“Theatre isn’t combined to the stage. The entire world is a stage, and that entire stage is a world waiting to be explored”
We had explored working inside out, and outside in. This week, we looked at utilising these techniques in performance not for ourselves, but instead a puppet that we created. We took great care in creating and moulding our little tinfoil puppet – Creating life, age, a personality.
We looked at The Tin Forest by Helen Ward and Tim Robertson; An endearing short story of a lonely man, living in a Tin Forest, full of everyone’s discarded trash. We began to deconstruct the contents of the story, the actions, the sounds, the sights. It created a real sense, even if only personal of the world we were reading.
In groups, we began to create our designated section of the story, exploring the room around us, the spaces and the worlds that could be created around us. A very important lesson today – Theatre isn’t combined to the stage. The entire world is a stage, and that entire stage is a world waiting to be explored.
We continued to explore creating worlds and the characters inhabiting it. This time, creating our own city filled with areas and places that have inhabited our own memories and lives. We then added layers of real stories, rumours and bad experiences, all of which created a sense of personal history within this city and linking to the idea of discarded trash, the things that we would discard from our lives and pasts are things that actually make up the city, our experiences and who we are and also who other people are.
I identified how this exercise could be further used to create characters within the city, and the location of that character, where they live, the locations they attached to could inspire the character itself – a great example of outside in.
Today was difficult. As a companion piece to what had come before it was an ideal day. What was difficult was the isolation aspect of it. Being every week this was the first session that felt like a bridging session between the past and the future, as it should be. But due to the weekly timetable, it was a slightly more difficult one to digest in context.
