Term 1 – Ruby Coombs Blog

Devised Performance Red – Ruby Coombs

This project was all about adapting a performance to be able to create a short show for children. We were given the play ‘Red Red Shoes’ by Charles Way to adapt into a 30-40 minute performance for Mellers Primary School. The project was aiming to help us learn the importance of the ability to negotiate and work with other peoples opinions and ideas as well as our own. It was also aimed to help us understand the full production process from devising and conceptualization to production and performance. I hoped to learn more about lighting for performance in this project, as well as, more ways to develop designs from the written word.

After the visit to Mellers School one of the main pieces of feedback, from the story we told the children, was that they didn’t believe the things that occurred in the story still happened nowadays, they thought that it was a really old story. To me this was something I wanted to avoid in our story. After re-reading the play, on one of the first few pages I noticed that Charles Way actually vaguely specifies the location he describes it as ‘a country like Britain’[1]. This was something I wanted to focus on, and it wasn’t hard to find evidence of cases of hatred, segregation and oppression, like in the story. If you look at lots of news reports recent events in the media such as ‘Brexit’ and the election of Trump as President caused a ‘rise in hate crime reports (that) peaked at nearly 60%’[2], towards different races and cultural backgrounds. This is shocking, we are meant to be a generation of acceptance and inclusion but when a person of power says things like ‘laziness is a trait in blacks’[3] it sets us back hundreds of years of suffering, protests and progression, back to when subjugation and oppression were the norm and I strongly believe this no longer holds a place in this society. I wanted this play to educated children about acceptance and the struggles that some people still go through today. To me this really hit home that this is something that is happening now that the children need to be educated in this area of life. I also did lots of research for the refugee camp, I already had an idea of how I wanted the camp to look but I went and did further research in to the appearance and conditions of a refugee camp, looking particularly at camps in Europe, I found they were tent like and generally used recycled materials to fill in holes and provide more shelter, as there are no bins there is rubbish and litter everywhere and people make do with what they can to create a home. I also researched the role of the red cross providing humanitarian aid and support for the refugees, the amount of food and water they receive is pitiful and just enough to survive on, something I wanted to emphasise in the performance, we ended up showing this through Franvera being given small parcels of food during the performance. We weren’t just influenced by current and political events; some of the performances we had seen also affected our design choices. One of the performances we saw that I certainly believe influenced our design was ‘The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips’. Their use of smaller scale puppets was evident in our design and helped us to express things that were not easily expressed verbally. For example the loneliness of Franvera was shown through her being alone and only having the puppet to talk to. An element of shadow puppetry was something we had considered before, having done some ourselves previously, but with the influence of Shaun and having watched the year 1 puppetry performance recently the idea was fresh in our minds.

We began by reading the script individually to get a sense of the play. Once that was done we began with vague creative tasks that would help us figure out the most important moments of the play. For example we did a individual paintings around shoes on a large canvas to inspire us, then we all worked together to link all the individual paintings to form one large group collaboration. We also did individual paintings at home and then brought them in and explained our reasoning behind this potential design choice. This helped us to decide all the key scenes. Following on from this we explored more performative/sculptural elements, we all chose key scenes and then created those scenes with scrap material and other objects and then we performed those scenes and evaluated the effectiveness of those scenes, developed them further and again then showed them to the group. Some of us worked individually to begin with and some worked in pairs, but we then combined our designs to create a more uniformed look. Katie and I began work together, we believed that the burning village was an important part of the story as this is the moment where Franvera looses everything, her mother goes to find her father, her father is killed and her home has burnt down and we felt it was important to highlight that. We cut out layers of a cityscape out of corrugated card placed a light with a filter behind each layer to great red or orange light to look like flames, we then had actors fleeing the village. We chose a cityscape because we hoped that the children would be able to recognise some of the shapes and realise it’s a place just like where they live. To develop this idea, we incorporated Anna and Erica’s idea of shadow puppetry by cutting windows into our buildings to allow puppetry from behind. We didn’t work individually for all scenes, the doctors scene was a group collaboration in the initial stages and was then slightly more independent in the later stages, which happened with most of the scenes, we all chose one or two scenes that we wanted to focus on, I chose the ‘Refugee camp’ and the ‘Burning village’, as did Katie. It was at this point we decided our main story arch and what could possibly happen in each scene, as well as our roles through the productions. I wanted to do the lighting and sound for the production as I knew very little about lighting and hoped to gain more knowledge of it, Katie also signed up to do this with me. I also signed up to be production manager of the team, this mostly involved collecting receipts from purchases and keeping a log of what was spent, I also had to occasionally make sure that every one was on top of what they were meant to be doing. We had our production meeting with the lecturers on the team and discussed our ides and the potential of the ideas as well as the practicality of some of them. With a few adaptions, alterations and nailing down of design elements and measurements we were able to begin construction and rehearsal. We had finished most of our set in plenty of time, which meant we had a whole week of rehearsal to get our performance ready for the children.

