Year: 2017

It’s hard to pin down exactly what I want to do as I have differnt ideas for the same subject and certain elements that I like but aren’t strong enough to hold themselves as a show. To put them all together the show would feel disjointed like puzzle pieces put together badly.

I stopped and asked myself:

What do I want to perform? – Something I’m interested in or passionate about. I want to take something that is personal to me and share this.  It’s letting down the barriers and allowing them to see the person I am.

What do I want to include in my performance? – My love of music. There isn’t a day that goes by in my life without it. Even now as I write this I have Green Day’s new album playing in the background.

What do I want to achieve or gain from this performance? – Something I have enjoyed creating and feel proud of. I want this to be a piece I look back on in the future and say I’m glad I did that.

 

When thinking about what I want to do in the future. It brought me back to this idea of when you’re a child and what do you want to be when you grow up? Apart from it changing every week from a RAF Pilot and a firefighter. Something that always reoccured was a performer.

A lot of my life is spent looking up to these musicians as inspiration and idols. I spend my spare time performing in my room with my guitar, piano or drum kit. I am alway imitating these performers whether it be through singing their songs or learning the chords to a new album.

Whilst watching interviews with these successful musicans I often hear how they spent their early carrier playing small venues for little money and taking whatever chance they can get to perform in front of a crowd, most commonly busking is where they plant their roots.

I have often debated busking myself. I wouldn’t say it would be for the money but the oppourtunity to perform. It’s something I love doing and I want to share it with others. However something seems incredibly daunting about taking my guitar to the middle of the highstreet in Lincoln and starting to sing in a crowd of strangers. Busking I believe is incredibly brave because  at a venue then people have come to hear music, in the middle of the highstreet there’s this vulnerability and knowing that some people will not enjoy it.

 

For my show I have been debating with this idea of the journey to success in this industry. I currently have two interpretations of the same idea which hold the same material and I would perform songs with my guitar but the outcome would be different.

The main source material I will be using is real life accounts of how musicians got to where they are today. I would incorporate these real accounts of musicians and how they achieved their success or what struggles the came through to achieve this goal. I took inspiration from Ed Sheeran’s new album and in particulary the song Eraser. I find it incredibly interesting how his opinion on this lifestyle is told.

The lyrics that stuck out most to me were:

“I used to think that nothing could be better than touring the world with my songs. I chased the picture perfect life, I think they painted it wrong”. “And ain’t nobody want to see you down in the dumps because you’re living your dream and this should be fun”

 

FIRST INTERPRETATION: I would start in a dressing room and I would be getting read to go and perform in a huge arena, one of the milestone venues for the UK is Wembly Stadium in London which holds a capacity of 90,000. I would then begin to tell the audience this journey from Busker, to local venues, to radio performance, to first album release, then first UK tour and so on. The accounts would be moments in an episodic like structure where I give both good and bad examples of this sort of lifestyle that is so desirible.

SECOND INTERPRETATION:  A Busker’s Dream and as they’re stood on the side of the street while people go by they have this dream they want to achieve. They want to be like such and such in the charts or who can say their job is flying around the world touring and spending their days performing. The accounts from real musicians would be the busker saying ‘I’m going to do it this way’ or having doubts about themselves.I like this idea of dreams and when do dreams stop being dreams and become reality or should they stay as dreams? Is it just the chosen few who achieve this lifestyle and why is it so desireable.

For this session we looked at creative writing. We were given a list of prompts in the previous session and set a task to take one of these prompts or anything that interests us and create some text around it. An example of some prompts are:

• Text on a piece of cardboard.
• Text written in condensation.
• A letter written at 3am from war.
• Text to a love one who has died.

With having an interest in both World Wars I took inspiration from the one regarding a letter written at 3am from the front line. Knowing about soldier’s letters home to those they loved I took my knowledge of this era and applied it to the task. I created a fictional soldier with a fictional address and recalled common experiences he would have faced in his time in the trenches.

While writing I related the text back to the title and dropped hints of why the letter might not have arrived but never confirmed. This meant the audience would be able to make their own opinions on what happened to the soldier writing this letter.

As I wrote this I tried to embody the emotions and thoughts that would have been going through this individual. Being passionate about the subject I have done a lot of in-depth research over the past few years so I was confident enough to portray this. I wanted this young Englishman who hid his fear behind humour when writing to his girlfriend back home. He has a guilty conscious and nobody to talk to. Whether he would have sent this letter at all I don’t know. It could have been an escape to put it down onto paper when he couldn’t express his feelings to anyone, it could have been intercepted or he could have been killed.

