What to put on the screens?

Images of the old people when they told their stories but also of when they were younger?

Mixture of WW1 footage? (without sound)

REHEARSALS

Photos from blocking and choreographing during rehearsals - working out exactly where each person is; where each chair will be - who moves it, who moves the puppets..  

Projecting onto curtain instead of sheet? Higher up than the sheet... 

Experimenting with projection of shadow legs onto curtain instead of using our own legs for the leg section - 

works better

NEXT - go through each section in detail and ask - 

• Ask what is the relationship between puppet/object/action?
• Ask are there enough clues for the audience to help understand the metaphor?
• Who are the puppets talking to? 

- Be more deliberate with how WE move around set - make everything obvious and move with purpose - don't be apologetic - walk through audience; be audacious! no backstage - no hiding! 

- Testimony: make it more clear that it is verbatim; we are telling their REAL stories that we have documented - subtle hints of documenting, recording etc - like typewriters; recorders, paper? 

-SLOW EVERYTHING DOWN and be more confident 

Notes after first run through

•  Who are we, what are we doing and why – our relationship between the puppets and objects – how we approach puppets and leave puppets – they could be telling us their stories and be aware of us, when we leave we are putting them to sleep – like carers. Movement in space – like we are at a factory – working – use of objects – mechanical
• 
  
• ·        Choreographically need more planning on who moves what chair and where each person is –needs a chair narrative; exits and entrances – more obvious to why there is one
• 
  
• ·         More lights on floor – ground lighting, more intimate
• 
  
• ·         Manipulation of puppets – puppets need to gradually become more and more angry, expressive and move more dynamically as the performance goes on – reflect their growing passion and enthusiasm of telling their stories – they want and NEED everyone to know what happened – it is important to them to get their voices heard
• 
  
• ·         Puppets manipulating us – works well when Layla Is being manipulated by the puppet during her memory – more of this needed – interesting contrast – manipulation occurring by puppets, by us manipulating them, us manipulating audience and memories manipulating everyone
• 
  
• ·         Legs scene – scraping our human legs appearing and now trying OHP shadows instead and sound of our voices dotted around set
• 
  
• ·         Sewing machines – more work needed; clearer choreography
• 
  
• ·         More use of wooden benches – shell shock scene; use back to benches – audience can see better when higher up
• 
  
• ·         Shadow puppetry sections – needs a the person telling the story to be visible or a puppet to be telling the story – more connection  
• 
  
• ·         Memories – more links between puppets telling their stories and what triggers these memories – different worlds need to link more – e.g. Gill holding a letter before letters are all thrown or Harry holding a handkerchief before they are all hung up
• 
  
• ·         Where audience is looking – how to tell the audience where to look; how to get them to focus on what we want them to focus on 

Development of shadow puppetry - Brothers in a shell hole

Sheet will appear after two people have repetitively been folding it, when then open it up, they freeze in time and the OHP and landscape will appear behind the sheet (audience on other side so won't see this - not until the OHP is turned on) the landscape will come into focus... two people manipulating the soldiers behind...



During rehearsals, we had to rearrange the landscape so that the story could flow better - for example, the man lying on the floor, we moved him away from the ladder, to further down. This made it more clear that the two brothers were climbing out of the trench and also we could use the lying down man later on as one of the soldiers who got down during the gun fire bit





Audience's view...




We also rehearsed the shadow puppetry for the Gangrene story and have incorporated the shadows to appear after the sheet section...the shadow wheel will appear on the sheet after it has fallen. The girl on top would still be spinning and sewing from previous scene onto the next. The spinning of the sewing machine would be in time with the spinning of the shadow wheel - reflecting the up and down, continuous and repetitive idea of the story. (he goes up the hill, gets shot, goes back down, then sent back up) round and round,... he keeps going....

Prop sourcing

I found an arm chair on free cycle which was only a 5min drive away and luckily fit in Sarah's car!!



Horse shoe in my house,,, this would be good for horrors of war puppet - significant to the horses used within the war as transport

Story boarding

We created a ground plan of the space and cut out the structures and used blue tack on the bases so we could move them around.. we then started to plan the journey of the audience. This again changed the ground plan as we realised some areas needed specific tables etc... 

Sewing machine first rehearsals

Horace's story is about leg amputation and I thought the sewing machines would fit and work well with this story. This is down to the way the sewing machines fix and repair things, they put things together while leg amputation is about taking off and removing; and I really like the contrast between the too.

My first idea was having four women at each sewing machine; sewing together these pieces of fabric (handkerchiefs from behind maybe) to create this massive material which is made up of all this individual handkerchiefs. Reflecting how the war was made up of lot of individuals which were put together to create this mass army - essentially not being individual anymore but one.

When we started playing around, I like the way the fabric falls. And the way it was falling, to me, reminds me of how his toe 'fell off' in the story - him loosing his leg and leaving a part of him behind - so this movement of the fabric falling down will hopefully aesthetically help this idea. We rehearsed on quite a low table but will need this is be much higher to get the falling effect!







Sewing the parts together idea will hopefully pop up somewhere else in another story during rehearsals we will find a place for it...

More experimentation and discussion on set model box

Model Box

Here we are figuring out and playing around with 1:25 structures of the steel deck and extra structure in order to work out what we need to build. Also to help us start to plan out the journey of the audience and storyboard it - what will happen where and how...

  

Washing line first ever rehearsal... how to do it?

Within this initial rehearsal, we placed the puppets at the front on a high up table looking into the distance where the audience would be. The line would weave through the audience as they began to talk.

 
We had a bucket below the puppets where the handkerchiefs were going to be and the pegs were pegged to our jumpers... one by one we walked up to the buckets and squeezed the handkerchiefs dry and went over to hang up each one.

Once all were hung, we stood at each poll and lifted the line and started moving the line along so that the handkerchiefs started moving through the audience as if each one were following the one in front.








The 'pully' action of the handkerchiefs moving was quite jerky and bumpy and we would have to practice to get it in time and in sequence so they moved off slowly and smoothly. The audience among the handkerchiefs worked really well, the obtrusiveness of the handkerchiefs and the way they blocked the audiences vision was effective... the notion of us hanging the handkerchiefs up as a theatrical action visually also worked as it was repetitive which fits again with this repetition idea of war.

Wooden cable wrap

Saw this massive wooden structure, which is used to wrap round massive cables, outside a building and started to get lots of ideas for what we could use it for, unfortunately they wouldn't let me have it as they were using it for tables or something. However this could have worked really well within our set.

  

Sound

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5B80F33C27AFBA46
- link to a playlist of world war one songs.. here are some examples which I like and would like to experiment with within the show..

Pack up your troubles...

Hang out your washing... 

Hanging on the old barbed wire...

World War One documentary photography - Roger Fenton

http://www.allworldwars.com/Crimean-War-Photographs-by-Roger-Fenton-1855.html

Roger Fenton, a crimean war photographer, took amazing landscape photographs on the aftermath of the war..no mans land and landscapes of shell bomb debris...



There is a real lonely, emptiness to these photos,. reflecting the loss of life

Shadow puppetry experimentation