Naomi Steele – Dance Joint Honour student. Costume designer and playing the roles of Leonce from Leonce and Lena, the Captain, and Drum Major of Woyzeck.
Why this production?
Well over the period of six weeks, the module that we have been studying is called ‘Dramaturgy’. With only a vague idea of what this module was about from reading the module handbook, I went into class with an open mind. Our first lesson was a question I feel everyone had on their mind. What is ‘Dramaturgy’?
We all soon discovered that our question should not be that of, what is ‘Dramaturgy’? But that of, what is the role of a Dramaturg? There are many different roles to a Dramaturg. The first Dramaturg’s were from Germany. The Dramaturg spreads the work between a director, a producer, set design, actors, an audience point of view and so on. Mainly an organiser for the theatre company and whom ever works within this company. In other words, a Dramaturg can bring a creative process to the theatre company and its production. “The Dramaturg is someone who ‘keeps the whole in mind’.” (Turner. C, 2008, pg 103)
With our new knowledge of a Dramaturg it was time to bring ourselves together into groups for our performance. As I am a Joint Honours student and this module was to be carried on only by the single Honour students. The four, including myself, joint students decided to come together and form a group. The performance was to be on one of George Buchner’s plays. With the other groups having a large amount of people, all of whom mixed gender, they formed an immediate interest in Buchner’s plays. The problems that we came across when looking at Buchners plays, was that we were all females and it became increasingly hard to find a scene that we could all participate in. After going away and researching Buchner, we all became fascinated with his achievements in his short life. We started to gain connections between his life and his plays, becoming more and more enthusiastic about his work. This led us to the idea of devising our own performance of Buchners life and the influences he had to his three plays, ‘Danton’s Death’, ‘Leaonce and Lena’ and ‘Woyzeck’. As the performance was to be between fifteen to twenty minuets long, we decided that Buchner’s plays would be done as dream sequences and as our interpretation lasting two minuets each. This allowed us to bring our other talents into our devised piece, which was Dance and Media.
As Dramaturgs ourselves, with no script to work with only research, I started to wonder where our devised performance was going. I decided to look at the book ‘Dramaturgy and Performance’ for an insight view of a Dramaturg. “Devising, in the strictest sense of the word, implies a process where ‘no-script – neither written play text nor performance score – exists prior to the work’s creation’… In truth, many companies do use some form of script, verbal text or score, sometimes as a starting point” (Heddon and Milling 2006: 3, sited in Turner. C, 2008, pg 170). With the Group now seeing this idea as a starting point of our piece, and realising that we had Buchners play script to help our devising, we soon had lots of ideas flowing.
We decided to split the script work up between the four of us; Sylvia took the life of Buchner and his influences, Laura took ‘Woyzeck’ and made her interpretation on this, Sam took ‘Leaonce and Lena’ and created a dance interpretation and I took ‘Danton’s Death’ and developed my interpretation. After this we all came together to find the appropriate transitions to the play. Along with the script we all assigned ourselves roles of a theatre company, for example, Sylvia was the main script writer and editor, Laura was the Make up Artist, Sam was the Choreographer and I was the Costume Designer.
As the costume designer, it started to become apparent to me that we were to play four or more characters, and we were to be females playing male roles. Therefore, I had to come up with away of allowing the audience to understand that we were males, alongside our change in character.
Our initial idea for the dream sequences was for them to be in a black and white scale, but as time went on and we had limited resources, this idea was put to one side. The main section of the play was to be in the time period of Buchner, 1800’s, and therefore the costumes had to mimic this period. Sam was to be the only female playing female roles. Therefore, Sam’s main costume was to be a long flowing white dress with ribbon around her waist to capture the 1800’s fashion. To differentiate between Sams characters of Minna, Marie and Lena, I gave Sam a bonnet to wear for Minna, a throw over for Marie and then just her dress for Lena. These props allowed the audience to see the clear change in character. Laura’s characters, all male, were rather eccentric making her props to change character rather bold, for example, a rather over sized hat for the Carnival Announcer, for the Doctor a toy stethoscope and for Robespierre a French wig, again giving clarity to the audience in the different characters. As Sylvia was Buchner, I did not want such drastic character change, as this may take the audiences attention away from the main action, so for her character of Danton a French wig was also worn, to show the French revolution and for Woyzeck the removal of her main costume jacket. For my costume, my character roles were mainly military based and as a result of this my main costume was to be black dinner trousers, a white shirt and a military jacket, all within the 1800s fashion guidelines. For my role of the Captain this main costume was worn, for the Drum major a baton was used and for the role of Leaonce my jacket was removed and braces were worn. Over all I fell that this usage of prop changing was a success to help the audience understand our character changes.
As the play was developed more and more characters appeared in the play but we applied the same method that we had to our other characters and there was no panic to be made. Although we had the security of the prop changes to show the difference in character, it was important not for us to rely on this and physicality was to be used. For example, my role of the captain was a very tall, proud of himself character and my physicality projected this with my shoulders back, chest open and very bouncy in my movement. On the other hand, my physicality for the Drum major was very low and wide, with my arms on my hips, my shoulders high and very heavy with my movement. I think that this was also a conscious thought in the rest of my group too.
Over all, I found the role of a Dramaturg very new, fresh and exciting, as we allowed ourselves and the group to explore different aspects to the devised performance. We all allowed ourselves to have an input into each others work, giving an audiences point of view. Such as the book suggests, “The compositional challenge is therefore to define and shape the material from the living process and from the dialogue between the people involved.” (Turner, C. 2008, pg 170) However, even though the role of a Dramaturg came through to me, I still struggled with a few aspects of our devised performance. I found that trying to capture the true meaning behind ‘Danton’s Death’ within two minuets a challenge and found myself relying on the already written script, and not really adding my own interpretation to it. I also feel that the performance became very ‘blocky’ with a lot of our transitions becoming blackouts. If given the opportunity to develop this devised piece again, I think that these problems would be worked on, as the piece was a working progress, although in our minds it was to become our final production. With more time given our Dramaturgical process may not have been as rushed as it was and our devised performance can defiantly be added to.
Bibliography
Turner Cathy and Behrndt, k, Synne, 2008, “dramaturgy and performance”, Palgrave Macmillan, United Kingdom