Making The Blood

As we were creating a visually impressive, one of the important props that we were requiring was fake blood. As we were unsure how much fake blood we will be needing we are reluctant to purchase any fake blood at this time due to funds. We also are wanting to make sure that the blood is convincing as we do not want to have any weak area where the visual effects are affected. The price to buy at pint of blood off of Ebay was £8.75, however while we want to rehearse with blood we are reluctant to pay that amount for fake blood.

Another option we have for fake blood is to make it ourselves. After looking at the best and cheapest way to make fake blood, we have a number of options;

Cornflower

We are able to mix Cornflower and water together and adding food colouring produces a thick yet runny liquid that, convincingly, looks like blood.

Honey

Again if we mix food colouring with runny honey from the supermarket, then this produces a thick red liquid that drips nicely. The golden colour of honey and the red food colouring mixed together produces a dark red coloured liquid that is can be very convincing as blood.

As we are wanting the blood at different moments within the play the biggest challenge once we have the blood will be to get it on stage or on to the characters without the audience seeing it being placed on them. We are planning on having blood at four points within the play yet three of those points, the actors are on stage and acquire the blood halfway through a scene. The Snow Child requires the blood to be around her legs and on her dress, yet she is in a bed during the scene and requires the blood to be placed during the scene.

Within the final scene there are two points where the actors are requiring blood to be used. Firstly The Piano Tuner is stabbed and therefore will require blood to seep out of his shirt as though he has been wounded. Then later in the scene The Count is also stabbed in the side and in the neck, the side is not a problem for us as he is stabbed in a non visible area. However when he is stabbed in the neck we require blood to be spat out of his mouth and on to The Countess’ face.

Therefore we are needing an secretive way of transporting blood on stage, hidden, and easily accessed so The Count can intake the blood and then spit it out. Furthermore we are requiring an idea for The Piano Tuner to have blood on his shirt after he is stabbed but not before.

At this moment I am currently looking at ways that these can be done and the easiest way to get the best effect so the audience do not feel they are being fooled.

 

Robert Bull

What do we mean when we say ‘Children’s theatre for adults’?

I have been considering carefully what we truly mean when we say children’s theatre for adults and how exactly one would go about directing such a concept. I first considered our audience and then the perception of contemporary theatre as a whole.

I recently read an article from the guardian website titled ‘A grown up attitude to children’s theatre – and not a fairy tale in sight.’ Although the main focus of the article is aimed at representation of children’s theatre and the exploration of it, I found myself thinking about what I aimed to achieve in Progeny Theatres production, an essential reverse of children’s theatre. Although I agree with what David Harradine’s has to say about the experimental new wave of children’s theatre being exploited out there, I do disagree with his expectations of audience.

Given the extraordinary ways in which children engage with performance, it’s also surprising that there isn’t more of this already. I’ve always revelled in the freedom that comes with making work for children. When you’re making a show for, say, a three-year-old, you know that person doesn’t know – and doesn’t care – what “theatre” is. Unlike adult audiences, children come with no expectation of what they’re about to see.[1]

I disagree here with Harradine’s narrowing of audiences imaginations, he seems to claim that children are the only audience that come with no expectation – that it is impossible to surprise an audience. As a director, I want to create something unexpected and exciting, which is where Progeny Theatres concept of children’s theatre for adults was born. I can see why Harradine has got this opinion of children’s perception of theatre from and to an extent I agree with the freedom of thought children come to the theatre with however, I believe this is something we can recapture within in the adult audience. I ultimately believe this is one of the fundamental reasons we all visit the theatre, to recapture a feeling or experience the new and the unknown. The ‘expectation’ that Harradine talks of here is almost in a negative light, but new age contemporary audiences are not always seeking to watch a production full of confusion and philosophical insight.

I have aimed to produce a piece of theatre that like child audiences, the adult audience will come with no expectation of what they’re about to see, or even if they do – the expectation will never be met. It is almost a piece about expectation, about what we expect from the theatre, I aim to have the audience asking the wrong questions. I want them to feel uncomfortable at how much expectation they place on themselves when they come to the theatre. In this high spectacle I have created two worlds to feed a liminal space that the audience feel caught between. The fairy tale elements will hopefully take them back to a memory of child hood and the feeling of freedom that they no longer associate with the theatre. I believe this feeling is never lost, rather they have been told this cannot be recreated in such articles such as Harradine’s. This is why I have incorporated the abrupt, corrupt nature of our play with huge stark contrasts, the audience almost are emerged in a confusion between what is heart breaking, humorous, imaginary and real. I hope to have mixed reactions from the audience in our production, some people feeling uncomfortable, others laughing at moments they feel they should perhaps not be and a wanting for empathy that never comes from a production such as A Gothic Tale.

