Hello everyone!
We had a really successful rehearsal a few days ago, and because the mood took us, we decided to record our first ‘vlog’ as a company. While blogging is a great way to document our process, filming adds a certain immediacy to our content- we are right there, in the rehearsal room and in the moment, and the conversations that form the basis of our work are being recorded as they happen.
The rehearsal was very experimental, looking at different stimuli our director had brought in and the original script, and creating work from the material which inspired us most. As a company, our aim is to create urgent, raw and challenging work, performance that will provoke thought in our audience and feel brutal in its topic. We don’t want to dress up the stories we’re telling; our role as theatre makers is to develop performance around the voices of women who are not part of western culture, but of communities where attitudes to women are vastly different.
With this in mind, we started exploring what role sound might have in our show, by playing a piece of instrumental music and seeing what we were inclined to do in the space. Sam ended up finding a melody and singing lines from the script, which developed into a song- a fragment of performance which can be easily slotted into the final show, as a bridge between different sections.
The video below is, in a nutshell, us talking about what we did in the rehearsal, our aims for the show as a whole, theatrical inspirations and International Women’s Day 2015, for which we did a lot of promotion of WOMENSwear.