Show Me.

The use of project in theatre has grown rapidly in the past 20 years and in fact it's rather difficult to find productions that don't use projections in one way or another. Shows using projections are: Billy Elliot, Wicked, War Horse, Matilda, Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Les Miserables, Spring Awakening, the list is endless. Charlie and the Chocolate factory as shown above is one of the best uses of projections currently on the West End/Broadway, the man behind the projections in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is Jon Driscoll.

Driscoll's credits include;

Ghost, Lun-Fantanne Theatre

Phantom of the Opera 25th Anniversary, Royal Albert Hall 

The Power of Yes, Lytteltan Theatre

Immersive yet practical, in the theatre the possibilities of projections are endless and free up time and narrative because they are so quick to change. They give the director the opportunity to use the element of surprise, something now lost in theatre due to complicated scene changes. Whilst literal in meaning the projections give the show another dimension for the audience to take in. In Charlie the projections are more game like to show the playfull-ness of the subject matter whereas in Phantom the projections are hyperrealistic in order to convey the very human emotions one must feel to connect to the story line of the show.

This is what I like about Jon's work, they assist the audience not hinder it. It is there to add to their experience and their understanding of the narrative, not to act alone. As stand alone pieces they could be exhibited however their naturalistic base setting could cause problems as they could be seen as too literal for modern day art.

I'd also like to give a mention to the 2009 production of Richard Bean's England People Very Nice a show which mixed animation (Pete Bishop) with live action by projecting animated interludes and backdrops to scene onto the front of the abstract set of East End Houses (Set by Mark Thompson). Here is a link to a behind the scenes video showing you clips of the show and how the actors interact with the set.

Make Me Care

Last year I remember watching the bird installation of Chris Milk and being fascinated by it, how it had a meaning behind it but it didn't try to confuse the audience it involved the audience. Using the Microsoft Kinect the camera tracks the audience and gives them the power to control the projection, immersing the audience and making them into birds.

Set up as three separate screens the first screen represents the birth of an idea, the initial conception, the lightning in a bottle.

The second the critical response to the idea, the people tearing it down, showing it's limitations.

Then finally you have the third screen showing the freedom of collaboration between the work and the artist making the idea work.

This is the kind of work I enjoy because it leaves the audience in awe of the creation, they go away talking about the idea and the technology behind it they don't leave feeling uncomfortable or stupid, they leave having enjoyed themselves.

I say this because when I am procrastinating from doing work like this unlike most people who play games, or look at cat videos apparently I watch TED Talks. I love TED Talks the idea that all of these people coming together with different fields of interesting but a collective intrigue to learn. Today I found the playlist 'The Power of Film' and I set it running.

The first video that came up was this, Andrew Stanton: The clues to a Great Story.

In the video he goes through his own work and pinpoints the moments he now realises he learnt something about story telling.
 Something that stuck with me was the 'Unifying theory of 2 + 2', a theory in which he suggests that the audience like working for the story, but they don't like knowing they are working for it. I think that's why I had such a hard time understanding the appeal of the videos we saw last week was because these artists didn't just make the audience work to understand, they didn't give them the puzzle pieces to begin to understand.  They also didn't 'make me care', they didn't give me a reason to be attached to what was happening nor the person involved, as an audience member I felt obsolete.

The next video was by Rob Legato: The Art of Creating Awe, this is what I want to do. I want to create the illusion that I'm not there but the audience doesn't get confused by trying to figure out how it's done. I don't want my audience thinking I'm crazy because they don't understand whats happening, I want them to think I'm crazy because my work takes what they understand and makes it into something they've never seen before.

For me a good experimental film is something that takes one aspect of a seemingly 'standard' film and plays with it, experiments with it, but doesn't distract from what the narrative is; because if it doesn't tell a story then I'm sorry to say you've already lost me.

Last Weeks Awakening

When we were assigned our sound project my first instinct was Spring Awakening (I know, shock horror right?) as mentioned in my last post Spring Awakening is currently being revived on Broadway with the use of sign language. Now this is the first time in Broadway history that this has happened which is still mind blowing to me. I went to see a modern adaptation of the original play in 2014 and as part of my A Levels I had to know the synopsis and it was as follows 'Anya Reiss' new version examines the exuberance, intensity and confusion of teenager life today. Spring Awakening asks important and pressing questions about how young people are shaped for their future by a generation that doesn't understand them.' it doesn't really touch on miscommunication when that is literally what the play is about, something I didn't know until I read about the ASL version.