I read another article asking the question ‘How far should theatre push us?’ by Maddy Costa and she brought up some interesting points about the type of experience audiences can take and whether or not the theatre should be pushing the boundaries of their audience more. She remarks on a company at the in between time festival in Bristol,

What Cole and her team understand exceptionally well is the need to challenge audiences – whether with work of quiet fragility, or work that is aggressive and contradictory. More than that, they understand that challenging art needs protection: the fragile, to ensure that its voice can be heard in the push towards art that is easier to consume; the aggressive, because it antagonises social boundaries and questions the limits otherwise placed on freedom and imagination.[2]

I agree here with the expectation and the need to challenge audiences through performing arts. The idea of antagonising ‘social boundaries’ and questioning the limits placed on ‘freedom and imagination’, I feel that although new age shocking theatre is becoming more acceptable and almost expected, it is something that can be created in even the most ‘fragile’ performances. This is how I vision A Gothic Tale coming together, Costa’s description of a ‘quiet fragility’ is what is hidden in the soul of our high tech production. It is contradictory and at some points aggressive, but it is the subtle message, the irony and the limits and boundaries we have created and also destroyed for our audience that will make this piece of theatre a unique, uncomfortable and thrilling experience.

As a director, I have even tried to recreate this in the rehearsal environment among actors, taking them from a dark, sexual and graphic scene straight into a fairy tale dance number that makes them feel uncomfortable.

 

[1] Harradine, David. . (2009 ). A grown up attitude to childrens theatre – and not a fairytale in sight. . Available: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2009/nov/30/childrens-theatre-christmas. Last accessed 28/04/2013

[2] Costa, Maddy.. (2013). How far should theatre push us?. Available: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2013/feb/20/how-far-should-theatre-push-us. Last accessed 28/04/2013.

Show Copy


Progeny Theatre Company presents their debut performance A Gothic Tale, an adaptation of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. Expect a visually stunning piece of theatre, which creates an impression of standing on the threshold between two worlds.
It is a corrupted fairy tale, challenging the traditions and expectations we have come to expect from “Once Upon A Time”, and tells the story of what comes after the “Happily Ever After”. When the fairy tale world slowly becomes corrupted and cracks begin to show, we are forced to question if any innocence can remain.
This performance is intended for adult audiences only (16+). It contains violence and scenes of a sexual nature.

 

Word Count: 109

Marketing – The process of ‘Tagging’

To accompany Progeny Theatre Company’s marketing campaign we decided to find a unique way of advertising our company and our show.  At first, as a company, we decided that it would be a beneficial idea to associate a phrase with our company – a tag line for Progeny Theatre Company. After developing our idea of making Children’s theatre for adults we decided to have “No one is too old for Fairy tales” as our main tagline. Following this I was playing around with other phrases and created “Once Upon a time will never be the same again…” The idea for this tagline was to intrigue our target audience into questioning why it would never be the same again, what is Progeny going to do with the well known “Once Upon a time”? As a company, Progeny wants to change the perception of a fairy tale, one way that marketing showed this was through this tagline. By stating that it will never be the same again, shows that performance will not be in the style of a traditional fairy tale and will change the way fairy tales are performed – within the company. These two taglines were used on our social networking sites – mainly on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

After these taglines were created the marketing team decided to exhibit these taglines in some way so that our audience could see them, more than them being on our social media sites. We wanted to create a closer relationship with our audience – in a sense face to face, rather through social networking sites.  Due to the Progeny’s relationship to stories through adapting fairy tales, it was then decided to hand write our taglines onto paper and place them into books.  Although we already had two taglines slowly becoming associated with Progeny Theatre Company, we thought it would be beneficial – for the tagging of books- to create a further two more taglines. These taglines would relate to our shows rather than Progeny as a company. One of the new taglines was our Show name ‘A Gothic Tale’ and the other would be a line from the play.

Choosing a suitable line from the script was not a simple process, which we first thought it would be.  The line had to be comprehensible without much context of the play and spark the reader’s curiosity and attention. The line also could not reveal too much about the play – it had to be a teaser. Eventually – after talking to the rest of the company – a decision was made to use the Ex-wife’s line “He will do it again!” (Bull, Chanel, Smith 2013, p.12). I believed that this line would create an interest due to what it is saying, we hoped that the audience would question – who is he and what will he do again?.

