Let's Get Physical, Physical!
Photo Credit: TinCan Theatre
The past week has been all about getting up on our feet and starting to turn the ideas in our heads into something physical. We were up super early on Sunday morning and got down to the studio to start with some basic blocking. We used what we could find in the studio and set up a basic set. As we're still running with the office theme, we just gathered chairs, tables, a sofa to create a sort of staffroom and anything else we felt we could use for office inspiration. It began to look a little like this:
Photo Credit: TinCan Theatre
Once we'd set this up, we began to improvise the office scenes. We want there to be a story line throughout the office to run alongside the scenes about the refugee scenes. But all the while adding personal touches to the characters to prevent the scenes becoming repetitive. We wanted each office scene to be a reflection of each character and it be that character that carries the audience through into the refugee scenes. We want to ask the questions 'what would you do?' throughout the piece and each character will answer that question, putting themselves into the situations of the refugees. We individually came up with character profiles and began to improvise these scenes with those profiles in mind. This in turn sparked ideas for how each of the refugee crisis scenes could play out. Each character would react differently to each part of the story, which changed the initial shape of the scenes.
The set then also began to aid us in our thinking for transitions into scenes. One of the tragedies we want to reflect in the piece are the hundreds of refugees crammed into rubber boats, trying to escape their homes. We don't want loads of transitioning set, so we want to use the set we have. As the tables have wheels, we thought about using them as boats. We very quickly ran out of time on Sunday to explore this, but we picked it back up with Bec in our supervisor session yesterday.
Our session with Bec was really helpful and got us thinking about how we can proceed. We told her what we were going for and she did several exercises with us across two hours. First of all, she got us using a single table as a boat. First we walked around the room with instructions like 'hide from this person' and 'you're trying to find someone, but everyone you meet isn't that person'. This really helped me in particular to get into the mindset that I was in trouble and desperate. Bec then asked us to continue to walk around the room in this fashion. Then, when she said so, to run onto the boat (table). Our feet were not allowed to touch the floor and us all running on to the boat like this was exactly the kind of 'crammed' feeling and look we wanted.
Photo Credit: TinCan Theatre
It looked more authentic than our original idea of one of us on a boat and having the rest move the table in a boat like fashion. This imagery was far more poignant and powerful. Again, this is something we're going to continue to explore next week.
After this exploration, we moved on to some writing exercises to generate some characters for a scene where we want to explore the opinions of lorry drivers. Many lorry drivers are being fined when refugees are found in their lorries and we want to explore this part of the crisis too. We only had a very short time left with Bec, so it was very short. But she asked us the following questions:
- How important is your truck to you?
- Who do you work for?
- How often do you see your family?
- What do you deliver in your lorry?
- Is there a punishment if you're late?
- Have you been stopped at a border?
- Have you witnessed any incidents with a refugee?
- How do you feel about the refugees coming across in lorries?
- Do you think they should be allowed in?
- Would you do it if you were in their situation?
We each wrote a short response to each question and read them to each other at the end. Everyone gave very different responses and we formed some good characters and opinions. We want to get real opinions from real drivers, so we're thinking of applying these questions to interviews we find and articles we read and see if we can answer them through the material.
So a busy week for TinCan! We have another rehearsal this weekend, but not much studio time next week. So we have a lot to cram in! But we'll keep you updated with all our endeavours!
TinCan X
