Whose Shoes
This speculative project introduces you to the creative processes involved in, and principles of designing for, theatre that tours into small-scale venues that are both theatre and non-theatre settings. This speculative project will lead to the devised project of the same play whose shoes and with new challenges of designing for a young audience with hard of hearing students. To take into consideration how to make the performance accessible so all can understand the show, along with learning to work in a small performance space as the theatre will be shared between two groups. The show will be performed to Meller’s Primary school year 5 students.
For the speculative project I wanted the kids to be involved so they do not lose attention, I thought about different ways to tell the story and I came up with the idea of using fabrics. The fabrics will be able to help tell the story of the show with the seasons through texture and colors. I also didn't want the kids to be sat down for too long so I designed the stage so the kids walk through a door halfway into the show and are now in this story the narrator Imelda is telling the kids. The children will be involved by helping Imelda bring out the fabrics to set the scenes for the show.
At the beginning of the show, the kids are on one side of the performance space, looking at some sort of utility room to a house where the narrator is telling the story this side of the performance space is all white. I envision the character pulling out fabric that is all white on one side and colorful on the other side (that's not been seen yet). The fabrics will be of different materials such as wool to represent winter, silks to represent spring, etc. They will then go through the door where everything is now colorful and the real story begins where the kids will help out. The shoe rack in the start will be hidden on the other side by the cloth that looks like hay bales and the shoes will be pulled through as the story is told.
For the devised portion of the project, I was one to take charge and somewhat be a production manager. I made sure people knew what time to come in by and what the goals were for the end of the day. At the start, I got everyone's ideas together and we spoke about how we could bring them to life. We settled on having the show be mainly puppets if that was shadow or physical we also wanted one main physical actor that I stepped up to be. To the right are some photos from our early meetings of ideas where we spoke about themes, struggles kids deal with today, story layout and set ideas.
We split into groups that would work on shadows, captions, set, props, and actors. However, we all helped each other in the end. We started with how shadow puppetry could work and projection so we started playing with ideas of this and how to split up the stage into a performance space, shadow space, and an area for captions along with a space for the main narrator puppet to tell the show. We came to the conclusion end on theatre would be the best way to successfully pull this off. Once we came up with this we had to play with how to light the shadows and project our background images, we found that we couldn't do both and decided to use the light source of the projector as our light for the shadows.
We created the shadows, props, and puppets as well as hand drawing the images for projection. We got into rehearsals and started using the space to learn how to make the space work and to see how everything interacts with one another. We found that our scuba diving scene had a lot more visuals so we added more to the rest and we also found that the puppeteers needed more practice and a better understanding of how to manipulate the puppets. We found a lot of issues went back tweaked and tried again. We had a massive issue with split focus but we overcame this and the images to the right are the final photos of the show.
