CONTEXT

            CONTEXT



     I consider every seemingly little thing that I do about acting is important and it brings me further closer to my destination. I feel like the process of rehearsals and the actual performance of "Love and Information" were the best we ever had since the beginning of this course; what I mean by "the best" is that I felt as if we were some professionals actors getting ready to put on an official show and if I think about it better, this is sort of what we did, for our second performance, in the evening. I am writing about it, because this is certainly a thing that is helping me to create a base of knowledge and experience for my future acting career.
     I will use this question as a reflection over my evolution, thinking both about the physical and emotional part of rehearsals.

PHYSICAL PART OF REHEARSALS: This is the constant work and aspects we need to think about that build up the process a script goes through till the final result, the performance. Starting with the moment when we got the scripts and the casting was completed, we started to create a way to use the stage effectively and we introduced some white blocks in the scenery. I have seen how some simple normal objects can totally change the way we introduce the play to the audience, from an aesthetic point of view. The newspapers idea came on the last moment, but I was amazed to see how the stage looked really interesting and professional by using some random things in a creative way. 
            The physical part of the show is about how we decided to present our play to the audience. We had a story behind the way we linked the scenes, which is "The Wedding Video" shared in pieces throughout the show. The middle entrance was used only for those bits, highlighting the difference between the two tenses of the story: past tense ("The Wedding Video" where all of the characters participated) and future tense (presenting every different and hidden story and the way the characters and their situations changed with the time). I've learned that even though the play as it is seems to be enough, there will always be a way to make it yours, without adding too much. 
              Some professional things we learned was about our behavior during the performance. The stage was shared in two and we only used a half; the other one was behind the curtains and we had access to it, but staying on that place was not recommended, because the audience could hear any tiny sounds or steps from behind the curtains. Using the entrances and exits in an effective way is another aspect we had to keep in mind. This episodic play didn't allow us to leave a gap in between the scenes, so while actors were coming off the stage, other actors were entering it. We had to find a logic for using certain exits and to be careful not to interfere with other actors and ruining your entrance. There were many moments when we used the curtains as a gate between the audience and  the play and we actually introduced it as an wall in our show when our quotes were being shouted from backstage and when for the "Facts" scene the audience could be heard clapping, cheering and shouting from the other half of the stage. 
               Other physical aspect of the rehearsals is the actor's approach to represent a character's physicality. I consider this part is 50% of your character, so I have done a lot of research about this subject and I was trying to highlight the difference between my characters using my body movement, gestures and facial expressions.  I have learned to adopt new ways of using my body while playing and, also, that I had to leave anything specific to myself behind the curtains.  
                My articulation, voice and projection improved and I've learned that I can use them in my advantage and play with them, as long as I don't think too much about this aspect. My focus has to be on my character, not on the I am talking, unless it is a part of the character.

EMOTIONAL PART OF REHEARSALS: I consider this to be the work you have to do on your own and the process you, as an actor have to carry on in order to use the skills you have achieved till now and to allow yourself to grow by gaining the experience the representation of a new character brings to you. As I've answered before, I feel like I've improved my skills, because I got used to the idea that the moment when I am on stage is my moment and it is my decision if I want to let myself be controlled by fears or be brave and be the one who controls them. The research I carried out in order  to  be emotionally ready for my characters is represented by inspiring myself from the work of other actors that have successfully put on a great performance behind the cameras; e.g. The Joker from “The Dark Knight” - “Message”; Hannah from “13 Reasons Why” - “Fate”; Holly Viola from “You Get Me”. I have learned to not let myself distracted by the circumstances, to believe in the work I am putting on and to complete it, staying truthful to my purposes and ideas.

      When I first read the scenarios that have been given to me, I started to picture myself in different situations and have ideas about my characters and the setting. Finally, when I chose exactly who my characters are going to be, I created their life story. These may not be obvious for the audience, but they represent my subtext and having or creating one is a part of my work as an actor. Furthermore, it is essential for my acting's veracity. For example, me and Diogo decided that "Savant" will be a part of a war and we were privates, we have been in the army for only two months, so I went on Google and searched for a list of all the recent wars in the world; that's how we decided we were in the Somali Civil War, 2007, fighting on the behalf of UK.
        The first part of my work was developing my characters mentally and emotionally, the creating their physical way of acting and a path they are following on the stage.

