The show must go on… but who am I ghosting with that one?

Well, we managed to get the videos of actors saying the ‘Seven Ages’ speech (including John Gielgud, Benedict Cumberbatch, Morgan Freeman, as well as others) and merge them into one over lapping video, though not for as much of the speech as we initially intended. We fitted in the words from the speech into our script, though again not as we initially hoped for of having the whole speech in but we still managed to get some in. And we even managed to create a slide to highlight that we used these words, though we couldn’t get it to float in as originally hoped. All the same though, we had managed to achieve what we had hoped.

Through rehearsing for this naturally mistakes were made and corrected as we went. We became tired and exhausted through all the running around. Sometimes we couldn’t find the correct cardboard to match what we were talking about. This was our rehearsal process, and we wanted to ghost it, we wanted to ghost ourselves in our own performance.

We added in to our script the mistakes we made within the rehearsals, we picked up cardboard with both Booker and Carlson on when quoting one or the other as if unsure of which it really was. When we mentioned Sir Ian McKellan and Sir Patrick Stewart Kyle and Lauren should hold up their names on the cardboard but were either too tired to or couldn’t find them. While frantically running around the set, I slipped and fell on the cardboard and Lauren would be so exhausted she would miss her cue. And Kyle even had the script with him through the performance as if a rehearsing rather than fully performing.

Fig i: List of cardboard titles   Fig ii: Highlighted script with mistakes and cardboard instructions

One final way in which ghosting was incorporated into this performance was simply we were the final performance of the day. For which the previous two performances were regarding ghosting. One featured information on The National Theatre’s production of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land, as did we. One featured cardboard signs in reference to Forced Entertainment, as did we. They were all performed in the same studio of the same building. As we performed, the audience may very well have been thinking of the previous performances regarding any of these factors. We were haunting not only ourselves from our rehearsals but also our other students but doing similar topics in a similar style in the same venue. Ghosting is in everything. Goodnight.

 Fig iii: Post show rest

Work Cited

Fig i: Marshall, A. (2017).

Fig ii: Marshall, A. (2017).

Fig iii: Higgin,s K. (2017).

Let the ghosting begin…return?

Well since it has appeared through the module once or twice…

*or every other lecture*

…as a group we decided to look into the phenomenon of ghosting for our performative presentation as part of the practical part of this module. For the three of us, another aspect of the course that had stuck with us was the video we watched of Forced Entertainment where they used cardboard signs, which on later research we learned they use in various projects. The production of theirs we had seen was of their 2014 project 12am: Awake and Looking Down but they also use cardboard signs in their later project Real Magic. Whereas Forced Entertainment used their cardboard sings in 12am: Awake and Looking Down to “endlessly reinvent [the] identities” (Forced Entertainment, 2017) of their characters, we wanted to use our cardboard signs to help us reiterate what we believed to be the important aspects of the performance. We thought if our cardboard was covered in the research we had done and also some of the statistics we might find out, it would help audiences full engaged with what we would be telling them.Fig i: Real Magic Fig ii: 12AM: Awake and Looking Down

So, that’s the general ‘what’ and ‘how’ sorted, but we needed some context, something we knew people could relate to, to make it interesting. Simple enough, we’re doing drama, we’ll do drama everyone in the audience will know, we’ll do Shakespeare. After all, sure there’s no one more ghosted on stage then the works of Shakespeare.

In our sessions about The Dramatic Text we looked at the introduction to Simon Stephens Pornography in which Jacqueline Bolton states that the seven scenes within the piece are “[b]ased upon Jaque’s ‘Seven Ages of Man’ speech in As You Like It” (Bolton, 2013, 14). So, looking for more things to ghost in our performance about the subject, ‘Seven Ages of Man’ seemed like a good place to start.

Our idea was to do a simple power point with various slides on whatever topics we eventually decided on. Along with this we’d write a script that would discuss ghosting, incorporating some current popular figures (actors, politicians, etc.) and using cardboard to really state the facts. Throughout the script we would include the words from the As You Like It speech and then at the end we would show a slide on the power point which would consist of our script and all the words from ‘Seven Ages’ would then float together to create the famous Shakespeare speech.

One last idea we had that we wanted to incorporate was multi-media, linking this to our discussions on media within performance and also liveness. The three of us, of course all fans of theatre and actors, wanted so showcase some of the actors who are ghosted regularly and so had the idea of getting videos of these actors all performing the same speech and linking it all together to complete it. Since we were already looking into ‘Seven Ages of Man’ why not use that speech, it can’t be that difficult to find enough famous actors saying? Wrong.

Searching the internet for these videos proved harder than we expected, but in the end we found enough to complete the first part of the speech.

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

The have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages.

Shakespeare, 2.7.142-146

Through script writing and development, improving and devising as we go, we were sure we would then also find other Shakespearean elements we could ghost with our performance, as well as fitting in more popular and current characters and issues.

Let the group work begin!

 

Work Cited

Bolton, J. (2013) Introduction. In: Stephens, S Pornography. London: Methuen.

Forced Entertainment (2017) 12AM: Awake and Looking Down. Forced Entertainment. Available from: http://www.forcedentertainment.com/project/12am-awake-looking-down/ [accessed 6 January 2017].

Fig i: Forced Entertainment (2017) Real Magic. Forced Entertainment. Available from: http://www.forcedentertainment.com/project/real-magic/ [accessed on 6 January 2017]

Fig ii: Forced Entertainment (2017) 12AM: Awake and Looking Down. Forced Entertainment. Available from:  http://www.forcedentertainment.com/project/12am-awake-looking-down/ [accessed 6 January 2017].

