To start the story from the beginning, I contacted Anna last summer to see if she might be up for workshopping a series of characters with me. My plan was to use existing texts from plays and re-interpret them - but as we dug through some Shakespeare, Chekhov and other favourite playwrights, we realised we really wanted and needed to do something contemporary - work with texts that comment on today's life; explore themes and issues we encounter in our everyday lives.
And so our creative journey together began, with seemingly endless (and open-ended) conversations over coffee. I asked Anna what kinds of characters she'd like to play, and at the same time I was working out what kinds of characters I wanted to create for others to see. We drank a lot of coffee, and I took many, many notes. Nothing made particular sense initially, since we didn't have A Theme in mind, or a concept - just that we wanted to create a range of characters together - like a masterclass in acting and directing, if you will - with complete freedom to explore.
This is what I emerged with from our first meeting:
A slightly daunting list of ideas, characters, characteristics...and not much of an idea of how to go about it. Looking back on the lists of words now, I realise many of these have already been incorporated in Jester and Dolly, as well as the new texts I've written...even though we haven't really returned to these notes, or felt the need to stick to these characters beyond the initial conversation.
One thing we did discuss was that each character should build organically on the previous one. We'd create the pieces one by one, rather than thinking about what character number 10 should be like. I was hoping this sort of process led approach would give us both creative freedom and focus - we'd give our absolute 100% to each character while we'd work on them, and after we had filmed this individual character, we'd turn our full attention to the next one.
So...two done, eight to go! Yikes :)
XX
And so our creative journey together began, with seemingly endless (and open-ended) conversations over coffee. I asked Anna what kinds of characters she'd like to play, and at the same time I was working out what kinds of characters I wanted to create for others to see. We drank a lot of coffee, and I took many, many notes. Nothing made particular sense initially, since we didn't have A Theme in mind, or a concept - just that we wanted to create a range of characters together - like a masterclass in acting and directing, if you will - with complete freedom to explore.
This is what I emerged with from our first meeting:
One thing we did discuss was that each character should build organically on the previous one. We'd create the pieces one by one, rather than thinking about what character number 10 should be like. I was hoping this sort of process led approach would give us both creative freedom and focus - we'd give our absolute 100% to each character while we'd work on them, and after we had filmed this individual character, we'd turn our full attention to the next one.
So...two done, eight to go! Yikes :)
XX
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