“MESSAGE”: I am a victim of a bomb attack, but I got away alive; my mental health is not good anymore, I am frustrated and stressed and I want to express my opinion in front of the people.
My character: I am 20 years old, I am a lonely person, observing the world until one day, when it happens to me. I don’t know what to do and I feel the need to unburden my frustration and desperation to the world, but I am still trying to keep myself together.

“FAN”:  Me and my sister are obsessed over a singer and we are constantly fighting over the question: ‘Who does he like more?’, even though he had only seen us a couple times at his 
concerts. We decide to break into his house to find out more things about himself and maybe find out who he likes more: me or my sister? 
My character: I am a teenager girl, 17, that has a weird life, competing with her sister on every little aspect. She is looking for role models and has a normal crush on a famous singer, but because of the competition with her sister, he starts to obsess over him.
          

                                        


“SAVANT”: I’ve been in the army for 2 months and I became friends with Aiden, who is 34; we are in the Somali Civil War, in 2007.
My character: I am 24 years old. I’ve joined the army because my father didn’t like the way I am living my life and I wanted to show him that I can be responsible if I want to.


                                        



“FATE”: After dealing with a sad life and depression, I consider the option to end my life. When I am about to do it, I hesitate a little and I try to see some point in living and talk to my friend, who wanted to stop me.
My character: I am 17 and I am on the edge. I have strong belief about life, but everything seems so pointless, because I feel like I already know what this life is about and I consider it’s not worth it.

CONTEXT

                         Love and Information

                                        by Caryl Churchill

                PRESENTATION

         Caryl Churchill was born on 3rd September 1938 in London and she is 80 years old at this moment. Her plays' subjects are about dealing with feminist issues, the abuses of power and sexual politics.

         Her family immigrated to Canada when she was 10 and she attended Lady Margaret Hall, a women's college of the University of Oxford, but remained in England after receiving a B.A. in 1960. Her three earliest plays, ''Downstairs'' (produced in 1958), ''Having a wonderful time'' (produced in 1960) and ''Easy Death'' (produced in 1962) were performed by Oxford based theatrical ensembles.

        During 1960s and ‘70s, Churchill wrote radio dramas and then television plays for the British television. while being a resident dramatist at London’s Royal Court Theatre, Churchill wrote ''Objections to Sex and Violence" (1974), which was not well-reviewed, but it led to her successful association with David Hare and Max Stafford-Clark’s Joint Stock Company and with Monstrous Regiment, a feminist group. "Cloud 9" (1979), with the main subject - sexual politics, was successful in the United States as well as in Britain, winning an Obie Award in 1982 for play writing. The next year ''Top Girls" (1982) brought her another Obie; it is a play that deals with women losing their humanity in order to attain power in a male-dominated environment.

       Caryl Churchill is known for her unconventional theatrical writing, e.g. ''Love and Information'' is an episodic play and while she is criticized by others, many appreciate her original way of writing a play.

       The play has no named characters, it is a series of unnamed voices circling around the central preoccupation. The audience is free to draw conclusions about the meaning of the connections or disconnection between the scenes. This play, particularly, is built up in a way that gives freedom for the audience and for the actor to interpret its meanings. There is a lack of indications for the actor, leaving them alone with their own thoughts and opinions, which is frightening. It is like the space in a therapist's room, where you encounter your own thinking and feeling. There is always darkness in Churchill's work.' - Digital Theatre

       Churchill examines, explores, celebrates and questions where we are in our contemporary society. Her focus is on how the information that makes us human beings; our feelings, dreams and minds, are negotiated in a world dominated by a different kind of information. How does this affect our relationships? How does it affect our memories? But rather than giving us an answer or presenting a moral tale, Churchill offers us short scenarios of us, existing, loving and figuring, and it is up to us to decide what we make of it.  The play is a compilation of seven sections each with a number of scenes that range from less than a minute in lengths to a few minutes long. The seven sections of the play must be done in order, however the scene within each section can be done in whatever order the director wishes. The ''random'' section of scenes, included at the end of the play are able to be incorporated anywhere within the play. This allows the director ample freedom to play with the story line of the play along with the certain themes and questions they want to highlight with their particular production.

