Author: Eloise Grace White

Hello everyone!

The day of the show has been and gone and I wanted to take some time today to reflect on the final performance. I am unbelievably proud of my company and feel so privileged to have been part of it. This experience has truly been an honour. I want to thank everyone who came to our debut show The Truth About Bedtime… as our audience were so supportive and engaged throughout the performance.

I believe that the nature of our pre-set, where actors interacted with audience members, enticed the audience and made them feel completely at ease, which was our aim from the outset. Upon the entrance of audience into the performance space they were greeted by members of the company handing out sherbet lemons and directed to our drinks stand where cups of hot chocolate and camomile tea were provided. Originally, we were only going to use hot chocolate but had to think of a sleep related alternative for lactose intolerant and vegan audience members. Arts Council England state that they “encourage our funded organisations to be more focused on audiences – to reach more people, broaden the groups they come from and improve the quality of their experience” (Arts Council England, undated). I truly believe that we achieved this with The Truth About Bedtime… as we took all needs into account, including setting aside spaces for wheelchair access and offering to get hot drinks for those with accessibility issues.

The show proved to be a great success and our audience were sublime. They laughed throughout the majority of the show and seemed to be transfixed during the more serious, verbatim sections of the piece. All in all, I believe we successfully combined the sweet and the sour in our performance to create a show that exhibited how divergent experiences of sleep can be. It has been a delight to dramaturg The Truth About Bedtime… and I very much look forward to making many more hilarious pieces of theatre with an amazing group of women.

E.W.

 

Works Cited:

Arts Council England (undated) Arts Council: Engaging People Everywhere. Available from https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/how-we-make-impact/engaging-audiences-everywhere [accessed 22 May 2018].

Hi everyone!

The last couple of weeks have been intense but the show is really coming together now and we are so excited to perform in a few weeks. I wanted to write about the structure of our show today, and how I have attempted to turn into a jigsaw puzzle master in order to piece the show together.

Very early on I decided that the most logical, and interesting, way to structure out show would be using the five stages of sleep. Our amazing set designer Amanda has made a clock that reflects these stages, the following image is of this clock.

Throughout the performance we will use music and this clock in order to transition from one stage of sleep to another. The tempo of the music will reflect the speed of brainwaves during each stage of sleep, which I think is so cool!

When sorting all of our scenes into a stage of the sleep cycle I have had to think about both where these scenes would sit logically, and how the scenes in each stage would work together to bring light and shade throughout. I decided very early on that I would not move the sleep disorder sections around as most of these occur in a certain stage of sleep, for instance sleep paralysis occurs during REM sleep. Therefore, every sleep disorder/verbatim scene has remained in its correct stage. The issue then came with fitting the rest of the puzzle around the verbatim.

The structure of the show has changed many times as the scenes have evolved, but now that we have a full show the structure has been set. In order to fit this jigsaw puzzle of a performance together I have had to write down what happens in every scene and try and pair light and dark scenes together, for example night terrors (arguably our darkest and most emotive scene) is in stage three, followed by one of our comedy bedtime stories. The reason for this is that our show is designed to represent different experiences of sleep; some people love the idea of sleep, others dread it. Not only this, but the mixture of scenes and rapid transitions mimic the structure of a dream. In combining the light and shade I hope to provide the audience with an accurate representation of experiences of sleep.

Finally, the show is cyclical. It both starts and ends with Emma struggling to get to sleep. This cyclicality mimics the sleep cycle, as when your body finishes REM sleep (the final stage) it begins the cycle all over again.

Though solving this jigsaw puzzle, and fitting all of our scenes together, hasn’t been easy, I am now confident that the structure of our show is cohesive; both accurately and interestingly representing a good night’s sleep.

E.W.

 

Works Cited:

Mason, A. (2018) The Truth About Bedtime Clock. [photograph] (Lucy Farrell’s private photograph).

Hello everyone! Today’s blog post is going to be all about verbatim theatre.

