Events

Class Act: Day 8, sharing and scratching and making things

Events, Theatre

(The weekend is sort of Days 6 and 7 — I gave myself most of the time off, apart from doing some charity shop shopping for the show materials, but in that down time ideas are still gestating and making themselves ready, so let’s count them.)

After the big weekend shop, the morning was spent pulling all of the materials together. The show’s all about games and participation, so the props are really all just game materials, and the set is just arranging them in a way that makes the audience feel game for it. By which I mean, from the moment the audience come in, they need to know that there’s going to be participation and games and roleplaying, and they need to feel reasonably comfortable with it. Here’s a video with me enthusing about what fun it is to put this stuff together:

If you’ve never designed and run a roleplaying game, I highly recommend it. It has a lot of the fun of directing, a lot of the fun of improv performance, and all the charms of playing a really intricate board game on top of it — the balancing of game values, the scheming, the making of materials that get the participants excited. I think my approach to Class Act has been more informed by that gleeful fun than I expected.

In the afternoon, I brought in an audience for a scratchy sharing of the show so far. It’s actually more complete that I expected at this stage, so we did a rough run of the full thing. They were great — other artists and staff at the Ovalhouse, so a very engaged audience, including the young Box Office team. They were one of the most engaged and backchattiest audiences I’ve ever had for anything! It’s easy to plan for the contingency of the audience not participating at all, because there’s only one way that happens, but much harder to plan for lots of unexpected enthusiastic participation, so it was great to work with those folk.

The first thing I learned from it is that the show is definitely fun. We had a great laugh. This I’m really pleased about, because it’s so important to me that the audience enjoy themselves if I’m going to get properly political. And I hear from feedback that some of them were properly roused and angry by the end, which is another bonus. That means I feel like I’ve confirmed I’m on the right track.

The other side of that is that it was messier than I expected, and a few things that I thought would work just didn’t quite come off in performance. This is the danger of preparing largely by yourself — without enough outside eyes, you forget what assumptions you’re making about how it will work. But it’s good that this happened now, because it means I have defined problems to solve for the next two days.

This is the hardest stage of development — it’s easier to cut and change early on, when you’re not invested in each moment; now the cuts and changes feel more brutal. But also, if done right, more necessary and more satisfying. So the last two days are about making everything about this show as perfect as it can be — getting it all ready for big, unexpected audiences.

Day One
Days Two and Three
Day Four
Day Five
Day Eight
Days Nine and Ten
Reflection

Class Act: Day 5, a theoretical interlude in the rigging

Events, Rambles, Theatre

Technical days are an essential part of theatre — they involve spending hours making sure that lights, sound, projection and every other technical effect are going to be just so, just right. In simple shows like mine, the audience barely even sees all the effort that’s gone into making everything look right, but is still takes hours and hours to set up. Hours that, while the product is satisfying, are usually long and tiring.

So it was nice to have my technical day on Friday brightened up by a visit from the lovely Tinder Theatre, who have been having an R&D week in Ovalhouse. They just dropped by to play and chat, and a pleasure it was too. Turns out having an enormous bag of lego in the studio is a great facilitator of theoretical discussion, as we batted a few ideas around while constructing some handsome widgets.

The big questions we were wrestling with were about audience agency and editorial control. I’ve found this post by Hannah Nicklin really helpful for unpicking the different approaches interactive performance can take, but even the best taxonomy of course leaves open the question of what approach is useful for what purpose. Interactivity can make us more complicit, can challenge us more deeply, can help us to play and explore an idea, can provide a means of discussion — but always, in theatre, within a framework set by the artist. Hannah’s post teases apart the possibilities of physical and narrative autonomy, but what about autonomy of interpretation, autonomy of thought?

(I’ve wrestled with these same things previously on this blog, in response to shows by Gary McNair, Robert Softley and Tim Crouch.)

Interactivity can often by manipulative or controlling. Ritual theatre is often about taking participants on a set emotional and metaphysical journey — you could say that a religious ceremony is a kind of interactive theatre designed to bring participants to an ecstatic encounter with God. Interactivity does not always allow for critical distance, for the audience to be able to consider and reconsider what they’re participating in.

Tinder want to produce an immersive experience about Empire, but to what extent do they have to embed or accept post-colonial criticism in their show, and how much can they allow the audience to, crudely, reach their own conclusions? How can they present an immersive experience about a racist society without either recreating the structures of racism or crudely lampooning them? These same questions would face someone writing standard fourth wall theatre on the same subjects, but they’re even more potent for interactive performance, which needs to take so much responsibility for its audience.

In Class Act, I have an agenda. I have a revolutionary, Marxist understanding of the class system, and that informs what I do. How can I talk about this, how can I use this in a show, and still allow the audience space to disagree, if they need to?

The solution I’m currently working with for interactive political theatre is to be honest. In Class Act, as with This is not a riot, I try to make my own prejudices and purposes clear from the outset. My hope is that this both gives me license to present my biased take, and gives the audience license to disagree. I’m not pretending to any kind of false objectivity, not performing a spuriously neutral stance: I’m aggressively partisan, but very clear about what that’s doing to the show, the games, the conversations. I want to be angry, to be challenging, to be revolutionary, but I want you to be empowered to choose for yourself.

How well this theory all works in practise you’ll just have to come and see.

The first few days of the coming week will be all about rehearsal, and finishing of the construction of the set and props. Expect a return to the practical concerns of putting a show together!

Day One
Days Two and Three
Day Four
Day Five
Day Eight
Days Nine and Ten
Reflection

Class Act: Day 4, actors are brought into play

Events, Theatre

I brought some friends into the studio today to play around with the show. It needed an injection of energy and some fresh ideas, and the games and interactions of course needed some serious playtesting. Plus, I needed to just muck around a bit — theatre is all about play, even when it’s not a show with games in, and one of the big risks of making a solo show is that it’s hard to have as much fun by yourself.

We tried out a few improvs to warm up the group’s ideas about class. A classic drama game is assigning status by playing cards and setting up improvisations, simple scenarios that actors can work with; I tried some similar scenes, but gave each actor a bank note to represent their wealth, telling them it had to be on display at all times. The results, even in old standards like “waiting for a train”, were pretty hilarious, and helped me figure out how to work some similar tricks on the audience. I won’t give away any more.

Then we got to grips with a game I’m calling The Great Money Trick, because it’s based on Robert Tressell’s classic game in The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. Our game is more in-depth, and sillier, but is demonstrating much the same points. We spent a good two hours simulating capitalist economics with lego and fake money (see these pics on the Ovalhouse site for a glimpse), and the results were pretty satisfying. The group gave me a bunch of ways to tweak the game, both adding new  dynamics to make it clever, and in and improving the rules we already have. I think it’s going to be a blast.

In the last past of the day, we got to flip roles. A number of the team were actors I’d previously directed, but I wanted to try some of the monologue sections of the play and see what they thought — get their direction on me. This was a great experience, and surprisingly nerve-wracking. I don’t usually get embarrassed or nervous as a performer, but performing for my actors was really strange that way. Of course, as expected, they gave me some really crucial feedback that’s helping me bash the monologues into shape — making them more engaging, better for the audience, more fun to perform.

You’ll note that this blog is more practical and less philosophical than the last one. That’s the effect that mucking around and doing the performing bits tends to have — it’s good to get out of my head and just make the show work. Tomorrow’s going to be more about getting the technical aspects (light, sound, set, &c) ready, which is long and bitty work, but really necessary. So hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have everything in place for next week to be rehearsal, rehearsal, rehearsal.

Day One
Days Two and Three
Day Four
Day Five
Day Eight
Days Nine and Ten
Reflection