      Throughout her writing life Churchill has experimented with form and process. "What is a Caryl Churchill play?" seems to be a question hard to answer. Churchill is a playwright that seemed to be constantly reinventing the idea of what a play should be.
       In the scene "Lab", it is described in unemotional scientific jargon the process of slicing a chick's brain in order to understand the pecking mechanism. This scene makes you wonder – what is information without love? Is it a madness like the obsessive fan in "Fan" where the need to know everything, disguised as love, is a different threaten?
        This mysterious, powerful play is like a disquisition on two of the most powerful poles in our lives: needing to know and needing to love. 

       Caryl Churchill's career is unmatched in contemporary theatre and she is considered to be one of the greatest.

Interview with Love and Information’s Assistant Director, Caitlin McLeod 

When you first read Love and Information, what was your immediate response to it? 

           'I felt it was such it was such a pertinent state of the nation play written by Caryl Churchill, one of our greatest leading playwrights. I guess it’s also a state of the world play, but seen through a mainly British lens. I thought these vignettes summed up where we were in time, in a technological sense and in a relationship sense – it’s where we’ve come to. And it was so far reaching and ranging that it felt like it was something that everyone could relate to or at least have imaged themselves in that situation or know people in that situation. It felt like there was a way in for everyone, it was one of those plays that I felt, for anyone who read it, there would be an instant reaction of recognition and enjoyment from each of those little scenes. And of course I was struck by Carol’s language which has become even more pared down from the days of plays like The Striker. There’s now no punctuation, pauses or character indications. Her simple, sparse and poetic style leaves such room for interpretation and meaning. There’s so much meaning in such few words, which I think is definitely unique to her craft. The form is really unique, isn’t it? Love and Information has been described as a kind of kaleidoscope in term of structure. '

Would you agree with that? 

              'There are different levels of structure, so you have the overall play that was then divided into seven sections and each of those sections has a collection of about seven different scenes which have a distinct theme. So one of them is difficult information, one of them is looking for meaning, one of them is memory. In those you can then have 3 page scenes, or you have 5 second scenes. And within these scenes, it doesn’t say who these voices are or how many people are in the scene. What the feelings are, what the relationships are, that is all up for grabs with the other artists. 

When you read the play on the page, those sections are numbered and each scene is also tilted. How did you try to convey those titles to the audience? 

                'We did a workshop a couple months before we started the play and there was a lot of talk about whether we needed the titles at the beginning of each scene, because some of them are quite specific and you wouldn’t necessarily know what the scene was about just from hearing it. I think everyone felt quite strongly that we could feel that were different sections and also when you were moving from one to the next because they were each saying something different about information or love. But generally, as we’ve rehearsed it and come to create the world of each scene, it has become quite clear that if you put too much meaning on top of it or try to signal too strongly that this is what it’s about, then it takes away from the possibilities of the scene. So I think they decided it wasn’t necessary that the audience knew, for instance, that a scene was about Census. It was more important that they have a sense that this scene is about people avoiding information or about people avoiding giving information. That’s more interesting than knowing what the scene is called. 

Can you say a little bit about the play’s title Love and Information? How did the name of the play feed into the rehearsal process? 

                   'There was a lot of discussion about where the information is in each scene and where is the love and how that is negotiated and changed. What was important to find out was what the relationships or what the love could be in each scene and every time that we pushed that, the scene inherently became more interesting and more powerful. It’s an interesting juxtaposition, love and information. 

What do you think Caryl Churchill might be saying about the relationship between these two ideas?

