In my group of four, we were given several events and topics to cover from the history of the pier. We were given the fire, world war two, post war trends, (teddy boys, modern rockers, hippies and punks). Obviously, for a five-minute piece, this was quite a lot of material that needed covering, so we decided to praisee the events into shorter informative snippets.
At first we thought about having some narrators, two older ladies, reminiscing about the past, and the other two in our group playing the younger ladies, so that we could switch between reminiscing and acting out the memory. We decided not to use this idea however, because we felt that it would be too confusing as we already had other narrators.
We actually ended up leaving the first event to the last part that we devised, because we had a lot of conflicting ideas about how it should be done. Half of my mind was set on re-enacting the scene of people ripping up the timbers from the pier, but then I also wanted to physicalize the appearance of fire with a dance. In the end we decided that we would try to combine the two, with dancers in the middle of a semi-circle of people, building the tension, by whispering fire, fire, fire, and slowly getting louder to a climax, when water is shouted. (see dance sheet three)
It was firstly intended that the semi-circle of people, whilst saying fire, would mime, saving the pier, but with the dancers in the middle, we did not want to complicate the image.
Through the whole performance, we always used the art forms to compliment each other, obviously when dance was used within songs it purposefully ties in with the era etc… The fire dance which I mentioned before is performed without music, and it’s purpose is to make an impact on the audience.
A theme throughout the piece is that after events, to link scenes, we have people walking about the stage, like a paperboys shouting, “Read all about it! Read all about it!…” By doing this we can look directly at the audience, trying to draw them in, talking out front to the audience is another Godber device.
From this, we went into a mini physicalisation of the pier, where we linked arms, and introduced the next part of the piece where we blew up the pier, by springing apart.
During my research I found an interesting event in the pier’s history, during the time period my group was set, when two men were court marshalled for six months, because they flew too low over Worthing pier, with no permission.
In this scene of our play, we firstly physicalised the plane, and the two officers inside. We imagined how the men must of felt, fearful, scared and worried, while we improvised our piece. Then we snapped into two commanding officers that court-martial the pilots. Because this was a military scene, we showed the audience who our characters were by standing very tall, and straight, where we spoke we, spoke in very clipped voices. When physicalising the plane, two of us represented the wings, at back and front, this worked quite well, because it was clear what we were trying to portray, and then left the audience to take for granted the scene and concentrate on the events.
This scene we acted out like a comedy double act sketch. When we were improvising it, we were trying to think of different ways that we could make this funny, we came up with the idea of two officers court marshalling the two pilots. The commanding officer would speak first, and the second officer would repeat what he had said, but shortened. E.g.
“Gentlemen, you have been called to my office today”
“Called! To! Office!”
“For the crime of disturbing the peace over Worthing pier”
“Peace! Disturbed! Pier!”
This got a very good response from the audience.
I think that a major weakness of our production over all, was projection, but not the lack of it. It is important to speak loud enough to be heard, and clearly to be understood, but when this performance was recorded we did not take into account, the acoustics of the studio. Everything we said echoed, and it did not sound very pleasing at all. In our actual performance, in a larger space with lots of soft objects in, curtains etc… the acoustics were much better.
We decided the best way to portray the different era’s we were given to re-enact, was to quickly give some details of the styles, in the form of narration and then devise a scene with some improvised characters from one era to give some depth to the information.
During narration, we always spoke out front, looking at the members of the audience, and talking to them individually as if we were having a conversation. During this part of the narration, we had to snap very quickly in-between three different characters, modern rockers, teddy boys and hippies, (see sheet four).
Hippy was our chosen era, to study in most depth. We took our hippie characters from the play “Hair”. As our four hippy characters interacted on stage, talking about the pier, how amazing it was, how beautiful etc… the rest of the class drifted on stage, and sat or stood around in groups, smiling and looking vacant. When one of my group re-marks;
“I can hear the pier singing to me”
This is the introduction to our second song, for our performance. It is a peaceful song about the pier, (see music sheet five). We feel that it fitted in well with the theme of the hippy era the song was played very simply on acoustic guitar and the lyrics were up-beat and very glorifying, it was written by one of the members of my class for the play.
