Opening up the rehearsal process. Guest blog by LFS director Andrew Loretto

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A guest blog by director and Sheffield Theatres Creative producer Andrew Loretto, written on Saturday 5 May 2012: 

And here we are at the end of week 2 of rehearsals for the Sheffield Theatres/Chol Theatre co-production of the world premiere of LeanerFasterStronger by Kaite O’Reilly. Time has flown by in the rehearsal room, but so much has been achieved – including a rough stagger run on day 9.

The project has been an extraordinary two-year journey of collaborative research and discovery – and my aim now as director is to condense and continue this journey in rehearsals whilst also doing everything we can to realise a bold and vibrant staging of this remarkable new piece of writing, owned by all the artists involved. I want our Sheffield audiences to be thrilled, provoked and caught up in the rapid-fire sweep of the play’s arguments.

Having Kaite in rehearsals for the first two weeks has proved invaluable in terms of tackling nitty-gritty textual and contextual questions to help me, the cast and our designers achieve a shared understanding of the many worlds of the play. It has also been helpful for me to share physical and vocal thoughts on the floor with Kaite so that she can see the choices we are making and – crucially for a first staging – be part of those choices. One of the reasons I love directing new work is the joy of having the writer in the rehearsal room – that sense of taking collective creative steps into the unknown for the first time. It is both thrilling and daunting, but as director I place my trust in a wonderfully talented team who I know will get us to our destination.

Alongside interrogation of text, character, setting, emotion and logic, we are also constantly playing with the physical language of the play in response to Shanaz Gulzar’s intimate in-the-round design of video projections that interact with building blocks that can be constructed in various permutations – rather like an oversized child’s play set. I’m keen that we don’t try to literally show sporting sequences on stage. We are not trained, expert sportspeople, but rather a bunch of artists interpreting the essence of the athletes for our audiences. I also feel that a naturalistic physical language would not serve the post-dramatic nature of Kaite’s writing. So we have been playing with various conventions based on broken down scores, shared by all of the performers and interacting with the geometric shapes created by the dispersed set blocks. I have also been playing with the notion that an athlete is still when speaking to us whilst the movement happens elsewhere. This produces the sensation of the athlete being the external observer of him or herself. This serves the text well and helps the audience’s understanding of the thought processes of the athletes we encounter in the play.

We have a wonderful, intelligent and creative team of four actors – each brings generosity, enquiry and complementary skills to the process. My job is to get the cast to a place of embodying the same physical language whilst also celebrating their individuality. With this in mind, and based on the discoveries from rehearsals, our Movement Adviser Lucy Cullingford is charged with empowering the company with a choreographic language that we all understand and can use at various points on the play.

One of my driving forces for making theatre is how we can open up and make opportunities of excellence for others – it flows through all of my work, whether making a large-scale production with an eighty-strong cast of 12-85 year olds for Sheffield People’s Theatre, enabling a student company to tour work to international festivals, or opening up Sheffield Theatres’ spaces to local musicians, comedians, dancers and cabaret artists through the Sheffield Sizzler. It doesn’t matter to me what the scale, level or form of project is, we must find ways of opening up our processes and providing opportunities for others to learn, develop and show their own creative skills.

With this in mind, from the outset LeanerFasterStronger has been designed to carry a range of pedagogical opportunities, including multi-media workshops for local schools led by Chol Theatre, writing workshops and a facilitated play-reading with Kaite and post-show discussion with the company. We are also providing opportunities for members of Sheffield People’s Theatre to work with our cast and become involved in elements of performance as ‘supernumeraries’ (a new term for me). In my role as Sheffield Theatres’ Creative Producer I have been curating a season of workshop opportunities for students reading Theatre Studies at the University of Sheffield School of English. And so I arranged that their final workshop would interface with our rehearsal process.

This is, to my knowledge, unusual in mainstream British theatre practice. The rehearsal room is generally held up as the holiest of holies, not to be disturbed on any account and only accessible to those people most closely involved with the process. And yet we strive (or ought to strive in the publicly funded sector) to provide access to most aspects of theatre-making these days. So why not also the core of making theatre – the working rehearsal room? In the case of LeanerFasterStronger, I not only wanted to provide a workshop based on our process for the students, I wanted to lead a workshop that interfaced with an active actual rehearsal whereby the students would be making discoveries with the cast for the first time.

So it was today that our fabulous company of Morven Macbeth, Christopher Simpson, Ben Addis and Kathryn Dimery were joined temporarily by an extended ‘cast’ comprised of first, second and third year students Amy, Matt, Sarah, Esie, Jade, Naomi and Natasha. Together we were taken through a journey of ‘Viewpointing’ by Lucy, whereby we developed an improvised but highly detailed approach to interacting with the space, set and gestures related to the play. Combined with narrative, character and scenario parameters I set, we jointly developed a rich palette of physical choices that were full of pathos, optimism, moments lived, savoured and lost. The students approached Lucy and my collaborative approach to making work with open minds, focus and great humanity. Until this point our cast had worked as a team of four. Now they were fully able to be observer/participants and step back to observe the bigger physical picture. This was highly empowering and encouraging for the actors – who could see properly for the first time how the physicality of the play would work. Not only that, but the students were excited by the prospect that their ideas would feed into our process – and all of them were keen to come and see the show by close of play.