Now with that in mind my immediate instinct was to create a version of a important point in the show for people with the opposite problem, people who are visually impaired. SA is very interesting visually for instance the band is onstage and interacts with the actors, something people who are visually impaired miss even with AD you can't explain the entire show to someone without ruining the experience, the shock factor, of a very explicit show. I've been speaking to fans online about which passage they believe would work with this idea and a lot of people mentioned the ending monologue of Moritz, a 15-year-old who gives up on trying to please everyone and commits suicide (a tragedy blamed on his best friend), the monologue is him as a ghost talking to his best friend who has ran away from his problems and is now sat in the graveyard staring at another characters' gravestone.

In the monologue Moritz outright lies to Melchior about being dead, how amazing it is, there are so many rises and falls of emotions that doing the sound project would be very interesting indeed. I even did a bit of research on the character resulting in a little case study so I could get the narrative from a different perspective.

However whilst I was writing what I could do a song came on itunes and everything just made sense? I guess. The song is a stand alone song by musical theatre composers Kerrigan and Lowdermilk called Last Weeks Alcohol, a beautifully written song with poetic like music behind it. Whilst it's 8 minutes in length the actual lyrics are poetic enough you feel carried away with them yet theatre orientated enough they are descriptive of their surroundings.  When I was writing out the section of the song and brainstorming what I could do sound wise it just fit. Now I'm in the predicament of do I go with my initial idea which was really intriguing for me, new ground yet made me really excited. Or do I go with the idea that I love and is equally exciting just not as progressive as I would like.

I'll make my mind up eventually, but if you have time watch these two videos. The first one is Last Weeks Alcohol performed by Andy Mientus a song I've never been able to skip on my itunes (also the orchestrations in this song are just phenomenal), the second one is the official trailer for Deaf Wests Spring Awakening on Broadway every time I watch it, it still simply blows my mind.

Deaf Awakening

When things collide normally those familiar with the original are very much against the change, however in the past week the ALS Deaf West Theatre version of Spring Awakening opened on broadway, the first sign language inclusive show to ever do so. Directed by Michael Arden the show was originally crowd funded for a string of performances in LA but was so well received it was immediately approached for a second run and then Broadway, none of the performers were recast resulting in 20 Broadway debuts most of which are deaf actors, including Ali Stroker the first person ever to perform on Broadway in a wheelchair.

I've always said that theatre leads the charge when it comes to inclusion of minorities and I stand by that. This year alone not only did we see a majority of women winning in non-segregated categories at the Tony awards, the first all female team won for Best Musical - the musical in question being a retelling of openly gay Alison Bechdel's life story of growing up with a gay father which includes a scene of 11 year-old Alison singing a song about her questioning her feelings a for a woman (Watch the Tony performance here, I may have cried a bit....) . This season Broadway (and the West End in some cases) has seen Autistic characters (The Curious Incident of the dog in the Nighttime), the first ever Asian-American woman to win Featured Role in a Musical (The King and I), the revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch a show about Trans people, the rehearsal progress of Allegiance a new show starring George Takei about a family and their task to save their family from wrongful imprisonment of Japanese Americans during WW2. Plus the Tony Awards was hosted by Kristen Chenoweth and openly bisexual Alan Cumming making puns about his sexuality all night.

Ali Stroker in Rehearsals for her Broadway debut

Then you have Spring Awakening a show were if the actor is deaf, the character is deaf. The actors in the wheelchair, the characters in a wheelchair. Or in the case of Krysta Rodriguez if the actor has cancer, the character has cancer. The show also tackles teen suicide, teen pregnancy, sexuality and emotion/physical abuse from parents, it's a tough show but it opens your eyes to a lot of things.

The plot of spring awakening, something I didn't realise until now, is based on miscommunication. So the use of ASL just makes sense, it simply fits and once it was explained to me I was genuinely perplexed at why it wasn't done in the first place and annoyed at myself for not realising sooner. One of the great things about this revival is nothing fundamental about the show has changed, the songs are the same, the plot is the same the only difference is the use of ASL and the use of voice over actors for the deaf actors who can not speak the role audibly.

