Jessica Helen Crosby

‘Wasting your time here, ain’t any criminals in HERE’ (WAKEUP Theatre, 2013, p.5).Characterisation of Ronnie.

Jessica Helen Crosby

Within our production of 130,000 I played the character of Ronnie, a troubled adolescent from South-East London who is a key witness to the stabbing of a character called Kwame. Throughout the rehearsal process I enjoyed developing the character of Ronnie immensely. Initially her character felt alien to me as Ronnie is not the type of character I have played before, therefore I had to think about her back story and how she feels living in a complex environment of poverty and gang culture. She has an upbeat and exciting personality along with some unpredictable behaviour, she is vulnerable and naive, she follows the crowd and looks up to her best friend Shanice, and tries to impress her constantly. Ronnie is the type of girl who failed at school and is a slight disappointment to her family, making her needy and emotional. Therefore I gave her some characteristic that I felt suited her and this description. I spoke with a fairly strong South-East London accent with a very slight Jamaican feel, as this is where I feel her family originated. I gave her a harsh vocal quality when speaking certain words, for example, when saying words like, here, though, I lowered the register to give more emphasis and to gain a comedic element to the speech, and I pronounced ‘th’ as ‘d’. Furthermore I made her speech slightly rhythmic and elongated certain phrases, I gave her physicality’s which mirrored this rhythmic quality. I had chewing gum when rehearsing and during the performance as this helped me to sustain the character throughout the production and gave attitude to her persona.

The character of Ronnie stemmed from watching Fallout on channel four, this gave me a good base to how to play Ronnie, it also gave me an insight to the relationship between Ronnie and Shanice. The character of Ronnie also developed through intensive rehearsals in which we responded to each others characters and utilised the notes provided from the director, dramaturge and other actors.

I also performed two verbatim extracts, one from Doreen Lawrence, Stephen Lawrence’s mum, and the other from Conan Taffee a whiteness who appeared at the scene when Stephen collapsed. This was to be delivered to the audience not necessarily acted, as we are not becoming a character we are speaking the real words from real people, this is not to say that there is no emotion on delivering the verbatim, it remains more about the words than the character. I found Doreen’s verbatim very emotional when speaking her own words, I felt her pain as a mother who was grieving, therefore the emotion was inevitably attached to the words. This piece of verbatim was at the end of the play and one of the most integral parts to the performance as it encompasses our company manifesto and defines the entire piece of merging fiction with verbatim. Therefore, I had an important job in making the text authentic, but at the same time, producing a compelling performance to express the seriousness and realities of the play. This was the reason behind ending the play with a piece of verbatim, as our script writer wanted to leave the audience with the realties behind 130,000.

With Fallout being inspired by the cases of Damilola Taylor and Stephen Lawrence it brings about representations of real events, even more so with our insertions of verbatim,

‘Williams is intervening in a way that may allow new meanings and new understandings to emerge. The degree of success with which he can do this depends on how readily the parties involved can accept his representation as a sound basis for renewed consideration’ (Derbyshire 2007, p.418).

We as a company had to invest in the representations of the characters and the verbatim text and so do the audience. For the concept to work and for the performance to be innovating and inspiring, we all had to completely absorb our characters and understand the subtext. At first playing the character of Ronnie made me question, how am I going to play a young black Jamaican girl? After attending a workshop by Theatre maker Andy Smith entitled, ‘What does it take to make a theatre?’, he demonstrated through his methods that an audience can achieve believability in what is being presented in front of them. Just as an audience believe that Jud Law played Hamelt and they invested in him being Hamelt, the audience will invest in our characters because we are putting it in front of them. This is also supported through the story and the emotional connection the audience make with our characters, with Ronnie being funny and slightly stupid they liken to her and therefore it is believable, furthermore I believed my character one-hundred percent which conveys itself to the audience making it easier for them to invest their belief.  The audience build a connection to the fact that Ronnie has a huge predicament of whether to tell the police that her best friends boyfriend killed Kwame, furthermore the connection to Emile goes further, the audience feel sympathy when they see him living with the guilt but also feel bad for feeling this sympathy because he is guilty of murder, but this is why the characters works so well and is why the audience invested their belief and furthermore is why it becomes irrelevant that we are not black, the emotion, intensity and realness of the story supports the believability.

Derbyshire, Harry (2007) ‘’Roy Williams’’: Representing Multicultural Britain in Fallout’, Modern Drama. pp.414-434

Smith, A, (2013). What Does it Take to Make a Theatre? Theatre Company Guest Workshop, Lincoln, LSPA

Arts Marketing for 130,000.

