The making of our video

Throughout the duration of the performance, we want to represent the men who had died on the first day of the Somme. By doing this, we want to create a projection which increases in numbers every 30 seconds. This is our process of how we did it yesterday –

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First we wrote down all the numbers that we need, going up in 7s to 840!!

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(As you can see the numbers are too much for Jess)

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We transferred the numbers onto paper where then myself started to take photos…

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In total there was 120 pieces of paper, my knees definitely hurt after a while! Now this is completed, our next step in now to create the projection onto a Mac which will be done by next week! Very exciting for the company even Louise thinks so….

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Inspiration

Dear Reader,

Ours was the fen country by Dan Canham struck us all as a piece that we could us in our own show. The way he used verbaitum voices from the fens and used the nautral rhythms from their voices to create beats to dance to really inspired us and our work. I loved the way that they faded up the actual voice to the actors speaking the words because it made the performance come alive. Also the way Canham used the rhythms of the fen country voices to create movement gave an intertextual element to the piece, providing the piece with layers; the pre recorded, the live voice and dance.

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londondance.com

Another piece that provided our theatre company with inspiration was Michael Pinchbeck’s piece The Trilogy (Michael-Programme-Guide-Web) who looked at the past present and future self. It inspired me through use of the text and the way Pinchbeck approached different elements into his piece.

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Michael Pinchbeck Performance|Physical/visual theatre|Devised theatre Photograph taken by Julian Hughes

Pinchbeck used a live feed so the audience could read what was written on the cards, it was commical and allowed the audience to become a part of the satire. Pinchbeck also stripped back the stage so it was a bare space, the actors filling the space with props and tech equipment.
They put the tech on stage which gace them the ability to control the internal elements; repeating sound cues, enabling microphones. Having the tech on stage allowed them to have a lot more control over their piece and this is something we are interested in taking forward in our own piece.

We talked in our last rehearsal about the prospect of his a live feed and what advantages it would have for our own work. We also love the idea of stripping back the stage so it is bare, this would be to create a sense of honesty in out piece. Honesty in our piece is important because we are telling the stories of the past and we are not hiding anything in our staging it is bare and visable for all to see.

Yours Sincerely

Charlotte

xx


Works Cited

Canham, D. (2014) Ours was the Fen country, [performance] Dan Canham (dir.):Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, 30 January 2014.

Mayk, K. (2012) Audience Feedback from Pulse Fringe[online] Still House Available from: http://stillhouse.co.uk/stilhouse/stillhouse_-_ours_was_the_fen_country_files/HERE.pdf [Accessed 28March 2014).

Pinchbeck, M. (2014) Online Programme[online] Triology Available from: http://michaelpinchbeck.co.uk/assets/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Michael-Programme-Guide-Web.pdf[ Accessed 30 March]

Pinchbeck, M. (2014) Trilogy, [performance] Michael Pinchbeck (dir.): Lincoln Performing Arts Centre.

Pinchbeck, M. (2014) British Arts Council [online] Available from :http://www.britishcouncil.org/arts-performanceinprofile-2010-michael-pinchbeck.htm[ Accessed on 30 March]

 

Birds Eye View embroidered postcard progress

Take a look at the embroidered postcards and other items we found at the Lincolnshire Archives and Lauren’s Great Granddad’s postcards for original World War One designs.

Works Cited:

Birds Eye View Theatre (2014) Embroidered Postcard Progress. [online video] Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOUE1P9slDQ [Accessed 25 May 2014].

Pearson, L. (2014) The Archives. [blog entry] 22 February. Available from https://birdseyeviewtheatre.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2014/02/22/the-archives/ [Accessed 14 April 2014].

Simpson, L. (2014) My Great Granddad. [blog entry] 26 February. Available from https://birdseyeviewtheatre.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2014/02/26/my-great-granddad/ [Accessed 25 May 2014].

A Day in the Life of the Marketing PR

“Theatre is a people business” and so contacts are key to any marketing team (Kerrigan et al, 2004, p. 43). We are currently building contacts across Lincolnshire and generating interest in our performance. Newspapers, libraries, museum, councils and schools all need to know about your performance.

