Blog posts from Individual Cast Members.
Being a creative practitioner can mean several things and includes a vast amount of questions and answers, such as; ‘what is a creative practitioner exactly?’ During this creative process I have engaged with several skills which have helped me present myself as a creative practitioner in ways I never thought I was able to achieve. In my opinion, I have managed to create theatre for our piece ‘#ANightToRemember’ that was not just captivating, but asked and answered questions throughout, as well as making the audience think and reflect on the performance. Even though my main role was choreographer for this project I took on various responsibilities and navigated several disciplines throughout the process such as; being part of a company, script writing and editing. I feel as if I adapted well when we found out our performance would no longer be live, as I would not have had to edit videos and scenes together if we were conducting a live performance. I used my intuitive and learnt new skills to adjust to the situation where I taught myself how to edit and create videos on ‘iMovie’. Using this skill, I produced our final performance where I edited individual scenes and put them together with transitions to make them flow better. I have grown as a creative practitioner; I have learnt new skills but have also adapted to my surroundings and how I have produced work due to the global pandemic. My choreography ideas were all based on being part of a live performance and I had to change the ways of creating my individual choreography and scenes to fit the current situation.
This included filming choreography on Zoom (a video conference platform), to still ensure my ideas were able to fit into the performance and that I could still include the group work I was working towards. My work was heavily influenced by DV8, a physical theatre company who communicate ideas and feelings with a focus on socio-political issues which relates to our theme of sexual harassment being a social issue in today’s society. Choreography has always been a massive influence on how I conduct work and engage with creating captivating pieces of theatre, therefore this role was perfect for me during this project. Gaining feedback on previous choreography I have produced helped with this project as I was able to use my knowledge to my advantage to help me grow as a creative practitioner when creating individual and group pieces for our website/performance. Adjusting to a new way of learning and gaining skills I never thought I could achieve has been the highlight of this project and creative process, even though it has been challenging at times I have thoroughly enjoyed working on this project and can’t wait to use what I have learnt as a practitioner in the future.- Charlotte Martin Blog Post
Nameless productions as creative practitioners what does that mean exactly? A virtual performance named #ANightToRemember During many months on this project, A team of interdisciplinary was the most valuable part of this journey with many strengthening in dance, singing, and acting. Although, As a Practitioner, I’ve felt compelled to discover a new way of work on my body physically through challenging moments such as dancing, I wouldn’t class myself as a dancer but I have used and acting technique of the breathing exercise from fellow voice practitioner in the university Janet, to allow my body to take over naturally and not let my nervousness or confidence get in the way of these elements and regain a stillness in my head that is just focused on the task at hand and is a lot like physical theatre which have a lot of experience in doing, I feel I’ve developed the skill of social media tools and creative inspiration when designing the website. What helped me the most in previous attempts in making websites and using the feedback to better the next website I create as a kind of mental bar I set for myself to reach I find it very motivating. Along the way, I have discovered proximity& the development using inspiration from me to movement and Ask Angela. The Alice Birch text was a stepping stone to understanding theatre and language with analysis the most important factors of the text and formulate an idea in my head about language and theatre, how language can inform through such statements within the text “your organs are my organs and my organ is your organs" or "I'm pulling away"-Philips,2016. This is enhancing what I wanted to highlight within my creative process using the boy's frustration to his friends “no you’re not listening”-Philips,2016. within scene 6 he does not feel heard or supported by them. Equally, I have learned a lot about Marketing and managing something still majorly creative but technical too that is the vessel of holding the company’s creative explorations to be displayed in a way that visually pleasing. Creating such an impressive platform to showcase our performance has been an amazing, challenging and gruelling process, I have 100% been tested and worked on the element of patience, showing the best way to stay calm. Looking at an overview of what I’ve learned I can now take these learnings and apply them as a practitioner and the future by introducing a new way (virtual way) of theatre and how many doors that can open for young actors trying to get into the industry like I am, it shows a new era for theatre that we just haven’t seen yet but Is emerging. -Jade Evans Blog Post