Jessica Helen Crosby

Arts marketing is an ever evolving sphere that is diversely changing all the time, therefore Theatre Company’s alike must do the same in regards to their promotional marketing. Social networking sites are now one of the main sources to promote on a wider scale, people can get the information they want instantly by the click of button, this is why we used Twitter and Facebook to advertise our company and show.  This way we can reach a wider demographic and create an event and page to which people could like and respond. Although on Facebook the people who will be invited to our performance are mainly friends, the process of people accepting the invite then posts on their wall, therefore their friends will see it and click on to the event or page and so on, therefore there is a domino effect which spreads rapidly and promotes the show without us having to force people to take a flyer.

‘Today the world is both faster and a smaller place […] Faster, because people are working harder and having less leisure time as industries strive to compete in the global market. Smaller, because technology and travel have brought the world closer with a resulting increase in choice of cultural and entertainment activities, including both popular and world culture’ (Kolb 2000, p.1).

With people checking their Facebook and Twitter pages on a daily basis more people are likely to see something on Facebook or Twitter than they are to read a flyer or poster. However some people are not as technically conversant as others therefore having flyers and poster is also essential to appeal to people who do not have Facebook to Twitter accounts.

My role within the marketing team along with Leanne was to design and create the flyers and posters. Designing these for 130,000 was difficult as there are many considerations that must be contemplated before designing them. As a theatre company we have a simplistic style therefore it seemed justifiable for the designs on the marketing material to reflect that.  ‘We see arts marketing as being about more than money […] Rather, our concern is to connect artists with their audiences by helping to develop an understanding of marketing which is sympathetic to artistic imperatives’ (Kerrigan and O’Reilly 2010, p.2). WAKE UP resides on the same morals as this. We are not a profit making company, we are more focused on the art and the purpose of what we are trying to achieve rather than making money. Therefore it seems imperative to reflect this through our marketing in order to represent our company as a whole.

Below is the first flyer that we designed, Leanne and I decided to keep it simple by having an abstract knife in the background, I used Paint.NET to create the image of the knife then added the text on top.

Knife

I really like the knife and the simplicity of it, it does not give to much away, however I was not sure how people would respond, I think people could potentially loose interest as it does not give enough information, therefore I was unsure to whether it would entice someone to watch our show.

After a few days break from making the flyer Leanne and I came back to it with fresh eyes and made a few changes. In order to make the flyer more informative and recognisable we decided to add WAKE UP’s theatre logo on the front along with our Twitter and Facebook information. Furthermore we added more information to the back of the flyer, we did this in order to provide more information about 130,000 and to support the other theatre company shows that were also taking place, this was to help promote the final degree performances and advertise the £15 deal for all four shows. Providing more information about our show and using our unique selling point of merging verbatim and fiction, we thought would help to capture potential audience members and promote our show, ‘participation in most cultural events does require at least some predisposition toward introspection and a desire to be exposed to new ideas’ (Kolb 2000, p.157). This is why it is important to have a unique selling point, from our research as a theatre company we could not find anyone who has merged verbatim and fiction together, therefore this new idea needed to be publicised to excite potential audience’s members.

back Knife 1 

With two of his murderers finally imprisoned 20 years on after the callous and fatal stabbing of Eltham born teenager Stephen Lawrence, his family’s fight for justice continues to forefront the complexities of knife crime in Britain. Merging verbatim accounts of the harrowing inquiry with fictional representations of ‘gang related culture’
We present to you: two worlds, two stories, one conclusion….

 (This section of texts appears on the front of the flyer, see print screen below)

Flyers

When discussing the flyers and posters it was decided that we would have the posters printed professionally and the flyers printed on paper. This was purely because of economical reasons of our budget; we thought it more beneficial to spend more money on the posters. Many flyers are thrown away, I know when I am given a flyer I normally put it in the bin, therefore we felt it would be a waste of money to give out professional flyers for them to be thrown away. The flyers came out well on paper, they looked simple but effective which coincides directly with our theatre company. We printed them doubled sided with two flyers on each page, each page cost fifty pence to print in colour and ten pence to print in greyscale, therefore due to the restraints of the budget we printed thirty on colour and twenty on paper giving us one hundred flyers altogether. We placed flyers in the Lpac, the University library, the tower bar, the engine shed, the waterside shopping centre and three coffee shops in town.

