Hi everyone.
Just thought I’d update you on our progress over the last couple of weeks. We have been getting many of our scene ideas up on their feet and have a structure for our show, The Truth About Bedtime…
Emelia and I were very fortunate to attend a dramaturgy workshop with Tom Cornford from The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama last week, which was amazingly helpful. Tom emphasied that the three things that are key to a performance are an anchor, a question and structure. We realised that our structure has to be cyclical, as that echoes the sleep cycle which structures our performance and though we still don’t have a set ending, we know that we want it to reflect the starting scene of our piece.
Tom also challenged us to analyse the relevance of every element of our performance and think metaphorically about how we portray certain things or events. For example, rather than explaining what happens in every stage of sleep to our audience we could somehow show it, through physicalisation or technology. This led to us thinking about the manipulation of sound and how one track could be distorted to represent how a person breathes in each stage of sleep.
Our main issue at the moment is our lack of verbatim material to work with, as we want the words of various people to be the main focus of our performance. In order to conduct interviews, we have had to develop an ethics form which took a long time to be approved. We are now starting to conduct interviews (which have been so interesting) but they take a long time to type and edit. However, this week I have managed to piece together a speech on sleep paralysis, which we plan to work on in Wednesday’s rehearsal, so I’m very excited to see how that will turn out.
E.W.