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.