2017 – Page 8

March 15, 2017Hannah Marie DArcy No Comments

A Quiz about something, anything, everything

Fragment theatre fundraiser!

“A key skill for any producer is the ability to be able to put together a budget that accurately reflects the cost of putting on a show” (Seabright, 2010, 31). Recent discussions within our group have taken place, this discussion involved the topic of set and props within our show. To create the aesthetic we desire (which will be revealed in due course) we are planning on having a large set, this large set includes scaffolding along the entirety of the back of the stage, alongside televisions that will be used throughout the show.

Now, for such extravagant set, we are probably going to need an extravagant budget. Which is where my role comes in to play as the producer of Fragment Theatre Company.

After brainstorming a few ideas, some a little bit too adventurous for our own good (including a fun day with bouncy castles and a horse, ridiculous, I know!) I finally came up with the idea of a pub quiz, not quite as exiting but it could still work.

With this is mind I set out looking for venue to host our quiz. After a few options I settled on the University of Lincoln’s student pub, The Swan. The swan was the cheapest option with the most potential of having a large crowd of willing participants.

I set a date for the quiz, that being the 14^th March 2017. Which gave me two weeks in-between to organise everything. First thing first, I needed to create a poster for the quiz, to advertise around the university campus…

(D’Arcy,2017). No automatic alt text available.

I chose a black and white poster for two reasons, number one being that it was an awful lot cheaper to print, and reason number two was because everyone has bright and colourful posters on the university notice boards and I thought that maybe, in a weird way ,by making the poster black and white it would stand out against the colourful posters!

Within the quiz I designated every member of the group to write a round, so the whole cast was involved with the process.

Each member who came to the quiz was charged £2 to enter, with maximum teams of six (This was because the winning team won 6 Tickets to our show)and a hamper of gifts including chocolate, alcohol and other fun (yet cheap) things! as can be seen in the photo below.

(Nixon,2017)

In the end the quiz was a massive quiz with our company raising over £100! Minus away the costs for the prizes leaving us with an overall profit of 88.90 to put towards our show! A massive thank you to everyone who came along and joined in! you were a joyful crowd! and congratulations to our friends in the theatre company ‘Kick a pigeon’ who came first place!

Image may contain: one or more people, people sitting and indoor

(Nixon, 2017) – Kick a Pigeon Theatre Company- The winners!

Here is a photo of Fragment Theatre Company at the quiz! And look we even got matching T-shirts!

(Chattaway, 2017)

Citations

Chattaway, A. (2017) Fragment theatre company group photo: The Swan Pub

D’Arcy. H. (2017) Fragment theatre poster: University of Lincoln library.

Nixon, E. (2017) Fragment Theatre Company, quiz prize: The University of Lincoln, Minerva Building

Seabright, J. (2010) So you want to be a theatre producer? London: Nick Hern Books limited.

March 14, 2017Roxy Jarrold No Comments

Escape into my blog…

Rehearsals are well under way, and at the moment there are so many ideas for our show I’m not sure we will ever come to a final decision! Although we all have the same overall aim; to show an audience ‘the little people in a bigger picture’, how we send this message is becoming a tough nut to crack.

One thing is certain, individual stories are being used as the main basis of our piece in some form. With this, we all brought in a story personal to us that we are willing to share that has impacted our life in some way. This rehearsal was really eye opening, and came with lots of raw emotion and empathy. This solidified the idea of using personal stories to enhance our performance on stage as emotions would be real. We then played around with how we would go about this, as if the stories we use are true to life, we would need ‘characters’ as such. This is when the word ‘meta-theatrical’ performance was brought to light. It all sounds very fancy and to be honest I wasn’t 100% sure what it meant. Whilst researching meta-theatrical shows together we came across a number of comedic approaches. This greatly excited us, because as an ensemble our talents in acting lean towards comedy and playfulness. I wouldn’t say we are unsure, I’d lean more towards ‘artistic overload’ of ideas. So after this rehearsal, we decided our show would be based on… ESCAPISM. We decided to stick with the personal stories, but rather than tell them, we would show how we escape them. We decided to go with this idea because we felt a lot more people would find our show relatable.

Last week, I volunteered to be in charge of making ad ordering our company t-shirts, and yesterday they have arrived! It’s perfect timing as our fundraising quiz was tonight, so we made our debut in them as a group. Taking away the quiz prizes, we managed to make £88.90 profit!

Fragment tops (Jarrold,2017). Fundraising quiz (Jarrold, 2017).

