Devising and Live Stream Testing with participants

Updated: Jul 12, 2022

Video: Sandra Cain and Richard's reflections on the Livestream

Making theatre seems to be most effective when it involves a process of delegation: moving away from individual ownership towards ideas that are 'magically' and spontaneously generated by an ensemble.

This online workshop with new participants on 10th July was really fruitful. I could not have imagined the ideas that came out of our skeleton script. The script was made up of a few loose threads and links from the classic Pinocchio story text, plus some improvised exchanges between me and Kay Aika. But this workshop pulled out these little threads to create some really complex material that we can now build into the scene.

Inspired by Kay's photo of the green glowing mushrooms we began with vocal improvisation. On Zoom, with everyone watching, a little discretion is needed to avoid embarrassment. So we switched off our mics. But then we got waylaid by a technical problem (the new laptop demanded the administrator's password - well they're off for the weekend, so we had to do a work-around!)

While we faffed about in this way we were all "digesting" and thinking about the mushrooms - how could we recreate the "Voices of the Mash-rooms"? When we came back to the Zoom gallery Ken Lowe told us about the invisible underground rhizome of which fungi are a tiny indicator. Like a loose thread again, these litle prongs stick out of a densely woven "coat" of roots and fronds. And he reminded us that mushrooms/fungi can send signals to each other - they talk!

"Voices of the Mashrooms" fragment from the improvisation....

Photo: Mizuno Yoshinori Asahi Newspaper Digital 30/6/18

I've been to Ali Matthews work in progress performance 'Mushroom Language' recently. Now this mushroom theme has popped up as a complete coincidence, after Kay's photo. Is this a symptom of this talking that mushrooms do too?

Inspired in their own way, everyone started humming and whispering. Sandra was muttering seductive hippie lines; Corinne and Ken were asking Pino-kun to follow them; and I was humming a low underground vibration - and we all kept cracking up at the ridiculous noises, until Tom went for a full throated and slightly scary cackling laugh. Scared silence. Then more laughter.

Screengrab: Participants (L to R, Top to Bottom),

Neil and Shannon, Sandra and Richard, Corinne, Kay, and Tom in the Zoom gallery.

Kay introduced Pino and then we played with the masks and ways of transposing characters into drawings and photocopies.

Photo: Sandra Cain and Richard with masks: The Cat (L), Pino (R)

Above - How things looks "backstage". The masks have eyeholes but don't need to be looked through.

Screengrab: Participants (L to R, Top to Bottom),

Neil, Sandra, Corinne, Kay, Naoyuki, Tom in Zoom

On Zoom you can see how shifting close to the webcam puts the masks in 'major' and 'minor', in terms of their prominance at any point in the story.

Screengrab: Sandra as The Cat (L) and Kurt Zarniko

On Livestream from OBS via Youtube, we used a Chroma filter to replace the green screen with a 'medieval' Japanese curtain.

Google document: Link to the script for the scene

(scroll in the above frame to read; or click this link to the script)

We read through the script. Again, Kay Aika, as Pino, was working in English and Japanese, and gave us the direct dialect of a young Pino. She also showed us how he could sound in English and Naoyuki Osawa, as Gepetto, sneezed and coughed in Japanese.

Neil McDonagh and Shannon McDonagh were wickedly conspiratorial creating the echoes and rhythms that are familiar from fairytales; especially around the mind-boggling sweet-talking trickery of the Cat and the Fox. Now that there are two of them, we can see the fox too.

Sandra Cain and Corinne Jones played with the bee's pitch and buzzing warnings. And Ken gave us a sonorous narrator, who winds up the story in a lovely Scottish accent. And now we can edit all of this to layer all these amazing sounds further.