For our second assignment we had to choose a location as an inspiration for a ’24 Hour’ folio. For my location I chose Fortyfivedownstairs, an independent theatre in Flinders Lane that I regularly volunteer at and has been open and producing works with emerging and established artists since 2002. Since this folio’s location is meant to simply inspire our pieces, my pieces are centered around the concept of theatre, which I’ll admit is a little broad, but I feel as though I at least managed to capture some of it:
Theatre is a finite medium, it only exists in that singular space, in that one moment and then it’s gone. It has an unequivocal way of inspiring its audience through evoking not only powerful and enveloping emotions, but life changing thoughts as well.
I seek to find the essence of theatre’s vivid image, through the interviews of Mary Lou Jelbart, Philippa Jelbart and Sophie Kahl,all intricate parts of the creative team at the independent, not-for-profit, theatre and gallery space – fortyfivedownstairs.
In creating this piece I was really inspired by the pieces ‘Poetry Texas’ (Pejk Malinovski), ‘The Letter S’ (Chris Brookes), ‘Tupperware’ (The Kitchen Sisters) and ‘If’ (Sherre DeLys and John Jacobs).
I tried to create observations like those of Malinovski in ‘Poetry Texas’, and while they were of a different style, I feel that my musings did add another dimension and layer to the piece, allowing for the audience to develop new thoughts.
Both ‘The Letter S’ and ‘If’ use the voice of the producer heavily through actors as well as through creating phrases relevant to the material and separate to narration, observations and interviews. This use of unique statements repeated throughout ‘The Letter S’ to give a different meaning, such as “are we on the air?” and the use of unique sounds created by the young girl in ‘If’ really create and add new sound textures that add meaning as the piece progresses. I tried to do something similar through my use of acting exercises, such as tongue twisters, constantly repeated underneath the sections of interview, and then faded to silence at the point in the interviews where focus was needed most. I also tried to make the tongue twisters relevant to the content of the interview, such as the tone and the literal words in “she sells sea shells by the sea shore” relating to no one donating any money to the performers in the ballet performance.
I also drew inspiration from ‘Tupperware’ as I layered the tongue twisters underneath the interviews with no music or other sounds, just voice on voice, trying to really get across the intangible feeling that theatre creates.
I started the piece with a quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which I feel sums up the finite nature of theatre. For this piece I really wanted to play with focus, so I made this section silent to make it prominent, bringing in the tongue twister over the last word “nothing”, emphasising the words own innateness. For each interview I layered in an acting exercise underneath and faded it out as the interviewees description reached its peak. The first two chunks of interview relate to each other well, as they both speak about the emotional vividness of theatre, but the third chunk speaks of a performance which is instead more ideological as the interviewee talks about how theatre may be enriching for the audience, but those who create it get very little in return. This then connects to the ending of the piece, another acting exercise, vowels being shouted out, layered over with “Do, Re, me” allowing the audience to ponder whether or not acting is the ultimate form of selfishness or selflessness. The final quote, “Exit, pursued by a bear.” reiterates this idea, as it allows the listener to ponder whether it is simply a stage direction or whether the audience is the bear.
During the creation of this piece I quickly learnt about how to clean up a sound file (wind noise) and how not to (handling noise masking audio). I have learnt a lot more about sound frequency and cleaning audio through the process of making this piece. I also feel that my recording skills have improved, as I went into the multi-track studio to record all of my material other than interviews.