to try other ideas for the performance.

The research that we carried out again wasn’t too In depth. For the most part our research for the character of Ziggy was basically visual. We looked at images and I watched a YouTube video of David Bowie performing as Ziggy Stardust to see how he moved and his speech patterns etc. but the deadline we were working to really didn’t allow for much more research to be carried out.