This got me thinking: why shouldn’t we open up all our rehearsal processes to local students? There cannot be a single creative process from which an aspect cannot be extracted to draw a line of genuine enquiry that can then be explored with students and cast together. Do it – as we did – in week 2. Enough time for the cast to have bonded and know the world of the play, but not too late for things to be set, and there still to be big questions to explore. And not at the delicate, later, highly focused and sometimes high-stakes stages of rehearsal.

Go on theatre directors – particularly those of you in the subsidised sector – plan for it in your schedules. And if facilitating workshops isn’t your forte, talk to your assistant director (if you have one) or a member of the venue’s creative development team. Do it now. What’s your excuse? If in doubt, here’s an extract from an email I received whilst writing this blog from a first year student who took part in our rehearsal:

 “I want to say a big thank you to you and your team for letting us step into rehearsals for the day. How refreshing it was to try something different in such a friendly and warm environment! Getting to do work with professionals was also a tad mind blowing! I found the work you were doing really different to all the training I’ve done in the past.”

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LeanerFasterStronger runs at Sheffield Theatres:  Wed 23 May – Sat 2 June  http://www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk/event/leanerfasterstronger-12/

Dramatic Structure – Raising the Stakes. Sat 26 May

Make high tension stories that really matter! Learn how to shape plays that will have an impact on your audience and make them care about your characters. Led by Kaite O’Reilly, award-winning writer of LeanerFasterStronger.

http://www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk/event/dramatic-structure-raising-the-stakes/

Taking the dramatic temperature of your script. Tuesday 29 May.     A practical checklist for effective and dynamic drama: tension, pace, plot, and emotional engagement. Led by multiple award-winning writer of this season’s LeanerFasterStronger, Kaite O’Reilly. http://www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk/event/taking-the-dramatic-temperature-of-your-script/

LeanerFasterStronger: A week of Olympians and Paralympians

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Kaite O’Reilly with Paralympian hopefuls Steve Judge and  Suzannah Rockett-Coughlan at Sheffield Hallam University.

I started this blog last year as I wanted to write about the varied processes I might experience as a writer/dramaturg/co-creator working on three vastly differing productions over 2012. It was my plan to reflect on my experiences in ‘real time’ in research, rewrites, and in rehearsals, as the work grew and developed.

Part of this project was in response to the questions I’m often been asked by those I teach and mentor about the process of ‘being a playwright’.  My answer has always been ‘it depends’ – for I believe there is no one process, and my hope with writing the blog is to reveal some of the many processes writers and makers of live performance may encounter.

I’m currently at the end of the second week of rehearsals with Chol/Sheffield Theatres co-production of LeanerFasterStronger, a Cultural Olympiad project, reflecting on elite sport and the ethics and issues around human enhancement and sports science. It has been a research-heavy project, reading books and academic essays, being in residence at Sheffield Hallam University’s Centre for Sports Engineering Research, and interviewing former athletes who have competed at international level.

I’ve often wondered when the research will stop, for the issues are so current, especially with the Olympics and Paralympics fast approaching. Almost every day in rehearsals one of the company will pull out a story relevant to the play that was in that morning’s newspaper, or reported on television:  Themes of corruption, of sacrifice, of cheating or playing fair; advances in technology and bio-engineering; sportspeople breaking records, or collapsing and dying owing to the extreme rigour and demands of the sport.

Never before have I been involved in a project which is so current and ‘now’, which brings with it a responsibility. Although what we are embarking on is fictional and looking to the future, posing the central question of ‘How far would you go to be the best?’, the work needs to be credible, rooted in ‘truth’. Several events this past week have enabled me to check out my ideas with athletes competing at the highest level, and these conversations have impacted on the final revisions of the script. I feel astonishingly fortunate that these opportunities have come to me, and especially so mid-rehearsal. I never expected part of my job as a playwright would involve spending time with Paralympians and Olympians – nor that the final changes to a script would occur so close to production.

After a Paralympics panel event organised by Sheffield Hallam University and Radio Sheffield, I spoke at length with fencers Suzanna Rockett-Coughlan and Craig McCann, who were nervously waiting to discover whether they had been selected for 2012; and  2016  Paratriathlete hopeful Steve Judge. All talked about the necessity – and challenges – of keeping a good family/training balance, and the pleasures and trevails of competing at such a level.

Finding the human aspect, the emotional drama at the heart of sport has been central to my writing of the script. So much coverage of elite athletes focus on their super-ability and dedication; even the panel event that evening, introduced by the Chair of the British Paralympics Association, Tim Reddish, focused on the Paralympians as being inspirational, over-coming so many obstacles. That may be so and, sincerely, more power to them, but as a disabled woman I’m tired of the usual representations of people with impairments as either inspirational ‘heroes’, or the tragic but brave. To cut through this and connect, person to person, and share ideas and anecdotes, to talk about life and passion and winning or losing was phenomenal, and I am so grateful to the athletes for the insight they gave me into the beating human heart behind the high-pressured business of sport.

