Community Performance Project

Introduction:

For the community project we were given the theme of the life and works of legendary film maker Alfred Hitchcock to be presented through the style of cabaret. Cabaret originated in France in the late 1800’s and prominently features the use of comedy, dance, music and drama. The location of the performance consisted of the Hitchcock Hotel in Whipps Cross; theoretically the most appropriate setting to pay homage to the masterful director. As the whole section of the course is called ‘Community Project’ , it should come as no surprise that it was aimed at the people in the community, that grew up in the same place that Hitchcock did. The overall aim was the give new insight, in an entertaining way, into the life and works of Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock’s films were extremely important of course and we primarily decided on his masterpiece ‘Psycho’ for use; ‘Anthony Perkins/Norman Bates’ was our MC and ‘Janet Leigh’ was on of the female protagonists. The other films we looked at were ‘Rope’ and ‘The Birds’ but we decided on ‘Rope’ which ultimately played a key role in the conclusion of the play. As a stimulus, we watched some of the works of famous choreographer Bob Fosse and we aimed at making the piece energetic and physical much like his style. Other practitioners we looked at for this was Bertolt Brecht, an influential theatre practitioner. We adopted some of his stylistic elements, namely his use of songs, dance and pronounced characterisation. Famous French actor Jacques Lecoq was very much part of the physical and mime theatre which fitted perfectly with the melodramatic approach we were going to take to our play. The use of stock characters and exaggerated acting dates back to ancient Greek and Roman theatre which we also researched and adapted.

Performance Process

Improvisation:

This primary stage consists of constantly trying out new things and assessing whether or not it fits the genre and is entertaining for the audience. We started out with attempting to come up with a catchy melody that would enable us to open the performance with something that would immediately engage our audience; This would come in the opening scene. In lesson, the exercise of trying to create a soundscape didn’t help particularly in this instance because we weren’t looking for sounds, but a song instead, so we resorted to trying new melodies and adding words to it until we came up with one we thought was perfectly fitting; ‘Alfred Hitchcock/ Tippi Hendren made his heart tick-tock/Everybody wanted a shot/But all she ever wanted to do was please Hitchcock’. It was very catchy and we were aware of this due to the fact other members of the class sung it aloud at times so we were really aiming for this song to stick with the audience, in fact we expected it to.

Join now!

The next thing was how to stage it; we began as standing in a diagonal line but we thought it looked quite dull and lacked dynamics and as proxemix is important in the movement aspect in relation to the presentation of the drama we decided to place the scene at the entrance to the pub and stand in a vertical line, one person on each step behind each other; that way we were all visible and we proceeded to move. We then began adding sidesteps  and box steps. The most prominent one was the use of the ‘jazz fingers’ which ...

This is a preview of the whole essay