Week 1– In our first week of working on Dramaturgy and Buchner we explored scenes using improvisation. The focus was on an extract from Woyzeck and we attempted a scene with no knowledge of the play or it’s context. We made three versions of the same scene, the first direct from the script, second a performance with music and lastly a modernisation of the text. These helped to give us an insight on how applying different methods can significantly transform a text.
Week 2 – Having explored the plays as a large group we then formed smaller groups to focus on specific plays. However, as Joint Honour students do not continue to the Theatre Company module we had to form a smaller group of four individuals.
As the Dramaturgy module is designed to develop from a ‘work in progress’ to a whole play in the Theatre Company module and our course path does not give us the opportunity to do so, we felt it appropriate to devise a shorter piece comprising of all three plays and Buchner’s life, differing from the other groups.
We also distributed roles within the group, such as costume designer, makeup artist, choreographer, and researcher etc.
Week 3 – This week Sam and Naomi moved on to developing and blocking the dream sequence for Leonce and Lena, focusing on the dance choreography. Meanwhile, Sylvia and Laura discussed the staging of the Woyzeck dream and potential extracts to be used.
The Woyzeck first draft was complete near the end of the week and parts allocated. The first scene of the Buchner biopic was also drafted and blocked.
Week 4 – Continued to block/rehearse stage etc of Woyzeck, working with music and supposed stage layout. The whole class (discussed) promenade theatre and interaction with the audience, which led to us forming ideas about how we could involve the audience more in the diegesis via posters and leaflets. These would reflect the anti-governmnet propaganda Buchner created during his early university years.
As the Buchner biopic and Danton’s Death scripts are in the final stages of writing, rehearsal wise, emphasis was put on learning lines, verbatim, for the first biopic scene and Woyzeck dream; Sam also continued choreographing the Leonce and Lena dance.
Knowing that we WILL be performing on the LPAC stage, we have begun designing the stage layout in more detail, such as lighting and the use of props. Although there are still some discrepancies over stage levels all of our plans are flexible at the moment.
Week 5 – With the performance drawing nearer we have set up a meeting with Darren Page to go to the Costume and props department to see what we have to work with already and what we need to purchase. Laura got a chance to experiment with our make-up designs in practice. For more details see the make-up page.
We finally got to go down to the props cupboard and found a few things that we needed, however a lot of the costumes that we originally had in mind had to be purchased. As well as that a few other brick-a-brack items had to be purchased but this is fine as we have a budget for this module.
The script was now finally complete and available to learn lines without having changes! We sat and analysed the script as a group and decided the technical lighting and sound cues and where they would need to be within the performance. This did take a while as some of the soundtracks we had in mind were a little hard to find, edit and change into the correct format required by the tech crew. However this finally did get finished and reflected just what we had imagined.
Week 6 – Tech rehearsal was on Monday and this was an interesting one. All of the technical side was to plan and went really well, however the actual performing side was a little weak to begin with and wasn’t what some of the group had hoped for. Getting the actors and the cues for tech to coincide caused a challenge at some points in our performance. This was due to costume changes and exits from one side of the stage to the other which we had not really thought about until then. However we had a couple of hours in tech rehearsal and this was an advantage. After running through the script and marking it through a couple of times, as a group it was a relief to see it coming together as a performance. But still keeping in mind that as a work in progress it will not be perfect.
Week 7 – The time for reflection is upon us! We were really pleased with how smoothly the final performance went and the warm reception it had from students and tutors bar a few hiccups. The effort we put into collecting props for details paid off and was appreciated by our audience and comments indicated that we had managed to create a coherent storyline that incorporated all the plays nicely. I was so relieved that it made sense to the audience because when you become so involved in a process like this it is difficult to step back and see the whole picture and the holes. Thanks everyone!