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Cutting Edge 2012: Behind Athletics, the English Institute of Sport.

Later that week, it was the turn of Olympian Roger Black, top sports scientist Professor Steve Haake,  Professor Chris Cooper, an expert in the physiology of top athletes, and Dr Rob Harle, a lead researcher in the development of innovative video and body sensor technologies to aid the training of both novice and elite athletes.

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Steve Haake, volunteer athlete, and Roger Black

Cutting Edge 2012, at the English Institute of Sport, featured live athletics demonstrations and my own advisor, Dr David James, leading an interactive  survey on how far research and new technologies should be used in the quest to win gold. Given the subject of my play – How far would you go to be the best? – it felt as though the event was especially organised for me and the whole LFS company who attended.

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Olympic Silver medalist Roger Black answering LFS actor Morven Macbeth’s research question. The English Institute of Sport.

One of the actors, Morven Macbeth, asked a question pertinent to our research and garnered a great response from Roger Black:

“Sport is definitely an industry, there’s no doubt about that, and the Olympics is a massive business, we know that, but for the athlete – you’re still the young kid who had the dream; you’re still one of the lucky ones who happened to have a gift for sport… I may be naive, but I still believe, when I watch the Olympics, the vast majority of the athletes we’re watching are clean, and are doing it for the right reasons, pushing themselves, having a dream, and trying to fill that potential. I can say that, because I did it….But there are many people who absolutely believe you can’t win a medal without taking drugs. And I know that’s not true.”

Further responses touched on the notion of ‘the spirit’ and ‘the virtue’ of sport – and how one of the ‘rules’ of sport is to ‘uphold the spirit of sport’ – a circular argument – and these rules or tasks we set ourselves are often arbitrary.

Given that one of the themes of the script has been ‘Sport tests the limits of what humans can do’, this comment, combined with the developments in bio and genetic engineering, gave me much food for thought. Fuelled by these interventions and provocations during the week, I locked myself into my hotel room over the weekend and finished the script.

 

One hundred ‘rules’ for writing fiction: 57-61

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Further provocations and reflections on writing fiction (and poetry), extracted from interviews and articles collected over the years…

57.  When an idea comes, spend silent time with it. Remember Keats’s idea of Negative Capability and Kipling’s advice to “drift, wait and obey”. Along with your gathering of hard data, allow yourself also to dream your idea into being. (Rose Tremain).

58.  Read like mad. But try to do it analytically – which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It’s worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work. I find watching films also instructive. Nearly every modern Hollywood blockbuster is hopelessly long and baggy. Trying to visualise the much better films they would have been with a few radical cuts is a great exercise in the art of story-telling. (Sarah Waters).

59.  Think with your senses as well as your brain. (Andrew Motion).

60.  Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether. (Jeanette Winterson).

61,  Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for. (Kurt Vonnegut).

LeanerFasterStronger – a playwright in the rehearsal room

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Archive poster of 1948 London Olympics on wall of Centre for Sports Engineering Research, Sheffield Hallam University.

Companies working with new plays have to be flexible, patient, and with steely nerves. Unlike second productions, or reinterpretations of Classics, a new script is not tried or tested, but neither is it necessarily set in stone. Having the playwright in rehearsals means the script can be malleable, responding to the other creatives in the room.

This, however, does not mean that the script is devised or co-created. In the case of LeanerFasterStronger, the script I’ve written over the past eighteen months is solid and highly developed, in its fourth draft. It is a complex script, with multiple characters to be played by a small ensemble cast of four.

One of the joys of being in the rehearsal room when completing such an ambitious script is the potential for engagement. If an actor has a question about the script, the writer is on hand to answer directly – and the playwright has the pooled imaginations, skills, and intellects of the company at work on the script. Here is where true collaboration happens, with all involved responding and reacting to each other, the production growing organically. It is demanding, exciting, and joyful.

Previously, the central characters in the play have been disembodied voices in my head. Now they find substance, psychology, a past. Andrew leads the actors in a series of exercises which create a chronological history of their characters from birth until we meet them in the play. As the play is not naturalistic, during my own process I haven’t created ‘back stories’ for the characters. Individually, the performers make life stories for their central characters: siblings, parents, experiences at school, at college, in work; they build a psychological and emotional profile for these figures, mapping their dreams, fears, hopes, ambitions…

I observe all this, fascinated, as the background material dovetails with the details in the script. There are no contradictions, only discoveries: the identity of these central characters, their accents, their emotional baggage. This is all grist to my mill, as I polish and make the final tweaks to the script.

LeanerFasterStronger

A Sheffield Theatres and Chol Theatre Co-Production

Wed 23 May – Sat 2 June http://www.sheffieldtheatres.co.uk/event/leanerfasterstronger-12/