I had heard of the revival when it was still in LA but over looked it as just another production of the show and didn't really think anything of it. I've seen a modern adaptation of the play live at the West Yorkshire Playhouse a few years back, it was set in a creepy playground and used social media as a way of bringing it back up to date including the suicide of one the characters being via a Youtube video. The use of video within the production stuck with me because it felt like it added a new dimension to a otherwise well known plot so when I found out that the new LA version wasn't changing much it just didn't really grab my attention. It wasn't until it got it's second run and Andy Mientus was cast in his old role (He was in the original National Tour cast) that I realised I should really read about it, after that I was hooked.

I grew up in a school that was disability inclusive but I never encountered anyone who spoke solely though BSL and in all honesty, I never really thought about. Some of my friends know the basic BSL finger spelling alphabet but that's it, looking back I'm a bit ashamed of myself for never realising how many people need it. Ever since having my eyes opened to this I've noticed people everyday using sign language, people using cochlear implants and signing at the same time, just little things that I've overlooked for so long.

I also realised how inaccessible my own work is, take Youtube for example; I am aware that I speak incredibly fast and sometimes with a rather strange accent, if someone couldn't hear what I was saying they would not be able to lip-read either. Youtube does offer an automatic captioning service but it's so bad sometimes it's just useless. I could write the captions so that if someone did need them they would be accurate, however right now I don't because I never saw it as a problem before. I never thought how people need to attend special screenings of films if they need an interpreter or captioning, or if you want to got the theatre you need to warn them in-advance that you need assistance and then they will tell you what days are available, you can't choose the date they do.

I guess what I'm taking from all of this is that I want my work to experienced by as many people as possible and to do that I have to make the work as accessible as possible. I'm not entirely sure how but I think I'm going to start with captioning my videos, possibly learning a bit more sign language just something to help people who are currently overlooked.

Here is a preview of the show before it went to Broadway, as you can see the signs are integrated with the show and have a very fluid, almost choreography look to them.

So you have 24 hours to apply to University

This month I have been working with the marketing department to write an article and create a video counterpart surrounding Clearing and A Level Results day. It's been very interesting and caused few debates over how honest a writer should be about a situation, but it's finished and available to read here.

Plus the vlog can be seen here!

(I also learnt the hard way that filming late in the day and using natural light can cause problems that even colour correction can't fix!) 

Find What You Love

A great little video from Tucker McDonald compiling speeches from Steve Jobs and Martin Scorsese.

I love finding videos like this, motivational speeches are actually useful for me as I found out years ago. I remember sitting in an auditorium at an awards ceremony for Durham Universities Aim Higher scheme - bored out of my mind. It was the night before a huge school trip to France so me and my friends were overly excited, we had just had our taster day at Sixth Form which had further confused me about life in general because A Level Physics suddenly didn't seem as fun as it had seemed on paper and here I was sat in a room with a guy in front of me just pacing up and down, silent.

No-one in the room spoke, they just watched this guy pace. Sometimes he would make eye contact mostly he wouldn't and then suddenly he started shouting at us. He started shouting at us about life, and what we wanted to accomplish and how we were going to do it, where we were going to study, what we were going to study and how that would eventually effect our lives. Then he just stopped and started pacing again.

I wish I could tell you why he did that, and he did give us an explanation that I've since forgotten, something about waking us up to reality? All I know is it worked.

When he started speaking normally we all couldn't take our eyes off him, we were hanging on his every word about his life growing up in a rough area of London where most people had written him off. He told us of how that chip on his shoulder spurred him to make his life what he wanted despite all odds being against him and that's exactly how we should approach life. His speech was articulate, he spoke in a manner that demand respect and attention and I don't know I just remember going home and researching everything I could about sixth form and my different options. So whatever he set out to do worked for me.

Ever since then when I need a bit of motivation I research my favourite actors/writers/directors and see if they've ever given a commencement speech, sometimes a motivational speech needs to be given at the beginning of your degree as well as the end. At the moment my favourite is Christian Borles not the most well known actor off broadway but a well rounded one at least.