Verbatim theatre, or word for word theatre is “a form of theatre firmly predicated upon the taping and subsequent transcription of interviews with ‘‘ordinary’’ people” (Paget, 1987, 317). This is what The Truth About Bedtime… is grounded in, the real words gathered in interviews about individual experiences of sleep. And they vary from night terrors to sex dreams. Our performance includes four scenes about sleep disorders: insomnia, night terrors, lucid dreaming and sleep paralysis, and these scenes all feature a combination of physical theatre and verbatim. In using the words of real people, for these sections in particular, we aimed to provide our audience with a range of experiences, allowing them to sympathise and empathise with people who they do not know, but whose stories are manifested on stage.

Before editing the verbatim sections of the piece, we first had to transcribe the interviews that we had conducted. Typing up these interviews was more difficult that it at first seemed, as I had to devise a key so that the actors were able to recognise changes in the interviewee’s voice whilst reading the text. The basic key is as follows: italics for speeding up, bold and capitalisation for emphasis, underlining for inflection. The interviews also had to be typed exactly in the way which they were said, so that accent as the elongation of words could be distinguished.

For example, the following audio is an extract from one of the interviews I conducted.

And this snippet was transcribed as: “you know if I, if I am suffering from, um insomnia it’s not usually that I can’t get to sleep it’s that I wake up, in the night, and then can’t get back to sleep. Or I wake up very early (low) and can’t get back to sleep. Umm… and, my mind is just racing with RIDiculous things, so it could be as ridiculous asssss, did I buy butter? Or, yu know, jus really really ridiculous things, that, actually, don’t matter at all? But in the middle of the night my mind is just wEYEired, an it’s just du du du du du du du du du du du du du ad it’s just all these random thoughts all over the place and I just can’t shut them up.”

In the process of creating verbatim theatre, “the words of real people are recorded or transcribed by a dramatist during an interview or research process… and then edited, arranged or recontextualised to form a dramatic presentation” (2008, Hammond and Steward, 9). We aimed to conduct all of our interviews in a comfortable and safe environment where our participants would feel at ease; mostly they were done in cafes. Our interviewees were asked to fill out one of our consent forms, to ensure that they knew how their words would be used and that they had to right to withdraw what they said in their interviews. Alongside this, all of our interviewees were invited to attend a work-in-progress show at the beginning of May so that that could see how we had used their words and thank them for their contributions.

An issue that I have faced when editing these interviews into concise sections within our piece is where to stop and draw the editing line, if you will. As with all verbatim theatre, I have sometimes had to “change the sequence of elements in a person’s testimony, remove contextual information, and create connections which did not exist in the interviews themselves” (Young, 2017, 29-30) in order to create a dramatic narrative. However, when doing this I have also been conscious of the people who have trusted us with their words and the context in which they were said. I wanted to remain as true as possible as I could to the original interviews to ensure that nothing was misconstrued. Alecky Blythe, a particularly famous verbatim playwright, claims to be “faced with the same struggle between remaining faithful to the interview and creating a dramatic narrative” (Blythe, 2008, 94). Though our participants were made aware in their consent forms that their words “might be used in full, in part, or not at all, and… might be merged with the words of other participants, and they may also be included in passages that are completely fictional” this struggle about being faithful towards the interview still applied. In my editing, though I have moved words around and merged them with the words of other participants, I have avoided writing fictional passages. I believe that when we have had so many people willing to participate, it would be a shame to write our own words just  for ease. Therefore, in writing sections such as insomnia, where passages from interviews are connected by a like word, I have ensured that these connections are found organically where possible.

Though I cannot say these interviews are unedited, with contexts removed and meanings slightly altered, I have attempted to ensure that the essence of each interviewee’s words is not tampered with. I hope that this will come across in the final performance.

E.W.
Works Cited:

Blythe, A. (2008) Alecky Blythe. In: Hammond, W and Steward, D (eds.) Verbatim verbatim: contemporary documentary theatre. London: Oberon Books, 77-103.

Hammond, W and Steward, D. (2008) Introduction. In: Hammond, W and Steward, D (eds.) Verbatim verbatim: contemporary documentary theatre. London: Oberon Books.

Paget, D. (1987) ‘Verbatim Theatre’: Oral History and Documentary Techniques. New Theatre Quarterly, 3(12) 317-336.

Stuart, Y. (2017) The Ethics of the Representation of the Real People and Their Stories in Verbatim. Themes in Theatre — Collective Approaches to Theatre & Performance, 9, 21-43.

White, M. (2018) Menopausal Insomnia. Interviewed by E. White, 2 April.

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.