This week also came with some exciting news. Brodie has decided to step down from the marketing role to focus on being a writer, so our producer Hannah asked if I would like to help Emily with the marketing side of things. At the moment my role as choreographer is practical in rehearsal but not much outside of them, so of course I am happy to have a more productive role! I got started straight away; overseeing the Twitter account. I’m really enjoying being a marketing assistant so far, as it’s something I’ve never done before. Choreography will always be ‘my thing’ but if the route for the show we are going down is meta-theatrical and comedy, I’m not sure how much choreographed movement there will be. Still, I’m having lots of fun creating different warm ups to keep everyone on their toes!

Warm up (Jarrold, 2017).

Another big decision we made this week is the name of our show! Now we are clear on the route we want to take it became easier to think of details such as names. Possibilities were flying left right and centre, but i’m pleased to announce the name of Fragment Theatre Company’s debut show is… EXIT THIS WAY.

Work cited:

Jarrold, R. (2017) Fundraising quiz.

Jarrold, R. (2017) Fragment tops.

Jarrold, R. (2017) Warm up.

March 13, 2017Brodie Atkinson No Comments

‘Sometimes I feel I’ve got to run away, I’ve got to get away’ (Soft Cell, 1981)

The Common Thread: Escapism?

The previous blog shows the way we decided to tackle the issue of having so many different and unique people in the company, and being tasked to create one show. Try to find a common thread throughout all of our ideas and that is what we did.

The ideas of mental health, various illnesses, drag and many other things were thrown around in our discussions. It was when we remembered what had been said several times throughout our talks on theatre company and being on a drama course in general, that we started on the path that would eventually lead to Escapism.

Brainstorming Post-It Notes. (Nixon, 2017)

We had been told so much that, us as drama students and content makers, found ourselves in a goldmine of material, due to the massive shifts we were witnessing within politics and society. Brexit, Trump, Terrorism and countless other things are what dominate our screens and have placed us on the edge of a cliff, one that we have to be careful not to fall off of.

A personal mentality I have had from the start of University, let alone the start of this theatre company is that I never wanted to be cliché. I never wanted to (or want to) create content that is obvious, that is expected due to the current situation of the world and deals with issues that are commonly found in the world of the arts. It is a big question that hangs over the art world, Originality. We can never achieve true originality with our content, it is just impossible but I always wanted to not create something that was obvious.

So, we spoke about how we could create a show, that applies to everyone but doesn’t do the obvious and become a direct ‘attack’ on the big issues of today.

The image that inspired our journey. (Allan, 2015)

We began to speak about our personal experiences with this political and social situation we were living through, and once again discovered a vast difference in how we all viewed it. Some were strongly involved in it; some weren’t that fussed by it all and others just didn’t want to give a damn about it. But a theme that ran throughout all of us was a sense of being tired by it all and wanting to ‘escape’ from it.

Quickly, we realised that we had discovered that common thread we so desperately wanted for the piece. From that point, the meetings changed from brainstorming to looking more into this thing, that we all used but had no clue on. From this we quickly discovered a whole world of escapism and how it is a big debating topic when it comes to psychology and copying mechanisms. A key moment, especially when it came to the start of the script, was when we found the sugar and salt speech. ‘Think of escapism like sugar or salt. You can sprinkle it on top of your life to make it better, but too much will ruin the whole thing.’ (Allan, 2015) was the first time we felt like we understood escapism, and would be able to make an audience understand it too.

We had found an ideology that perfectly represented our company manifesto, something that wasn’t limited to a type of person but was available to anyone and is found throughout the world. Something that could reconnect all these fragments.

Works Cited

Nixon, E (2017) Fragment Theatre Company Gallery.

Allan, P (2015) How to Snap Back to Reality when “Escapism” Becomes “Avoidance”. Available from http://lifehacker.com/how-to-snap-back-to-reality-when-escapism-becomes-av-1723091630 (Accessed Feb 12th 2017)

March 4, 2017Chloe Catherine Goddard No Comments

What’s Our Aesthetic?

Now we had an idea of what we wanted our show to be about and the structure of it, we started to discuss the aesthetic of the piece to create a clearer idea of what the show would look like. As a creative designer, I was responsible for the set and the costuming within our show and began to look at different ways scenography could reflect the themes we were exploring.