The downside to this approach is it only works well if you already have a goal you need to be motivated to fulfil and the flaw in my plan is I don't know what that goal is. One of the things the AimHigher scheme equipped me with was the ability to plan out my life, my plans ranged from being a chemical engineer, to being a rollercoaster engineer, getting a music scholarship and attending the Royal School of Music to being a playwright and director. Not having a plan is terrifying for a person who has literally been planning their life on paper in lovely colour coded tables and charts, yet the plan always falls through.

The upside to not having a plan is that you weigh your options, and the fact that plans in the past have failed even though you have given them full credence even if just for a day, just means there is one less misleading possibility in the world and you are one step closer to finding the right one.

So now I'm reading, reading about writing (The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth) a great book poking fun at Shakespeare and his methods, musical theatre composition (Sondheim on Music by Mark Eden Horowits) an insight to the technical composition of Steven Sondheim, composition for film (Soundtrack Nation by Tom Hoover) a compilation of interviews with top film composers. Watching movies and documentaries, The Sherman Brothers showing the lives of the top disney composers behind Mary Poppins, Jobs a Steve Jobs biopic, The Pixar Story an amazing insight to an incredible creative company, Waking Sleeping Beauty the story of Disney animation and Six by Sondheim because I need to keep the theme of Sondheim running here.

This is a very long way of saying I'm still here, I'm still working but right now I don't have much to show for it other than a fountain of currently useless knowledge about people who have already done what I want to do.

Long Time No Play

So I haven't posted in while, mainly because I've been preoccupied with doing other work! I recently went to the Fine Art Grad show at Teesside University as a friend of mine was exhibiting, I'll have a post on that soon. But mostly I've been having a bit of a crisis. It seems to be a common crisis of finishing first year and being met with the reality of when you enrol next year you're done, there is no turning back or switching courses because you won't have the funding available to you. As I joined the course through clearing with a last minute change of career plan it's always been in the back of my head that it could have been the wrong decision. After realising that I would much rather read and analyse plays or watch musicals doubt started to set in, in fact I've never wished more that I could take DFSA as a 50/50 course alongside theatre, or even major in DFSA with a minor in Theatre.

Finding out that I did pretty well with my grades did nothing by solidify my confusion because it turns out I did make the right decision on results day and I love the course, so I have to find a way to make theatre and film mix. When I came home from Uni the first thing I did was take advantage of having my DVD collection within arms reach, I proceeded to watch every musical DVD I had. I started thinking how theatre and film aren't actually that different, the major differences 1) In film the director controls the audiences view point 2) In theatre the audience feels a human connection to the characters, in film you need to pander to more senses to create that connection.

With more and more broadway shows being picked for the big screen I looked at the difference
between successful adaptations and the not so successful. Those lacking in dance numbers seemed to get the theatre goers approval rather than those that have them, Sondheim shows coming out on top. Now I love Stephen Sondheim (Award Winning composer/lyricist, Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods, Sunday in the Park with George to name a few), growing up I was never aloud to perform his songs because they were simply too complicated for me as a singer and the poor accompanist. So how is that the most musically complicated and challenging pieces of theatre are those that cross over the easiest?

Whilst Sondheim shows aren't know for their big dance numbers everything is still meticulously choreographed, movement around the stage is so fluid all a camera man has to do is look at the stage version and mimic the movements they do. Simply putting a stage show on screen isn't the way it works.

Now that came out a lot longer than I expected but it is something I want to look into further. But in other news I bought a piano. When I was younger my Dad taught me piano very briefly before he passed away, but he taught me by ear meaning by the time I had professional lessons I was just really confused as to why people were reading music and why they couldn't remember what they just played. Now today I can read music to an extent and I can play piano to an extent, the goal is to play piano by reading music by the end of summer. Maybe even start learning to compose music properly, mix some music tech skills and become the one person orchestra I had to be at A Level, in other words I'm still working on different projects... I'm just taking a longer route than usual.

Also I found one of my old 'Listening Diaries' that I used during Music Tech, it was the first time I recognised the technique qualibet being used in Les Miserable, it's also the technique that insipired the end of our last short film.

 

That was really ramble-ly and not really that progressive but it's just a sum of everything that's going on right now, hopefully I'll have some more blog worthy things soon.