L.E.M. workshop

Francois Lecoq tries out a new creation

 We spent this week taking part in a L.E.M workshop (Laboratoire d'Etude du Mouvement) run by Jaques Lecoq's daughter Pascale.  This was all about us understanding the relationship between movement and space.  At first I felt it was all a bit arty-farty for my taste but in the end, after developing 3 dimensional objects and using moving them around a bit - I realised that I picked up a lot of different bits and pieces that will be helpful with regards to directing.
Drawings of our bedrooms

Looking at the spacing between people, how certain areas show certain passions and how certain colour illicit certain responses was interesting.  We made various objects and I'm sure that it will all be very useful when we have our first meeting with our set designer next week.




The following week will be very interesting, first we watch our acting cohorts perform Gorky's 'Vassa' - it will be interesting to see what results they get from what has been a very difficult rehearsal process for some of them, I'm looking forward to it. Then we move on to developing scripts with our playwrights, that is going to be a lot of fun with a great group of actors and a fantastic playwright - I can't wait to get started

.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Oblique Strategies for Drama

I am a big fan of the musician Brian Eno. From his work with Roxy Music through to his records with U2 and Coldplay via Bowie, Byrne and inventing ambient music I think he has an interesting outlook on the creative process and has made a career out of reinventing his own sound, and the sound of others. As a theatre director who has a massive interest in record production I was drawn to Eno's Oblique Strategies . A series of prompts written on cards that he would pull out at random to instigate a creative impulse in the musicians he was working with. You can check out some of the strategies on this website .  Sometimes when you are rehearsing a play you can feel that, as a director, you are making the same safe choices again and again. Actors have this feeling too. They have made choices in rehearsal and are scared to deviate from 'what works'. This pushes a whole world of unexplored possibilities to the side.  I was working on some show or other a few years ago and when it
Read more

Music As A Time Machine

Image
I’m preparing for my next show, called Battery Park which is a fictional story of a Britpop band from Greenock that almost made it. It looks at the bruised and bitter mid-40’s main character and flashes back to his youth in the 90’s, when his band almost became the next Oasis… almost. In my latest draft I wrote the line, ‘music is the closest thing we have to a time machine’ that then got me thinking. I thought back to my own days in a band, Blind Pew (why we were called that, I can't recall, I know it's a character from Treasure Island but... well... that's all I know!) some of which makes it into the play. I thought about doing something exciting and fun with your pals but also the boredom, the arguments and the crushing disappointment that comes with the territory.   This was before smartphones so we don’t have many photos outwith the official ones from gigs, but when I put on our old albums, it was incredible how quickly images and people came rushing back into my h
Read more

Making Battery Park

Image
Opening night for my latest play, Battery Park, has come and gone. I'm sitting here, exhausted but exhilarated after a fantastic rehearsal process that led to us making what I think is a great show.  I started this blog as a student at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, where I studied directing, as a place to reflect on my practice, and over a decade later I haven't kicked the habit. So here's a reflection on my process as a director - but also as the artistic director of Sleeping Warrior Theatre Company.  It will be of niche interest to some I hope, and will be a resource for myself looking back. Battery Park is about a group of young people from Greenock who form a band and attempt to become bigger than Oasis in 1990's Britain. We know right from the off that they didn't succeed and we watch the main protagonist now - a 47 year old man - as he grapples with the choices made by younger him and how they still affect his life.  Around a year and a half ago I appli
Read more