The term ‘creative practitioner’ is extremely broad and has an endless amount of answers, who determines or decides ‘what makes you a good practitioner’. Personally, I believe that if you create a piece of art or theatre that keeps people intrigued, makes them ask questions beyond the performance and makes them think, then to me I consider you an excellent practitioner. Theater is a place where you can express anything and really make a difference. I believe I have been a creative practitioner throughout this process by finding as many creative ways as possible to continuously portray our theme and messages and always keeping them things in mind. I have also tried different ways of creating theatre during lock down and therefore social distancing rather than just one person filming themselves speak. To me being a good and creative practitioner is to be free with what you create, have no limits and completely trust your thought process which is what I have done throughout. I also believe you have to be open to all ideas no matter how plain or crazy they may originally seem as they could end up being the most amazing pieces of art, that’s what I believe has made me both a ‘good’ and ‘creative’ practitioner throughout. The biggest challenge I faced was making sure everything I created had the power to have the same affect it would have live on stage no matter how it was recorded. Naturally as a practitioner when writing scripts or scenes you are writing them to be performed on stage. However, from early on we were aware this would not be the case. This led to my next challenge which was trying to make the ideas I had planned for the live performance to be as imaginative and creative as possible with the resources we had. The editing videos and scenes was extremely time consuming and an exhausting long process of trial and error until I felt it had reached its maximum level of creativity that I had hoped for. The creative process has been beyond intense. Throughout I have continued to try and make different pieces of art using as many aspects of the arts that I could. With everything I wrote or created I kept in mind two questions that kept me on track; ‘how powerful will/can this be’ and ‘will it raise awareness and make an impact’’. Naturally due to the pandemic there were automatically limitations as to what we could do and create, it also lost some of the inspiration and creativity we were aiming for as it was no longer a live performance. Therefore, I had to think into more depth about how I can try and create as much of the atmosphere that I would have created on the night behind a screen. This whole project has also made me want to improve both my editing and tech skills as well as my web designing skills as they were my tow biggest challenges that i had to overcome. -Chloe Bushell Blog Post
What does being a ‘Creative Practitioner’ mean to me? A creative practitioner creates intriguing art, makes the audience think, and makes the audience ask questions beyond the performance. This means that the creative practitioner has done their job right. A good practitioner keeps the audience intrigued throughout the performance, but a great practitioner makes the audience question the performance and makes them think. Nameless productions have created a performance titled #ANightToRemember. A group of interdisciplinary students with our most valuable assets being in Dance, Singing, and Acting are trying to create an immersive theatre piece in a sight specific setting. As a creative practitioner for Nameless Productions I have tried to explore different ways through choreography that continually portrays our theme and keeping it in mind at all times. During this process it has been overwhelming because I have had to try and create a new and exciting way to explore choreography through this time of lockdown and Social Distancing. To be a great creative practitioner can rise to any obstacle that is presented to them and create work inspired by such obstacles. As a choreographer I have had to stay open-minded to different ideas because they may seem bizarre and crazy to begin with but have turned out to be some of the best choreography I have created during this process. The work I have created was heavily influenced by Pina Bausch and other theatre companies. I explored techniques that they have used in the past to create art and tried to adapt it to enhance the choreography I was creating. One challenge that was going to be hard to overcome was creating choreography that was still powerful through video and that would give the same effect as a live performance. The original choreography that I wanted to create had a lot of contact between the performers and the audience. However, as a company we were made aware that we would no longer be holding a live performance, so we had to use different resources to create are initial ideas and concepts. I then had to challenge myself to reinvasion my ideas with the current situation we were all facing. Throughout this process I have tried to create art that uses as many resources from the performing arts industry. Due to the outbreak of COVID-19 there were restrictions on what I as a creative practitioner could explore and create so I had to be imaginative during this process. When I was creating choreography and monologues, I kept asking myself the same questions; How will this affect the audience/ make the audience ask questions and how will this add awareness to the effects of sexual harassment? This came with it's owns limitations as I was unable to explore the original ideas, I had of contact work within the choreography. But as a creative practitioner I have overcome these obstacles and create choreography that is still imaginative and fresh but taking into consideration our current situation. – Brooke Foley Blog post