After the song, we went into the time machine stance. For the time machine everyone in my class comes and stands in a circle around the three time travellers, and leans over them, waving their arms up and down, and saying
“Tick tock tick tock”, then the time travellers say “time machine stop”
After that we bend back up, opening out our arms then twist around to turn and face the audience with our arms by our sides. Everyone representing the time machine does the same thing because we want to appear as the same object, the time machine could be seen as the motif of our play, it is a reference point which we consistently refer back to. I think that as a motif it is effective, because it is a simple image always presented in the same way to the audience. At the end of the last song and dance, we go back into the time machine, and say “tick tock…” in time with the beat of the music.
After the time machine stops, the time travellers say a few lines to conclude the play, with some more of that sarcastic humour I mentioned before, but this time in a much more contrite tone.
“Thank you for travelling with us!”
“We hope you have enjoyed yourselves!”
“And learnt something along the way!”
The closing song was written in a contemporary style, jointly by the class, it’s function is to initially background music to the millennium scene, where some people are trying to get into the club at the end of the pier, called “Lush”.
So quietly in the background during the dialogue of this scene is the click track of our closing song, and as the rest of the class are admitted into the club, the music gets louder, and more parts are added to the track, while we move to our positions for the song, in a line, behind a member of my class who happens to know a lot of gymnastics, as her family own a circus. She did a routine, with hoops. Hoop dances originate from India, but in the last couple of decades have been very popular over here, especially in contemporary type dance routines.
For our finale song we looked at up-to-date club tracks that we all liked, such as “Castles in the Sky” by Ian Van-Dahn. We found that in such songs, they was a trend of just using a few chords, in “Castles in the Sky” the four chords used are: , the words were also very repetitive and simple. We decided to follow the same format in our song (see music, sheet six).
Our costumes were very simple and they did not change throughout our performance, (apart from the time travellers, who would wear very simple capes), everyone wore plain black, this meant that we were not looking to convey information through our actual appearance, but through our drama and we really had to think about every detail and work out ways to help the audience realize our intentions. Through our three songs, the seven components that make them up have change consistently with the time period we were portraying, (see table one)
Table one
Apart from the “setting music”, explained in the above table, as a group, we did not use many props, apart from four chairs, a crutch (the crutch represented a bunch of flowers, a fishing rod, a walking stick and a barrier) and the hoops. This is very true to Godber, who also used very minimal staging, costumes and props, but I feel that we could have used a few more. For instance, it would have been more helpful in our part of the drama, to simply break up the amount of black, to wear hippy style shirts, it would of also made it more interesting for the audience to watch.
The reason for such minimizing of Godber’s Style came from Brecht Berkoff, a political dramatist, who made his pieces to minimalist so that the audience would concentrate on the message of his plays, instead of the presentation. For this piece we were trying to entertain visually as well as conveying information to the audience in a style reminiscent of Godber. We did not think about the implications of having so little props etc… within the piece and I think that over all it worked to our disadvantage.
For our final performance, we went to the Denton Tea Lounges, we chose that place, because it is on the Pier, and it was the only suitable place that we could find.
Many of the people who came along to see us, were regulars at the Denton Tea Lounges on the pier, and quite elderly, they seemed to appreciate the comedy of the piece (i.e. they laughed), but they theatre form was obviously alien to them. I feel that they would of enjoyed it more if we had used more props. After the performance a questionnaire was handed around, (see sheet 8).
The general response was positive, there were a few key points that came up though;
- Needed more music, more singing, more instruments.
Everyone seemed to say that our songs were the strong point of our performance, and that we should of exploited this talent more. I agree with that, if every other group could think of an opportunity within their drama to replace acting with a song, the energy and quality of the piece would be lifted.
- Lack of space, more props needed.
In the Denton Tea Lounge, the stage was about a meter too short, and for the dance routine where we would stand in a line, everyone was so squashed up, we were literally standing on each other.
Throughout our piece, the pace increased, which I felt was fitting with the era’s. For the Victorian scene, especially seeing as we were portraying princesses, we could not be running around, but as the piece moved forward in time we did pick up pace, obviously not enough though.
- Excellent enthusiasm
- Dance was the weakest part
- Would pay £5 to see us
- A refreshing and interesting historical account
We had about 35 people in the audience, about 10 or 15 of which would of come in anyway, to eat there. We did put up posters in most public places (e.g. the public library, restaurants, shop windows), perhaps the posters should have been more eye grabbing, as they were quite dull in colour.
I really enjoyed devising and performing this piece, I would agree that music was the most successful and energetic part of our performance. I think that for the audiences who saw us, learnt a lot about the pier’s history and perhaps began to see it in a different light. As a group, our performance could have been more finished and polished, but our over all quality was good.