“The diversity of market participants differentiates the marketing of the arts from most other contexts” (Butler 2000, p. 353) and this is the biggest challenge we are facing when marketing for our theatre company in particular. We are branching out to a huge variety of audiences because the topic of war is very relevant across generations. So, watch this space to see if we can pull it off!

Works Cited:

Butler, P (2000) ‘By Popular Demand: Marketing the Arts’, Journal Of Marketing Management, 16, 4, pp. 343-364.

Kerrigan, F, Ozbilgin, M, Fraser, P, Kerrigan, F, & Fraser, P (2004) Arts Marketing,  Oxford: Burlington, MA Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann.

Simpson, L. (2014)

Where we Sit on a Local Scale

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Simpson, L. (2014) WW1 Commemoration Timeline

In Lincolnshire and the surrounding areas, we have stumbled across numerous other World War 1 projects which are currently in the development stage.

1. Andy Barrett is putting on a performance called ‘The Second Minute’ at Nottingham Playhouse

The performance is a letter based piece focussing, in particular, on the letters of the Sherwood Foresters regiment.

2. Mystery Plays  project called ‘The Last Post’ at the Lincoln Drill Hall

This is a performance based on letters sent back to Lincoln from the eight Beechey brothers who were all sent away to war. The piece is aiming to be a tribute to the family and the bravery they showed.

3. Events taking place in the Local Museums and Archives

Over the next four years, various different events will be held around Lincolnshire, in museums and on the streets. Lectures are to be given on different aspects of the war. There is one which focusses on the women’s role during the war which is particularly relevant to our performance. Family events and craft workshops will also be held to engage with the younger audiences.


Although there are similar projects around, we are still unique as we are offering an insight into the role of women during the First World War, using the letters that were sent and the stories that people still tell today. However, more and more projects are being announced all the time, so from a marketing point of view it is important to keep an eye on the other projects to keep our performance original and fresh!

Works Cited:

Simpson, L. (2014)

‘Grandma’s’ Verbatim

In the opening line of our Manifesto, we state that Birds Eye View Theatre Company, “are committed to creating REAL theatre. Honest theatre. Truthful theatre. Theatre that uses real people’s voices.” (Company Manifesto, 2014). In Verbatim, Verbatim, Will Hammond and Dan Steward define this diverse style of theatre a simple step by step process in which; ‘The words of real people are recorded or transcribed by a dramatist during an interview by a dramatist during an interview or research process…’ (2008, p.9).

From a directorial viewpoint, working with verbatim or devising theatre so both are new challenges for me as I have only ever worked with adaptions and script based texts before. Having watched Ours Was The Fen Country directed by previous DV8 member Dan Canham, we decided upon a similar style using head phones to listen to the verbatim as we spoke it. A few weeks ago, our producer Jess made contact with Mr Canham to ask some vital tips when learning verbatim. One of the best tips that Canham gave us was to listen to the piece as if it were a rhythm. We grasped the ways in which we could project the verbatim from watching the show. For the actors in the Ours Was The Fen Country, this was facing the audience head on and speaking the words. This may sound incredibly simple I have learned the key to creating verbatim which will evoke emotion is to set the scene using the words, images and background movements can then be added separately. Watch a snippet of verbatim practise below…

This brings me to my favorite Birds Eye View rehearsal so far which took place on Tuesday 18th March. We managed to pull together 16 minutes of our show for our work in progress showing, and most importantly I was able to work with each actor individually on their verbatim section. In terms of rhythm, Jennie’s appears to be the fastest, Her verbatim was taken from Charlotte and Ellie’s visit to one of our two care homes. Listening to the piece along side Jennie we were able to notice moments in which we could create beats in the dialogue, similar to the beats an actor would use to mark a fresh script.

Jamee, Jess and Lauren Rehearsing verbatim.

Jamee, Jess and Lauren Rehearsing verbatim.

Katie Mitchell’s book, The Directors Craft was equally as useful for developing the characters immediate circumstances. By this I mean simple things which the actor can imagine to help them pick out more of the character, Mitchell defines immediate circumstances as; ‘…the events that happen in the 24 hours or so leading up to the action in the scene.’ (Mitchell, 2009, p.31). Using verbatims from both Louise’s and Lauren’s Grandmas, these details became things such as how the furniture was set in the room, what was playing on the television and the time of day. For example Emily’s grandmother sips a cup of tea as she speaks, a detail which when added to the scene allows the audience to see further into the lives of our interviewees.