Our taglines needed to be both catchy and mysterious enough to intrigue our target audience enough to find out what they were. We also had to have a way for the finders of our tag lines to know who created these tag lines. On these tags, we made sure that we had our company name clearly wrote at the bottom of all of the tags, we also hash tagged (a term used on Twitter) them so the finders knew that they could find us on twitter.

Jessica Smith and I then decided that, to help create the handwritten tags we would ask the group to create a few of each tag. I created a rough version of what the tags should look like and uploaded them to our private Facebook group. I told the group that all tags should be written like this – to keep them consistent – and that the tags should also be written in blue/black ink or pencil. I also noted to the group that these were rough versions and will not be used – and to ensure that the edges of the tags were cut neatly and straight

.tag 1 tag 2 tag 3 tag 4

 

When the tags were completed properly and combined together, we wanted them to look as follows;

 

alex's tags

Photo of Alex Urbanczyk’s combined tags.

 

After the group created the tags we had created 300 small tags. The next step in this marketing activity was to gain permission from the library. This was done through emailing;

email library

 

Once permission was granted we went ahead with our idea. As aforementioned our intention for tagging was to place our tags into books in order for people to find them, see our company name and become intrigued enough to search for us on the internet. This would hopefully further increase our target audience and social networking followers. After the tagging was complete we updated Progeny Theatre Companies Facebook status letting our current followers know that something was happening. This, again, was to build the relationship between the company and our audience – as well as gain new audiences. The status that tells the audience about the tagging begins with “Calling all students”.

facebook status tagging cropped

Facebook status – Calling all students!

        Once the tags were hidden in differing books in the library, Progeny Theatre starting receiving picture twitter messages containing various tags that people had found. By people responding to our previously mentioned tweets and status about our tagging, showed us that it had created a line of communication between Progeny Theatre Company and our audience. This was shown through people tweeting Progeny Theatre Company and attaching pictures of the tags that they had found;

two cropped tweets 3

cropped tweet 1

cropped tweet 2

          Although this way of marketing our show and our company did not reach as many people as our social networking sites, we believe it was a creative and unique way of gaining more audience and further building a relationship with them. By doing this type of marketing in the University Library focused on our relationship with our immediate audience and, hopefully, created a more interactive connection with them. By focusing this particular marketing activity in the University Library targets a large amount of our audience –Students of the University of Lincoln.  By linking up both our tagging and social networking sites created a way for our new audience members (from tagging) to find us on Facebook and Twitter. The tagging also enabled people who don’t have Facebook to know who Progeny Theatre Company are, rather that primarily focusing on internet users.

Word Count – 1000

Works Cited

Bull, Rob, Lewis Chanel and Hannah Smith (2013) A Gothic Tale, Lincoln: LPAC

 

Fundraising

This post is just a brainstorm of some of the fundraising ideas I had if we needed more money for the budget.

 

  • Bake sale – LPAC Cafe
    We would bake a variety of our own cakes, liaise with the LPAC to set up a date and spend a couple of hours in the cafe.
  • Quiz – LPAC Cafe
    Taking inspiration from online, we could put together a quiz of around 20 questions, charging 50p-£1 for every entry.
  • Bring & sell – LPAC Cafe
    A bring and sell is where we could have brought in anything from our homes that we do not want/need anymore and asking for a donation for it instead of selling it for a certain price. The items of course would have to be in good shape and could not be anything inappropriate!
  • Donations to Progeny (collection) – LPAC
    This would just be a basic donation – tell people what we are about and what we are doing and why we require donations. There would be no pushing people into giving us money.
  • Sponsored fancy dress for the day
    Fancy dress which includes the whole company could be a fun idea. The fancy dress would have to be a theme which linked to our performance or made people want to sponsor us!
  • Sponsored silence
    Some people may love to shut us up for a limited amount of time! We would have to prove this by being out in public though.
  • Running a workshop for the public (including schools, colleges or youth centers).
    This was an idea from Hannah. We could have ran a small workshop on ideas which stemmed from our original fairy tale ideas. It would only be one hour long per workshop.
  • Bingo night – LPAC Cafe
    Speaks for itself really. Again, charge 50p-£1 per entry.
  • Competitions – eg. the competition we had on our Facebook page (guess what this image is)

 

There are of course many other ways in which we as a company could fundraise, these are just several of the ideas we could have chosen from. For now, we do not need to fundraise.

 

 

Francesca

Word count: 344

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