When considering the set of our piece, it seemed imperative to fully utilise the space that was available to us; in order for us to showcase the themes and aims of our show and theatre company as a whole. When deciding the overall aesthetic within a theatre production the space is a blank canvas to enhance in a way that the show requires. When creating a set, you have the power to ‘make it and break it, what we need to [do to] create the right space and how it can be constructed with form and colour to enhance the human being and the text’ (Howard, 2009, 1). I wanted the set of our piece to compliment the actors in relation to our theme, and work simultaneously with the actors to create the overall feel of the show.

Taking influence from other theatre sets that explore scaffolding

(Pinterest, 2017) (Wilhelm Layher GmbH & Co, 2014)

At this point, our show is focused around the idea of being able to escape everyday issues many people suffer from through different forms of escapism, such as music, reading and writing. Even though ideas are still within the developing process, we know that there will be one main narrator character that will feature throughout, and the setting of the piece would be within this characters ‘world’. As we wanted the set to represent this ‘world’ that the character was creating, altering and manipulating throughout our show my first thought was to use some form of scaffolding. The use of scaffolding signified the narrator’s ‘hands on’ construction of this world, perhaps with the idea that this world is the narrator’s very own escape from his problems.

Initially, my set plans, included a tower of scaffolding positioned along the width of the stage at the very back, with two slightly smaller towers of scaffolding at either side of the stage.

A rough sketch of our initial set layout

(Goddard, C, 2017)

Another aspect of the set we wanted to include was a variety of old and new televisions placed throughout the whole of the stage. This was to indicate an idea that though the media is surrounding our lives constantly, people will continuously have individual personal issues that they want to escape. Therefore by using the towering scaffolding this creates a distance between the actor and the televisions that are placed on them at different heights. This proposes the idea that the character is surrounded by not only all of the conflicts seen in the media but also their individual problems creating some form of entrapment for the character. This could consequently contradict the theme of escapism and sadistically suggest there is never any real escape from issues in everyday life.

Works Cited

Goddard, C. (2017)

Howard, P. (2009) What is Scenography? Abington: Routledge. Available from: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0Kd9AgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=scenography&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=theatre&f=false [Accessed on 4^th March 2017].

Pinterest (2017) Pinterest [online] Available from: https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/147141112804219575/ [Accessed on 4^th March 2017].

Wilhelm Layher GmbH & Co. (2014) Layer. [online] Available from: http://www.layher.co.nz/scaffold/rent-scaffolding-set.html [Accessed on 4th March 2017].

February 28, 2017Hannah Marie DArcy No Comments

Let’s talk about the Heirarchy …

The Discussions around the hierarchy within the theatre company started pretty early on, even though we fully plan of working as a collaborative ensemble it’s important for the whole group to understand who has the final say in the circumstance of a disagreement.

So here is a quick rundown of who is in charge of what…

(Rickards, 2017).

Meet Joe, he’s the director here at Fragment theatre company

Joes job as director is too… well Direct. However, Joe is also in charge of

any thing ‘visual’ when it comes to the show. So basically if a member of the group

has an idea.. one which the audience will see, it goes through Joe first. An example being if

our choreography Roxy has some moves she wants the world to see, she will

have to ask Joe first!

(Rickards, 2017).

Meet, well Me (My names Hannah, in case you have forgotten). And I am the producer

of Fragment theatre company. My job is to make sure everything behind the scenes is getting done on time!

for example, posters, set designs and props lists. I also am in charge of all the money! so I get to decide what gets

bought for the show, examples being costumes, set, and Marketing tools. Members of the group will come to me

with any issues they have regarding behind the scenes stuff! For example I know that our set designer Chloe has some pretty

wacky ideas, so I will have to make sure that we have enough money is the budget to cover the costs.

Myself and Joe will be working together to think about things like who gets cast as what part and the kind of staging/

seating we would like in the auditorium.

(Rickards, 2017)

Next up is Lucy, our Stage Manager! Lucy Works very closely along side myself and Joe.

Lucy’s job is to make sure everything is running smoothly, From the rehearsals/productions meetings

to the actual show itself! But are Lucy is super organised so we know she can do it!

Ok, so, The Hierarchy continues but the three main people who make the decisions are myself, Lucy and Joe! We are a group of ten people, which means ten different opinions!

but if any member of the group has a question rather me, Lucy or Joe will be able to answer it. See Below a Diagram of the Hierarchy that our wonderful stage manager Lucy made!

(Workman, 2017)

Citations

Rickards, M. (2017) Fragment Theatre Company. Lincoln: MR Photography.

Workman, L. (2017) Fragment Theatre Company. Lincoln.