(Chapman, 2014)
From the casting of our pebble a few months back, the ripples have grown. As our ideas have developed, our confidence in ourselves and as a company have also strengthened. With this ever growing confidence with our work, we have seen refinement to some of our original ideas and also used influences from other professional such as Michael Pinchbeck’s The Trilogy and Still House’s Ours Was the Fen Country plus our own research to create original and exciting new work.
We have stuck with the idea of presenting a Documentary piece of theatre as it seemed appropriate for our desired subject we were looking at, World War One, rather than producing a straight play. It has also allowed us the liberty to spread our wings, as it were, and discover the multitude of information and resources about World War One and utilise it to our own ability and effect. The main purpose and point in our manifesto is to create real theatre.
“We are committed to creating REAL theatre. Honest theatre. Truthful theatre. Theatre that uses real people’s voices. We want to give history the chance to speak again” (Manifesto)
With the chosen path of our work we have stayed true to this as much as possible. All of the text we have used so far, mainly the letters we found, have not been edited with embellishments or alterations. We have taken the raw text and used other elements such as music and movement to stylise the presentation of the texts. The influence of verbatim theatre came from Dan Canham’s performance Ours Was the Fen Country, which used real people’s stories and voices to create a representation and atmosphere of the Fens. This is what we are trying to achieve with finding stories and letters from World War One in order for the audience to gain an insight into Lincolnshire’s place in World War One and also some stories that are personal to members of our company.
(Chapman, 2014)
Links to previous blog posts:
Works Cited:
- Birds Eye View Theatre Company (2014) Manifesto [online] Lincoln: University of Lincoln Blogs and Social Network. Available from: https://birdseyeviewtheatre.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/sample-page/manifesto/, [Accessed on 14th April 2014].
- Pinchbeck, M. (2014) The Trilogy. [performance] Michael Pinchbeck (dir.) Lincoln: Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, 30th January.
- Stillhouse (2014) Ours Was The Fen Country. [performance] Dan Canham (dir.) Lincoln: Lincoln Performing Arts Centre, 6th Feb.