Works Cited:

Birds Eye View Theatre Comany (2014) Manifesto [online] Lincoln: Lincoln University Blogs. Available from: https://birdseyeviewtheatre.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/sample-page/manifesto/ [Accessed 27 February 2014].

Hammond, W. & Dan Steward (2008) Verbatim, Verbatim London : Oberon Books.

Mitchell, K. (2009) The Director’s Craft: A Handbook for the Theatre. London and New York: Routledge.

Letters: Role of the Post Office in World War One

(BBC, 2014)

(BBC, 2014)

The Post Office was a crucial part of Britain’s communications and war effort during the Great War (The British Postal Museum and Archive, 2014). The Post Office were not only responsible for the communications on the Front Line but also between the Front Line and home. At the London Home Depot there were 2,500 women employees alone  to sort through letters and parcels and over the first two years of the war, 35,000 women were drafted in to work for the Post Office. 12.5 million letters were sent every week and a total of 2 billion letters and 114 million parcels were sent during the war.

We have taken a great interest in letters for our performance hence our title ‘Sincerely Yours’ After visiting the Museum of Lincolnshire Life and finding many letters from Billy Lounds, we were intrigued to see whether we could find any others. With a trip to the Lincolnshire Archives, Ellie, Charlotte and Louise encountered another lot of letters from Private Harry Butt. We started to compile the letters that we had found and after reading many of them we realised that there were several references to the local area of Lincoln. I’ll also admit that a fair few of us have fallen in love with either Harry or Billy or both!

As lovely as it was to read these letters and the significance of these letters, it dawned on us that we were reading personal, private letters. It is a sensitive subject to explore, all these letters to the men’s sweethearts and mothers so we must be careful with how we use them. As well as actual letters there were many other forms of letters that we found such as telegrams, field postcards and also beautifully detailed silk postcards.

We are possibly going to use some of these letters we have found within out final piece as we have been conducting several experiments with what we could do for example. We responded as Dora to a letter from Billy. It was a good exercise as, although we are not trying to be these women, it helped us think about the possible emotions and thoughts these would have had when receiving these letters. We have now taken inspiration from the silk postcards to create our flyers for the performance. We are creating our own design in a similar style to the postcards we have seen and will convey our piece to its receiver.

Field Postcard

‘A completed field postcard, posted on 22 March 1916’ (BBC, 2014)

Simpson, L. (2014) Christmas Postcard

Christmas Postcard (Simpson, L., 2014)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited:

BBC (2014) World War One: How did 12 million letters a week reach soldiers? [online] London: BBC. Available from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25934407 [Accessed 15th March 2014]

BBC (2014) iWonder World War One: How did 12 million letters a week reach soldiers? [online] London:BBC. Available from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/zqtmyrd [Accessed 15th March 2014]

The British Postal Museum & Archive (2014) The Post Office and the First World War [online] Available from: http://www.postalheritage.org.uk/page/firstworldwar [Accessed 15th March 2014]

The British Postal Museum & Archive (2014) The Post Office At War [online] Available from: http://www.postalheritage.org.uk/page/peoplespost-war [Accessed 15th March 2014]

“It’s a long way to Sincerely Yours”

We reach that point in production where the devising has just begun, the research has been collated and the directing team are putting in place all the big, small, important and on some occasions ridiculous ideas that will be sewn together to create ‘Sincerely Yours’. As a director, it is important to remember as many of the ideas and research materials that we have collected over the past month and a half; all the playing and experimenting and now start cherry picking the best of it all to create our performance.

Mooney, C 2014

(Charlotte Mooney, 2014)

We are working currently on our “big scene”, otherwise known as ‘The Factory Scene’. The scene is set in a cotton mill in Lincolnshire (keeping it local!) where the women are working the home front while the boys are away at war. They are a representation of the British war machine; sewing plane wings, making stretches of material for further development and any cotton based resource that would be needed for the war effort. As the dance director, I took inspiration from the stories and history we have learned over the past couple of months from the archives, the care homes, the family stories and history books that it was the professional nature of the women working like machines back home to “keep the home fires burning”. Therefore, I chose to show this machine like system of women in the factories through a combination of dance, physical theatre and tightly choreographed movement to create an industrial appearance.