Being a Creative Practitioner means so much more than just creating pieces of work. Yes, that is the bottom line, but there are so many different aspects to it. I believe that I have engaged with many of these aspects throughout my creative process. As a group, we have come up with intriguing pieces of theatre to make our audience and viewer think beyond what is being performed in front of them and I personally believe that creating such a piece makes us all great practitioners. For me, personally, I have faced many challenges throughout this process that have made me doubt what I have created but I feel as though this pushed me further and made me create something even better than what I had originally come up with. These obstacles have enabled me to challenge myself in ways that I never have before, which has only made me better as a practitioner. Prior to this project, I had never really had an opportunity to create pieces of theatre like this, I considered myself a performer rather than a practitioner, however this project has enabled me to explore my abilities with creating and to produce some work that I can be really proud of. This project required us all to be more open minded with what we created due to it being such a sensitive topic, not only for us as performers but for our audience members too. This proved to be a challenge for me as my question required some human interaction with the audience, however I feel that trying to aapt this and make it work with the situation has helped me to improve my abilities as a practitioner. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, our time in rehearsals was cut extremely short, leaving me as a dramaturg in a difficult position. I had multiple moments where I was unsure how I would portray my work and if it would be portrayed in the way I wanted it to, however after a lot of thinking and discussions and help from the group I was able to come up with two pieces of work that I felt answered my question. Working within the group really helped me as I was able to take on other people’s feedback and use this to help improve my work. It also enabled me to take other people’s perspectives into consideration when working on my pieces to create something more diverse for our audiences. I used my research to gain a better understanding of some of the aspects of my work and also to back up what I was using. It helped me to expand my knowledge and improve as a practitioner. Overall this was a challenging experience but I do feel that I have improved greatly as a practitioner because of this. - Ella Catterick, Blog Post.
Being a ‘Creative Practitioner’ means being able to work with other aspects of the performance and not just being an artist who delivers an experience. It means creating pieces of work to go into the creative process and being able to use their skills and knowledge to work closely with people in different fields of the performance. I believe I have worked very hard in becoming a creative practitioner for this project because not only have I created work on my own, I have also worked with the other members of the company to create creative pieces. I have created my own work and I have also helped others out in giving advice on their creative inputs. I was costume and props manager and at the beginning, that involved working with the dramaturgs and finding the theme of the performance, thinking of ideas which could be used. I knew that there weren’t going to be many props being used because of the venue and we had to be realistic and think of what people take on nights out, and that is not a lot. From the beginning the costume was always going to be minimalistic because of the nature of the piece and also because I wanted to find inspiration from Brechtian theatre techniques on minimalistic costuming. The idea was to have every girl play the girl part and Rory to play the boy. I knew I didn’t want the girls in exactly the same clothes because I still wanted to have them act in individual ways even though they were all playing the same character. To show that they were in fact playing the same character, I chose the same red headband for them all so that the audience would be able to understand this artistic choice. I think the biggest challenge I faced whilst on this journey, was definitely adapting from a live performance to virtual. Not only was it mentally challenging, but also physically. In regard to costume and props, I found that I would have to work with what actor had at home with them rather than being able to source out specific items and taking them to and from rehearsals. I also had to work out how each girl was going to look costume wise. I managed to find some headbands online that were in stock for enough of us and so in each video, the girls could be wearing the same headband as I originally planned. With the rest of the outfit, I told the girls to wear something black but was appropriate for the theme. My ideas also included wallets and purses but because you couldn’t see them when filming, I didn’t need anyone to provide these, but they would have been present had we been live. I also created a duologue for the boy and girl to act, as if they had just met up in the club again after it happened. I really think being a good creative practitioner is also about being able to adapt well to situations. Although challenging, I believe I have adapted well and been able to still be a impacting part of the creative process.