                    'I think she is investigating the point that we are at now in terms of our natural impulses, which are love and feelings, existing within our man-made technological world which is a lot to do with information and how to process that. Today’s information, Internet, Facebook, etc - are they used to channel love, are they now different ways to express love? So, I think she was interested in investigating, exploring different types of love that have come out of this new world of information. She’s not necessarily saying this is bad or this should change, or that we are in a worse place then we were when we had love without Facebook or any of these other things. I think she is really interested in the strange place we have ended up and how we negotiate love within information which is overpowering us every minute of the day, really. 

PROPOSAL

       UNIT 8 - Proposal

Level 3 Diploma – Performance and Production Arts Assignment Brief:

Assignment Title	Final Project Love and Information by Caryl Churchill
Unit No & Title	Unit 8: Collaborative Performance Project
Level & Credit Value	Level 3 / 24 Credits
Assignment Leader	Shenagh Cameron
Assignment Verifier	Shenagh Cameron/Monique Campbell
Start Date	23/04/19
Assessment Date	Performance May 29th & 30th May. Final Blog/log – June 1st 2019
Assessment Grade	DISTINCTION	MERIT	PASS	REFERRAL	FAIL

Project Proposal

Learner Name	UAL Reg. ID	Centre name & Number
Madeline-Gabriela Bejat		Westminster Kingsway College 11072

Project proposal title	Main Area of Activity/s e.g. Performance/ Direction/Choreography/ Acting
Love and Information	Acting; Performance; Direction

Tutor / Assessor Name	Signature	Date

 Section 1 – Rationale (approx. 100 words)

This section provides an opportunity to reflect on, review and summarise your progress and achievements through the first seven units. It also offers a chance for you to take stock of the knowledge, skills and understanding you have acquired, what you know now, compared with what you knew and could do before you started the course, and how this has influenced your choice of pathway and your project proposal.

I consider the most important thing I have achieved since I started this course is experience. With experience, there come a lot of things; I had the chance to observe myself in every performance video and to find out things about myself, things that can be seen mostly from outside. For example, being on stage felt different from what it looked like, it felt more intense, but watching myself I observed that I didn’t express my emotions and reactions the way I thought I did; and now I know why: because I was too concentrated on the inside action of my mind and I forgot to use my body, my facial expressions. So I started to work it out in front of a mirror, at home. I experimented with different emotions (sadness, disappointment, happiness, hope). Then I had to remember myself every time I was rehearsing to use that till it becomes something natural for me; to involve all of me in the representation of a character.    During this journey, starting with “Antigone” and finishing with “Macbeth” I’ve done a lot of teamwork and as always, working with people will give you the chance to see how different people’s ideas are and to observe the process where all of them are brought together, creating the final project.     Working with Camden Youth Theatre was a great experience and I had the chance to feel like a professional actor and perform four times in a theatre, for an audience that actually paid money to come and see our show. I’ve learned to be creative and  productive, to express my ideas, because they are valuable.     Broken Hearted Youth Theatre has thought me to not be afraid to step out of my  comfort zone and go with the flow, as long as I stay truthful during that process. Some of us even participated to the making of a professional short film for a two nights shoot, which was quite a delightful experience for all of us.     Before I started this course, I knew I didn’t have a clear idea of all the aspects a professional actor has to keep in mind, but I was ready to find out. I am not a professional actor, but I aspire to be one. Now I know more about the long way ahead of me and I am aware of all the obstacles that I may encounter, as well as the shortcuts that may come to me disguised as opportunities. All I have to do is to know exactly  who I am and what defines me as an actor; some of those characteristics I have discovered during this course: focus, creativity, perseverance, ambition, belief in myself and my own ideas.      My pathway is the same I chose some time ago, but now I am more determined  than ever.

Section 2 – Project concept (approx. 200 words)

This section provides an opportunity for you to clearly explain the concept and aims of your project. This should include what you anticipate producing, the research and ideas that will support its development and the levels and types of resources that you will need to complete and present your project realisation within the allocated timescale. You should include the 
names of anyone you will be collaborating with and/or those who will perform in your piece. 