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(Imperial War Museum, Accessed on March 14th 2014)

The whole scene is uniformed, precise and powerful to show how professional and hard working the women were in their positions back home. The scene includes tap dancing to create the sounds of the war machine and the factory itself; to give the piece pace and rhythm, and as the demand for materials increases the pace has the ability to increase, thus creating a sense of chaos. I have included a devised broom/sweeping routine in this scene as well, to show the domesticity of the women and how they kept a clean environment within which to work; vital when in the cotton mills especially. The different noises made by the brooms based on which part of the broom you use creates a completely different tone to the piece; the sweep, the hard knocks, the slides all add layers to the rhythm of the home war machine.

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(Louise Pearson, March 2014)

Then I move onto the inclusion of the cotton sheets themselves, creating patterns and shapes to add creativity and fun into a scene that would otherwise be very simple. What I love about this scene is it’s universal nature; it could be any type of factory, anywhere in England, any war but the focus on how the women worked so professionally, and how they responded to increase in demand or any personal issues did not hinder their work. The women of the WW1 cotton mills were machines, were providers, were the solidarity of the home front war effort and we should be proud of our heritage.

Works Cited

Charlotte Mooney, March 2014.
Imperial War Museum, accessed on http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205195286 on 14th March 2014.
Louise Pearson, March 2014.

A day in the life of a Producer/ Production Manager…

Within professional theatre the role of producer is unclear and there are many variations (Seabright, 2010, p.5). My role, as Producer and Production Manager of Birds Eye View Theatre, is one of organisation, responsibility, problem solving, finance and co-ordination. Within the company I am the go to girl regarding the technical, financial, artistic and marketing aspects of our current project, Sincerely Yours. In the words of James Seabright, I am a ‘do-it-all’ producer. (2010, p.5) and my job is to ensure the smooth running of the company. I could only do this with the help of my handy folder of wisdom…

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Golby (2014) Folder of Wisdom

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Promoting our performance!

Finally the bunting is in the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre I am so happy with it, even though it took a hours to make I am really pleased with how it looks. This is the LPAC version with minimal information on it, and below is the other version with contact details on. I am very happy with how it looks, now it’s time for a cup of tea.

Cox, E (2014)

Cox, E 2014

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Cox, E 2014

Creating the bunting

 

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Cox, E 2014

Unfortunately I had a complete nightmare with the colour printer the day I wanted a colour mock up! However, here is a teaser of the marketing bunting that will be available soon. They will eventually be red, white and blue after taking inspiration from The Museum of Lincolnshire Life, where they had bunting hanging in the vehicle room. I previously mentioned this in my blog, The Grand Day Out. The red section will be poppies, the white our logo and the blue the title, date, time and where it will be performed. We will be putting this up in the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, the Lincolnshire Archives and also in The Museum of Lincolnshire Life. We will be using this as our pre-marketing material bringing out the leaflets and flyers closer to the actual date.

I really enjoyed designing our own version of a ‘poster’ as it is something completely different to what you would usually see for a performance promotion. It is bold, decorative and eye-catching because of the three vivid colours. I love how the ideas and inspiration from our research process are creeping into our current development. I really want to use bunting in our performance in order to tie in our ‘visual identity’ (Pieters 2008, p.1) as a theatre company.

Works Cited

Cox, E 2014

Pieters, R. Wedel, M (2008) Visual Marketing: From Attention to Action. Routledge: USA.

My library experiment

I decided to broaden our audience by targeting those that could be interested from the library. I made some tiny ticket style messages to put in World War One/history books in our campus library. These cards ask whether they have any family stories and what they themselves know about the war. They then have to reply to our Instagram or Twitter pages. I have made 120 tickets and have hidden them in the library, will you find one?

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Cox, E 2014

Dear Dora…

Dear Reader,

Our main focus as a theatre company as you can tell from the title is letters. As Bird’s Eye View Theatre are celebrating the centenary we delved into the archives (I now have my own membership) and found old letters sent from loved ones from Billie to Dora and from Harry to Alice, we were excited by the prospect of holding these old letters and falling in love with these characters of the past and their stories Ellie, Louise and I were shocked at the amount of history we could hold in our hands, actual letters that were sent that talked of the stonebow in Lincoln and Barclays bank,places that as students we walk past every day and now they have some hidden history and  story that we can share.We desperately wanted to give history a stage and let voices of the forgotten past be remembered.

