Developing our ideas - 29th Jan 2014

Having visited the Unicorn Theatre the previous day we spent the 29^th discussing the elements that we liked from the two performances we watched and what aspects we wished to include within our piece.

To help map out possible elements we created a spider diagram that showed the styling aspects that we would possibly explore during the developmental process:

As a group we were particularly interested in multirolling, as it opened up a wide range of stories as we wouldn’t have to be tied down to only having six characters. In “The Pardoner’s Tale” the actor used his voice and physicality to change between characters having a conversation, and this execution of multirolling was something that we wished to experiment with within our piece. As a group we were set on creating something that would be funny and humorous but we didn’t want to avoid being serious. We quite liked the idea of creating something fast paced and having the story constantly changing direction. Having seen “The 39 Steps” in early January we all expressed our enjoyment in the way the pace was used in the piece and so felt that we wanted our piece to share that similar aspect. Another aspect we liked in “The 39 Steps” was body propping as it was intriguing to see how one actor could create a lake and a puddle with the use of his body.  

Once we had written down the possible elements we could use we began to look at what topics we were interested in putting into a story:

Our initial idea was to do something around “imagination” and thought of telling a story about characters that have magical imaginations compared to characters that lack any imagination as they’ve become obsessed with modern technology. However after seeing “The Pardoner’s Tale” we thought about the possibility of creating a performance based on a story that had already been told, such as a fairytale. Fairytales are one topic that most children will have prior knowledge of and so we thought that we could re-tell a well known fairytale and create a different interpretation or modernising it. An example we thought of was changing the story of “The Three Little Pigs” to having the Wolf stealing from the Pigs rather than blowing their houses down. We thought that “stealing” would have been a topic that children would be aware of and so we could use “The Three Little Pigs” as a way of showing the negative repercussions it has on people.

As well as thinking of a starting point for our story we discussed possible elements we were interested of using in the piece. Music was pivotal to “The Pardoner’s Tale” as it was able to create atmosphere in a way that the words couldn’t and there were several rhythms created during their performance to help add audibly to the piece. This led us to thinking about using sound, such as clapping and call and response within our piece and could be used to help create tension in dramatic scenes. I also suggested the possibility of having drumming as having seen Stomp I found that the resonance created through the sound of a beating drum is effective in creating tense or eerie atmospheres and it would be an added element to include within our piece.

The next step after looking at what elements and topics we wished to explore in our Children’s Theatre piece was to find an idea for our piece!