#thingsonwheels

TUESDAY 22nd July:

Guess who’s back baby!? Only the whole dang ensemble! And what a reunion it was! We began, of course, with a wonderful warm up led by Ari, to get the blood pumping and those muscle’s toned. We then dived into the newly written quartet of politician scenes to explore how our clowns might approach playing those pompous fools. First, we explored the transition into the scene. How do the clowns change the set? How do they prepare to become these characters? Who helps, who hinders? My clown rushed around at pace, desperately flinging blazers at each clown whilst Vera and Abi locked in on one bench, spinning round and round. Ari did nothing but play to the imaginary audience, awaiting a blazer from myself and was then escorted by Lau to her place. We ran this transition a few times before setting exact actions and paces, exploring how Ari can eventually call “Order!” to transition the transition into the scene.

On reflection, the challenge with these clownish transitions is to find a balance between the clownish tendency to get stuck/distracted/forget and the actual need to maintain the pace of the show. The clown’s are incredibly competent during the opening montage – is it then odd that they lose that organisational ability completely later on? Perhaps its just a case of not becoming zombies – maybe every clown maintains the energy and purpose just some clowns have more tasks to complete than others.

We explored how to clown the politician scene through several improvs. By letting the clowns behave how they liked for a few runs through the scene, we were able to discover the games we could play within the scenes in-built conventions. For example, a rule of the scene is that you stand when you speak. Which clowns forget to stand? Which clowns sit down only to stand up again? Who stands at the wrong moment? The challenge with the scene is not over saturating it with physical gags as the text is also densely packed with puns and jokes. The text has to be heard. We must be wary of overloading the audience – which is difficult to manage without a director, especially with scenes we already know so well (we are so familiar with the material it becomes harder to imagine hearing it for the first time). We ran three of the scenes back to back to explore how each builds on from the next – which jokes grow each time, what changes – and to get a feel for how the intensity should grow. We are all narcissists and want the spotlight so need to be careful to really listen to one another and understand who is in major and who is in minor at each moment.

MONDAY 21ST JULY

Despite being 3 company members down, great progress was made. We did some bargaining with wardrobe to get hold of some moving rails for the rehearsal, only to find two metal door frames on wheels serendipitously lying waiting for us in Rehearsal Studio E. These frames are now not only our best friends, they are ours. Confirmed property of the clowns. After a quick warm up (involving jumping and swimming around in a circle...), we set to work with our new toys, building them into the opening scene of our new structure: "Welcome to Cropshire". We wrote out each of the introductory moments we wanted to include on sticky notes and played about with the order to create a satisfyingly structured montage. Then, we were straight up on our feet, playing with some of the ideas Lynne had given us, experimenting with the Clown's being cut off/drowned out mid sentence by music or a curtain sweeping past and consuming the speaking clown. Nick, Abi, Vera and I turned a 7 person job into 4, swapping in and out of each character to figure out the placements of the full ensemble as we choreographed each moment, exploring how the clowns might change the set and figuring out how to incorporate our new speechy dramaturgical conventions - who needs cue cards and when. What are the precise rules around speech? Can a clown only speak if they are giving a pre-written speech, reading off a note or an auto-cue? It then becomes our mission as an ensemble to provide these cards to a clown at just the right moment. Cue cards also seem to be ripe for a good old mix up gag...

The door frames provided us with fun challenges as an ensemble - e.g it is much harder to hide 4 let alone 7 people behind a much skinnier piece of set compared to the back drop curtains of the new studio. This feels particularly ripe for our piece. Clowns not being very good at trying to hide from the audience came up with Ari's clown in Lau's workshop right at the start of the process. It feels fitting to play with the impossibility of trying to hide, drawing attention to our metatheatrical frame. The empty frames gifted to us by the studio also made us begin to consider whether they could initially have curtains hung from them which are later removed, leaving the clowns permanently in the open, no escape from the audience. This could help us blend the metatheatre with the theme of surveillance states. The empty frames also gave us a way of... framing things - moments that look like photos, backdrops behind people to create a sense of a room, a more enclosed space, a green screen.

There seems to be something particularly enjoyable about the "impossibility" of a group of clowns staging a complex play with multiple locations, characters and quick scene changes with only a few curtain rails. We decided we should limit ourselves props-wise as well, only using paper, pens and vegetables to tell the story, creating cardboard placards to introduce the title of each scene. This will help us reinforce the meta theatricality as well as highlighting our theme of beaurocracy through the paper/pens. Costumes, however, we have decided will be plentiful - this is the theatre after all, darling! Creating the scene with just the four of us multi-rolling highlighted the joy of the just possible. Spitlip talk about this in relation to their show Operation Mincemeat, where 5 performers multirole as over 100 different characters. The excitement and the humour for the audience is built from the genuine reality of the actors only just making it through the show, only just achieving a costume change, only just making it on stage. This feels particularly relevant for our clowns - their task is huge, they are ambitious and just about capable, with only a few individual floors (obsessed with the audience, forgetful, reliant on reading) which disrupt the flow of the show.