What does Nameless productions mean to me? throughout this process I believe our production company has created an inspirational performance, a performance that will make the hairs on the back of neck stand up! To say I was one of the creative practitioners on this piece gives me great joy. The overall process wasn’t easy and as a team we managed to overcome all challenges that stood in our way and have created a performance that will keep our audience intrigued and asking for more! We started this creative process by looking into different practitioners and companies that inspired us for inspiration, we done self-research on our theme which was the Ask for Angela scheme and we looked into real life scenarios to make sure we brought across the realism needed for our performance During this process I believe that as a creative practitioner I have been able to explore different aspects of performance to be able to portray a realistic story with our taboo theme without overstepping any boundaries. As a creative practitioner I broke the work down into steps, these steps were the idea, pre-production, production and reflection. These steps would be used to help focus and channel the ideas and the content behind our performance.Once we had the idea of our performance the main focus was to come up with some original but flexible ideas to create a piece that flowed, during this process I came up with multiple concepts such as a toilet scene which would give the audience some background information as they were walking up the stair to enter the club and a more sensitive sexual harassment scene that would be focused towards the end of the performance which I used inspiration from real life rape stories to portray thoughts and feelings, other ideas were in the works but not all of them made the cut and eventually we collectively had a script. During this process I was able to work with other creative practitioners which helped feed ideas related to my individual projects throughout my creative process. Now we had our script we had to edit and refine our work to a high standard but keeping it as evidence of our creative process. I wanted to be able to make the audience more immersed within our performance to make it as realistic as possible and to make sure we got that point across we wanted our performance to be site specific, which I found a club location suitable for our performance. For me the most difficult part of this process was trying to create content during the lock down, this was because we couldn’t film any of our work together due to the fact that we had to go into isolation, but as a group we managed to overcome this problem by filming things individually such as monologues or by using our initiative to film group work safely together online. This process has been an incredible challenge and a serious learning curve which has opened my mind to new experiences and as a group we have been on a rollercoaster of emotions but I’m glad all of our hard work has paid off – Rory McCanna Blog Post
As a young emerging practitioner I am no stranger to the fact that I most definitely still have a lot to learn and a significant amount of new skills to develop throughout my future career. With that being said, I believe that I have taken the challenges faced within this module and my course as a whole within my stride. Despite having to do so during a global pandemic which has forced us all to be as adaptable as possible in regards to our project. Due to the nature of limitation that comes hand in hand with Covid-19 we have had to acquire skills in new software that some of us have never had to use before. However, it is undeniable that the Practice as Research module in itself has allowed me to truly begin to grow as a creative practitioner through so many different mediums.
Initially, I was able to observe the works of other contemporary and past practitioners in order to draw inspiration from them but also, to distinguish the type of creative work I aim to produce as well as methods of doing so. I have learned the importance of applying a critical approach to my work so that I may be sure the content I am producing is exactly what I have designed and envisioned within my mind. Equally I have been able to identify the positive significance other people can have on your ideas and how, in some cases, it may be that they can truly help you capture the essence of the creative concepts you thought you would never be able to fully bring to life.
One of my main areas of focus was ensuring that throughout the process we did not lose sight of what we were trying to achieve. This is one of the main reasons I was in charge of constructing the script. I wanted to ensure that we would had a solid guideline to follow, one that incorporated our individual works but came together to focus on answering the questions we set ourselves. I felt this to be an important tool that would prevent us from losing the structure or possibly even the meaning of our piece.
This module has enabled me to fully embrace the positives of working as part of a company and being a part of something that is greater than oneself. It has forced me to undertake new challenges in order to bring to life not only my own creative ideas but also that of my peers. I have worked collaboratively with my group to produce a piece of work that allows us to explore a wide range of topics and differing forms of theatre with the soul aim of presenting our individual ideas in a shared vision. This shared vision being creating pieces of work that will hopefully impact peoples’ lives by actively involving them in theatre which addresses issues that affect the masses and in turn causes individuals to challenge their previous perceptions.
- Almira Repaj Blog post