Shakespeare, W. (2010) As You Like It. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

 

The Imagination of Horses… Hang on that s not right…

Dan Rebellato argues in his article, When We Talk of Horses Or, what do we see when we see a play? that within the subject of Theatre Studies “we study not plays on the page but performance itself” (Rebellato, 2009, 17). He states also that in his experience that when he reads a play he does not imagine the performance vividly in his mind, nor does he simply read what is written, it is a cross of the two, only when it is performed in front of you can you full understand what is meant within the text, and in turn the performance.

He also disputes the idea that “dramatic theatre […] is illusionistic” (Rebellato, 2009, 17) which is certainly a view I share when he expresses himself by saying “No sane person watching a play believes that what is being represented before them is actually happening” (Rebellato, 2009, 18) If they did, I’d certainly love to see this person reactions when watching something like Angels in America. Moving on though…

What we imagine and what we see are completely different things, if you are doing one, you cannot be doing the other. If you are to imagine a cow, you will imagine it how you recall seeing a cow, using your memories (ghosting, again, really?) but you will only be able to imagine the cow in part, there will be elements you may not have noticed previously or have simply forgotten the finer details. If though you physically see a cow you will not use your imagination at all, you will see simply see it there as fact, not a memory or a “mistaken belief” (Rebellato, 2009, 18). Either one is creating an image or one is merely seeing one. Moreover, “[w]e don’t always imagine things visually” (Rebellato, 2009, 21), somethings can’t be mentally visualised, Rebellato uses the example of world without loyalty, how can one imagine something that, if it did exist, wasn’t a physical object.

 

Work Cited

Rebellato, D. (2009) When We Talk of Horses Or, what do we see when we see a play?. Performance Research,14(1) 17-28.

 Fig i: Cast List of The City

The specifically unspecific. (Just a quickie)

For an example of the post-dramatic we looked at The City by Martin Crimp, for which the opening character list and stage directions are above:

Both “heading for forty” (Crimp, 2008, 3)? “A small girl of what? nine or ten?” (Crimp, 3)? My experience in reading scripts may not be as vast as others but surely that’s a bit vague? Especially for the time and place being “Blank” (Crimp, 2008, 3).

Thankfully after looking into things a bit more I realised that, vague though it is, it is also very specific. It is specific in the fact that these are instructions being giving to the director and actors playing these parts. It is specific when addressing the designers of the set. It is specifically unspecific.

As a performance it shouldn’t be seen as clearly being set in a middle-class suburban house in the mid-seventies. It shouldn’t be two people, one thirty-seven and one thirty-nine and another twenty-nine. It shouldn’t be a girl who has just had her tenth birthday.

 

Identity, in a poststructuralist discourse, is something that is consciously constructed out of the texts that are already present in the world; it is not something that exists prior to, or is expressed through, its own original voice.

Tomlin, 2009, 60

Through the play we may learn more small details about the characters, but never through what can be classes as their own voice, it is always clearly through the voice of another, through the voice of Crimp. The opening stage directions say straight away of this that there is little identity to these characters, they are nothing special, they could be anyone, in anytime, in anyplace. Their identity is minimal at best.

 

Work Cited

Crimp, M. (2008) The City.

Fig i: Marshall, A. (2016).

Tomlin, L. (2009) ‘And their stories fell apart even as I was telling them’ Poststructuralist performance and the no-longer-dramatic text. Performance Research, 14(11) 57-64.

Why see a play? When it’s over, it’s over.

Theatre is no longer the audience grabbing, socialising hub that it used to be, but why is this? Is it too expensive? Is it seen too much to be snobby, a hobby for the middle-classes? Is it purely that theatre just not very good anymore? Or is it simply inconvenient for our modern society?

I am not disputing that in some case the price of seeing a performance can put people off and that due to these prices it is arguably more middle-class people attending the theatre rather than the working-classes but what do you actually get from it? You have to travel to the venue, whether that’s a local hall or a large theatre in a major city. You then might have to sort out parking, accommodation, food before and/after. You may have to queue in cold wet weather to then sit in your wet clothes for anything up to three hours and then go home with nothing but a ticket stub and maybe a program containing more adverts than production information. You could have stayed at home and watched the television or a film, you could have gone online and done some shopping, you might have more to show for it.

“[T]heater does not produce a tangible object” (Lehmann, 2006, 16). Going to the theatre is an experience, it’s not simply a product one can purchase and take home; with the technology people now have at home to keep them entertained, why go to the theatre? Is it really just for the experience? Yes.

Theatre means the collectively spent and used up lifetime in the collectively breathed air of that space in which the performing and the spectating take place. […] The theatre performance turns the behaviour onstage and in the auditorium into a  joint text, a ‘text’ even if there is no spoken dialogue on stage or between actors and audience.

Lehmann, 2006, 17

By coming to the theatre, you are a part of the theatre, you are a part of that performance that is why you travel and eat and get wet. You don’t do it for the ticket stub and the programme (though they are nice souvenirs) you do it to be part of the text. To add though, with technology constantly changing theatres have in recent years created more ways to make theatre more of a “marketable commodity” (Lehmann, 2006, 16). With live streaming, DVD recordings and online downloads, you can now take the theatre home with you after an event. But then do you really get the same experience if you take it home and watch it again through a mediated camera from angles that have been chosen for you by someone else who has deemed them ‘the best seats in the house’? Well I better stop there, I feel this might be a discussion for another post.

Work Cited

Lehmann, H. (2006) Postdramatic Theatre. London: Routledge.