I debated erasing sections of the letters that he would have regretted putting down but I feared how this would have come across in spoken word. However it has given me thought of how to experiment with something like this in future. I also considered whether to actually name Jamie or list him as soldier due to the fact so many letters similar to this would have been written from both sides. If I were to develop this I would strip back the personal details and make it a more conventional letter which could apply for any soldier fighting in any war across history.

Laurie Anderson

When looking into the solo artist Anderson I found her use of music rather interesting and the minimalist side to her tracks. She doesn’t just present a conventional song with a catchy melody and the conventional band instruments. Instead she uses a device similar to a loop pedal within her songs to create repetition which is what caught my attention.

 

My Performance

In my performance I want to tackle the idea of auditions and the idea of “when is enough enough?” and “when is it time to stop?” after all the constant rejections. I want to embody the role of the actor attending auditions yet you can never actually get through the full audition piece as the rejections interject and you move on. The use of a loop pedal or this idea of repetition can be used for every negative rejection phrase being looped. So it may start with “Next” which then brings in “No thank you” and this noise of rejection would just build and build into this mass of noise of negativity. This would then drown out any sound I am making for the audition and then the question would be asked for “How much longer do I do this?”

Anna Deavere Smith

We looked at the solo artist Smith who interviews subjects and then takes part of their interview and expands on it to then create a character. Looking through some of her work we saw how she would use a particular item of clothing to represent a character. For example, a stetson to signify a middle aged Texan woman. When she would take off the hat and then hold a walking stick she would be come an elderly gentleman. It was this swift change of character without the need for complicated costume that I personally found interesting. Although the item of clothing was to signify the change of character, he posture, voice and pace would all change as well to suit the person she was recapturing from her interviews.

 

The Three Hats

We were set the challenge to find three different hats and create a performance from that. I personally struggled with this exercise but found it useful and enlightening all the same. I took the interpretation to create something realistic from a conversation I’d witnessed during the previous evening. I took three of my friends and certain traits about them. One is always worrying about his dissertation and asking people to fill in his surveys, another is rather quiet and isolated with music while they work on their dissertation and then the other rarely talks about theirs, only that they go home most weekends and make toast all the time.

I set the space out to simulate the layout of the living room where we spend most of the time around the television. Having the first character enter as he usually does and just burst into conversation with his friends and the rest follow into conversation.

When looking back on my performance I feel as though my weaknesses were around the voice and posture of the characters. If I were to do it again I’d ensure to rehearse as many times as possible to get the dialogue and authenticity of the characters made obvious to an audience who doesn’t know my friends like I do.

 

 

The art of storytelling is something that has passed through the ages. History is made of stories that have been passed down through the generations.

In our workshop we had a challenge to talk for a minute about a memory or moment in our life.

We would remake Spalding Gray’s style of sitting behind a desk and talking to an audience.

I chose the subject of my brother and I going to Manchester to see Panic! At The Disco live as we had both recently bonded over the bond after years of not having much in common and being quite distant. It was the first time we’d both been allowed to go somewhere of great distance without any supervision. Due to the train times we couldn’t get the late train back and decided to book a hotel, spend the Friday in Manchester and get the afternoon train back to Wales.

After arriving too early to book into our hotel we decided to sit on the food court balcony and get a warm drink as the weather was miserable. It was after some nice chatting about what we both plan to do with ourselves as we’re at crucial stages in our lives that I received a text from my mum saying my brother’s high school have messaged informing parents of a Science ISA exam that attendance is mandatory for taking place on the Friday. My brother swore he knew nothing about it, a little later he said his teachers had told him it would be next Friday. We eventually pried the truth out of him and he had known about the exam but was worried Mum would say he couldn’t attend the concert because of it.

Due to this we attended the concert but then had three hours sleep, had to get the five o’clock train back to Flint from Manchester. Sat in the abandoned Manchester Piccadilly Station for half an hour then got onto an empty train with the other early risers attending their jobs. Our mum picked us up from station at 7am only for us to realise the signed poster from the lead artist was missing. I still won’t forgive him for the mess up he caused. Although he did make it to the exam on time.

Through this story I intended to tell the story about the relationship between my brother and I and how the first big bonding moment between us was ruined (or at least an experience) due to his lack of organisation.

Spalding Gray took moments from his life and told them to an audience. I attempted the same by taking an event from my life and opening up to an audience about it. Even if it hadn’t been as confessional as some of his work, it was still a prominent moment in my life and something I probably will never forget.

However in our workshop we did an exercise which involved asking and answering personal questions. It was interesting to see how you opened up to different people depending on how well you associate with them. Although I answered every question the feeling of vulnerability and being uncomfortable was noticeable within myself. It was an interesting challenge which pushed the boundaries at some point.

I think that is a key part to storytelling to open up to your audience as it forms a bond of trust between you and them. It also makes it engaging and if it is true and a genuine experience you are able to deliver it more naturally that if you were making it up.