Hi guys, Ellie here.
It’s been a very interesting couple of weeks and I’m really enjoying watching our ideas about sleep come to life and starting to think about how certain scenes can fit together.
After deciding that the focus of our performance would be sleep, and how vital it is to our existence, we decided to gather as much research as we possibly could. Rather naively, I had never realised how complicated sleep is. One of the things I found most fascinating is that there are five stages in an average sleep cycle (the final one of those stages is REM sleep, Rapid Eye Movement) and there are generally multiple cycles in one night’s sleep.
After watching The Duke at LPAC on the 8th of February we have really thought about what we want to achieve with this performance and therefore changed our approach. The Duke was simplistic in both style and set, with the majority of the one-man-show by Shôn Dale-Jones being performed sat at a desk. My favourite part about the show was that the actor greeted each audience member individually, giving a sense of inclusivity and appreciation, something that we have realised is very important to us as a company. The Duke has inspired us to keep the show simple and honest and therefore we have decided to abandon some of the game-show type scenes that we were working on and focus on verbatim theatre, which will be at the heart of our production. In order to portray people’s stories in a truthful way, we decided that we would audio record interviews (with the participants consent) and use these to both inspire and potentially feature in our final performance. One of Arts Council England’s five goals for arts and culture is that is should be “for everyone” (Arts Council England, undated) and this is something we are taking very seriously in our devising process. We want our performance to be accessible for as many people as possible, and are even looking into whether we would be able to audio describe the performance for the blind. In using the words of a vast range people in our performance, we hope that the show we be both about and for everyone, as every individual has a different experience/relationship with sleep.
As the dramaturg it will be my job to record and edit these interviews and decide where in the piece they may feature. Therefore, my focus in the last couple of weeks has been how to be both trusting and truthful in an interview. As someone who suffers with insomnia I have always been interested in sleep disorders and therefore started researching different disorders and the potential causes of them. As such, we are hoping to interview people who experience sleep or dreams in unusual ways including people who suffer with sleep disorders. Initially we talked about sleep amongst ourselves and came to the realisation that as a group we have experienced a range of sleep disorders, from something relatively pleasant such as lucid dreaming to the horror or night terrors. As such, the first interviews I conducted were with members of the group. Whether these feature in the final performance or not they will be crucial to the process as it has given us further insight into these sleep disorders and the effect they can have on daily life.
My hope is that I can do the people whose stories we are collecting justice, as I aspire to be as truthful to their words as I possibly can.
E.W.
Works Cited
Dale-Jones, S. (2018) The Duke [live performance]. Performed by Shôn Dale-Jones. Lincoln: Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, 8 February.
Arts Council England (undated) Arts Council: Our Mission and Strategy. Available from https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/about-us/our-mission-and-strategy-0 [accessed 21 February 2018].