For our new project I would like to change the type of plays we worked on till now; we had ancient greek playwrights, Chekhov and Shakespeare, but what about the contemporary plays? Sure, these old plays are masterpieces and they challenge you as an actor on many ways, but a modern play that reveals the problems people are struggling with and situations that may never happen to you, but it gives you an insight view for your  better understanding; a play that makes you know more about humans and their way of thinking and acting - this is a play I would never say ‘no’ to.      I think Caryl Churchill is the perfect playwright we should approach for our next project. She is controversial due to her original type of writing, breaking some traditional conventions of a play. “Love and Information” is an episodic play about  everything, starting with secrets and continuing with suicide and analyzing the starts; it’s a play that puts a mirror in front of humans, revealing their dark thoughts and actions. I believe the other people I’ll be working with will be more interested in creating this performance, because the themes of the play resonate more with their interests.  A lot of research needs to be done in order to be able to represent the intense emotions hidden in every line, but the great aspect about this is that the actor  is not limited by the writer; everyone is free to direct their scenes and create their characters the way they want to, because there aren’t even signs of punctuation.      I prefer to not include any names of who I would like to work with, because I enjoy working with random people and experiencing what it’s like to adapt to different approaches.

Section 3 -­ Evaluation (approx. 50 words)

This section provides an opportunity for you to explain how you will reflect on and self-­ evaluate your work, as both an on-going activity and at the conclusion of the project.

You should describe how you intend to record your decision-­making and how you will document developments as the project progresses. This evaluation should reference 
your stated aims and be reflective and analytical rather than a description of actions completed.

I will keep my decisions and ideas written on my notes or on my script, making short observations and I will use my blog to keep track of the progress I will be making as the performance is getting closer and closer.      We will be giving each other feedback and ideas on how we could change something in order to achieve a good quality performance. We will take photos of the settings, as well as videos to help us see what needs to be adjusted and to not forget any important detail.

Record your intended research sources, both primary (from your own first-hand experience
 e.g practical studio research) and secondary (from other sources), in this section. Sources of research should be as wide as possible and may include: libraries, museums and galleries, books, film, magazines, TV, radio programmes, websites etc.

Where appropriate you should use the Harvard system of referencing. The bibliography should be continuously updated as the project progresses.

For my research I will use websites, as   https://www.digitaltheatreplus.com/education and  https://d19lfjg8hluhfw.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/25191802/Love-and-Information-Resource-Pack.pdf , to find out information about the writer and the play and to create a knowledge base for my work and I will watch different productions  of "Love and Information" online:  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O5_P9Y7xSAk, https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=17eg13lOCyE .  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars:_2003–present - The world’s recent wars         I am going to use as an inspiration every character from movies I have watched that I consider to be close enough to the way I picture my characters, e.g. for my ''Message" character I will have a little bit of 'The Joker' influence.

Project action plan and timetable:
Outline your planning and organisation over a period of weeks and the activities you will need to carry out in order to successful complete your project within the agreed timeframe. It is important that your proposed output is realistic so ensure you consider ambition and time when completing this section. Make sure you include what you are going to do, how you will do it and by when. The more time and thought you give to planning your project the more successful it is likely to be. Remember to include time taken to visit sources,  sourcing materials, questionnaires, access to workshops, tutorial and peer group feedback opportunities, as well as when you will incorporate independent study.
Week no	Tasks	Notes
1 23.04.2019	Read the play for the first time.	We need the script.
2 30.04.2019	Distribute the scenes and characters. Build up our characters.	We need everyone in, our scripts and the opinion of our tutor. We need some paper and pens or our phones to write down ideas.
3 07.05.2019	Establish an order and rehearse individually or with our partners.	We need our scripts and our partners.
4 14.05.2019	Start to be off script and rehearse the play as a whole.	We still need our scripts and everyone to be in.
5 21.05.2019	Talk about lighting, sounds, costumes and setting. Searching love quotes to introduce in between the scenes. Continue rehearsing.	We need some paper, a pen or a phone to write down our ideas. We need everyone in.
6 27.05.2019	Do a technical run, look for props, costumes  and rehearse in the theatre.	We need the technical theatre students, props, costumes and a tutor to give us some feedback.