I really enjoyed working on this project, it was nice to go through the whole process of designing but also have a construction element throughout, I liked being able to express my design choices through sculpture and things that I could create with my hand and objects around me rather than through drawings all the time and I plan to carry this forward onto my future projects, building models earlier to help me express my designs. I also enjoyed being able to discuss my ideas with the group it made me analyse my decisions throughout the process more carefully as well as made me able to let ideas go when the majority didn’t like them, which I feel is an important part of the designing process, not getting too invested in an idea in the early stages just in case something better comes up. We chose to do the performance in promenade, which I think worked really well as it felt like everyone was going on a journey, however, I would have liked to have made the movement of the audience a little smoother, but I think by the last performance it was much easier to get everyone moving and the performance went much better. I also felt that there were lots of different design ideas and because we waned to be inclusive of all designs we struggled for a while as to what to do and where to begin in order to create a cohesive design. It was particularly difficult when people would go and draw up a design but not tell anyone else what the design was until it was too late and then we had to fit in around them without the discussion being had as to what the over arching design theme was, this made it very difficult sometimes. However, despite that I think on the whole teamwork was really good, we explored everyone’s ideas and I feel that people were given equal opportunities to express their opinions and have their say in the final design. As the production manager I tried to make sure that everyone was included and on top of all their work, but due to, in my one of my previous projects, being told that I need to relinquish control sometimes I think I was less assertive in the role as I should have been as I felt like this was a team effort I didn’t feel like I should be really controlling of everyone. I felt that I was a good team player and worked hard to try and include everyone in some aspect of the design, I was also organised, I kept on top of all the work we had to do, as well as helped everyone keep on track of what they had to do. I think I remained positive and helped to motivate the group when we had been in for long days, although I will admit I struggled a little bit towards the end when I had no time to myself or to go and play sport in the evenings to shake off the stress of the project, but it ended up being valuable time spent on the performance and was still enjoyable. I was pleased to be working on the lighting and sound, although I was originally unaware that someone else would be working on the sound as well I think we worked well to get it done together with her putting the tracks together and myself organising them into order and adjusting the timings slightly as was necessary. I learnt a lot from Adam doing the lighting together and I was really proud of how it all turned out and I think even with doing that I still managed to balance the work, although sometimes I struggled, not because I hadn’t done anything, but because sometimes it would look like I hadn’t done anything, so for example there were some days where I spent a lot of time lighting, rigging lights and patching them through and doing everyone else’s performances as well, so my part of the set wouldn’t get touched for a day because I would be caught up doing other elements of the performance, so although it would look like I hadn’t done much of my own things I would have been doing a lot for other people. I am very glad I chose to do lighting and I feel it developed me as a designer. I think that my attendance throughout this project was good, and my punctuality on the whole was good. I thoroughly enjoyed taking part in this project, it developed me both as a team player and a designer and I plan to carry everything I learnt about designing, developing designs and in particular lighting and Google Sketchup into my future projects.

[1] Plays For Young People ; Red Red Shoes– Charles Way

[2] The Independent

[3] O’Connor, L. (2016) Here are 13 examples of Donald Trump being racist. Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-racist-examples_us_56d47177e4b03260bf777e83 (Accessed: 13 December 2016).