We found some amazing things in the archieves including embroided post cards that the soilders either bought or made and sent them to loved ones.

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Forget Me Not Mooney. C (2014) Taken in the archives

The Birds also had the pleasure of Louise and Lauren’s grandparents checking in their attics and finding lots of old embroided post cards which made the whole experience feel a little bit more real. Touching the cards that were passed through so many hands in WW1 made it a little bit eerie but made the Birds feel like we as a company were beginning to become apart of bringing the stories to life.

Yours Sincerely

Charlotte

xxx

What sort of flyer shall we have?

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Cox, E 2014

When we were deciding how to create flyers and programmes we took inspiration from what marketing and promotional materials we had seen around campus and at other theatre venues. We absolutely loved the postcard flyer for A Letter To Lacy,  we thought it was incredibly different, small yet eye-catching and bold enough to still have the distinctive image that will make people pick it up. We decided that this was the style of flyer we wanted, using World War One postcards as a template and creating our own stitched pattern on the front.

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Cox, E 2014

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Cox, E 2014

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Cox, E 2014

Cox, E (2014)

Cox, E 2014

If you want to see how well the process went click this link to read Louise’s blog post.

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Cox, E 2014

My Great Granddad

So, a trip home last weekend uncovered some amazing family history for me. My grandma had an entire folder full of original postcards that were sent during World War One.

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Simpson, L. (2014) Postcards

The postcards vary from being written by my great granddad to his mother and father, to then some being written to him by his French girlfriend, Juliette. There is not always much written on them due to censorship but they always let the family know that he is safe.

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Simpson, L. (2014) Postcards

There are also some lovely hand stitched cards in this folder, sent on special occasions like Christmas or a birthday. The detail on them is incredible which shows the amount of time that must have been spent on them.

We really love the aesthetic of these and so we are currently looking at ways of incorporating this style into the set. The words that are written on them will also, hopefully, make an appearance in the final performance. This adds a real personal element to the performance for me and it will hopefully ring home with a lot of the audience members too. Here is a final picture of the man himself:

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Simpson, L. (2014) My Great Granddad

 

All Images:

Simpson, L. (2014)

So how are we going to do this?

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Going back to our Theatre Compay Manifesto which we created a couple weeks ago, we mentioned that we wanted to create “REAL theatre. Honest theatre. Truthful theatre”.  As this is an important motive for us as a theatre company, we want this to reflect in our final project. By doing this there is a lot to think about such our space, the aesthetics of the theatre and also our research. These are the ideas we have come up with so far:

First of all, we would like to strip the theatre back by making sure that everything we do in our performance such as moving the set, changing of the lights, creating soundscapes through ourselves or even microphones is visible. By doing this we feel as though we are being honest and truthful not only to ourselves but also our audience. By doing this we aren’t hiding by what we want to achieve.

The honest and truthfulness won’t be just in our aesthetics of the performance but also in ourselves. We don’t want to be characters. The type of theatre we want to portray is verbatim theatre which is a documentary based language with real people’s spoken words. We want to be able to share their own words and not take credit for them and by doing this we will be representing their words in a variety of mediums.

Even though we would like to strip back our stage, as a company we would like to use a lot of technology such as projection to show the audience more visually what research we have gained through our experience of making this project. We would like to project text and also images. By projecting quotes from our interviewee’s shows the audience not only our research but our journey and other people’s views and opinions on WW1 that we have gained over the past weeks. Another medium I have mention is images. Members of our theatre company have collated images of their past relatives during WW1 and also have explored the Lincolnshire Archives where they have found useful pictures.

My last point taken from our manifesto is that we mention about taking “the lost and forgotten documents that are stored away, in your attics, archives and annex’s”. This would be a great image to start our performance with. By decorating the stage with lots of clutter and boxes, and then slowly taking the items away throughout the performance would represent history slowly fading away. It is the same with our performance, it will be once there on the stage but once we have finished it is as though it wasn’t there.