To design the posters I used Vista print, I selected the design of the newspaper as this related to the verbatim aspect, as Stephen Lawrence’s case is one that appeared profoundly in the newspapers recently and twenty years ago at the time of his murder. I used the picture of the group to represent the gang culture of Fallout and 130,000. I used Photoshop to add the blurry affect, blurring the picture added a dramatic but unidentified affect as if to remain inconspicuous to interest potential audience members. The unique selling point of verbatim and fiction was placed at the top as if it where the head line of the newspaper, making it eye catching and significant to the poster. Putting the words real in capitals was to emphasise the fact that we were using the real words from the inquiry of Stephen Lawrence, and to ensure that people realised we will be using real words from real people. We placed the posters in the same places as the flyers. In Zing café at the Lpac we placed one at the box office on the wall; this was in the hope that when people were queuing for tickets or queuing at the café they would read it whilst waiting. We also placed a poster in the business and law building, as our piece centres around crime, murder, institutionalised racism and suggestion of the police being corrupt, it could potentially attract people who already have a genuine interest in these issues.

 

130,000 flyer

Kerrigan, Finola and Daragh O’Reilly (2010) ‘Marketing the Arts’ in Daragh O’Reilly and Finola Kerrigan (ed.) Marketing the Arts A Fresh Approach. London: Routledge

Kolb, Onita M (2000) Marketing Cultural Organisations, New Strategies for Attracting Audiences to Classical Music, Dance, Museum, Theatre and Opera. Dublin: Oak tree press

 

 

 

 

 

Target Audience

Jessica Helen Crosby

Producing a performance as a theatre company requires audience consideration, without an audience there is no performance. Therefore as part of the marketing team this was something to be considered when deliberating the marketing strategy. Playwright Roy Williams stated in an interview with the guardian,

‘When a theatre produces a play by a person of colour, it is easy for its marketing department to bring in large black audiences. When the Royal Court staged Fallout in 2003, it targeted local youth theatres, community centres and schools, with great success. It was a thrill to watch these audiences come into the theatre. Finally, they were able to see themselves and their stories on stage’ (Williams 2009)

This was not the case in our adaptation of the play, the target audience is for anyone who wants to listen. WAKEUP wants to make the audience think about what is happening around them, still today, twenty years on from Stephen Lawrence’s murder, there are people being stabbed. We do not want to aim at one specific audience type; we want people of all ages and all races to be in the audience. Due to the strong language and themes of violence there is an age restriction attached, however, it seems ironic to have an age restriction when the play is about young people who commit crimes and is inspired by the real event of  a ten year old who was killed by an unprovoked knife attack, ‘in 2011/12, 14% of those admitted to hospital after an assault by a sharp object were aged 18 or under’ (Fearless: Online). This statistic proves that young people are involved in crime therefore plays like 130,000 could be used as a tool for younger people to think twice about committing crime, although Emile is not arrested you still see his life fall apart through living with the quilt. Fallout highlights ‘both a conflicted police service and the societal divisions that push black youths towards criminality, draws attention to the underlying systemic causes of inner city violence and makes a constructive and valuable contribution to on-going public debate’ (Derbyshire 2007, p.414). Our adaption of Fallout could potentially make young audience members think twice about committing crime or getting involved in gang culture, 130,000 looks at the different view points from the victim, the witnesses, the murderer and the grieving family. The guilt of Emilie and the affects it has on his character could make people see that it is not a game and that he has to live with the fact he has killed someone.

The main audience for 130,000 will be made up of family, friends, lecturers and peers, due to the show being apart of our final degree. This will create a supportive audience who are there to provide support for our company and more specifically the individuals in the company. As part of the marketing team we have to take this into consideration, we know most of the tickets sales will be from the above list. However marketing our performance is still essential and we aim to market a wide demographic. Therefore we have to take into consideration our core and potential audiences.

Our Core Audience

Friends and Family of the participating individuals

–          Parents and grandparents interested in seeing their children/grandchildren perform in their final degree show(some of which will not have see theatre like ours before)

–          Friends wanting to support their friends

–          Students wanting to support their fellow students

–          Second year students who will attend in order to help them decide which module to take for their final degree performance

New Audience

Individuals who have an interest in original theatre

–          Interested in Verbatim theatre and new forms of representation

–          People who follow the works of playwright Roy Williams

–          Individuals who take an interest into society and news

–          Curiosity into the Stephen Lawrence inquiry

–          People who are interesting in starting their own theatre company

–          Educational reasons

–          People interesting in new and innovative theatre

The piece is current and relevant and furthermore has a unique selling point of merging verbatim and fiction, therefore new potential audience members who have a genuine interest could potentially come to see 130,000. This will only be achieved through successful marketing and staying true to our company and performance, false advertising can lead to an audience being dissatisfied with what is being presented. Therefore our marketing material must coincide directly with the originality, the reality and simplicity of WAKEUP and 130,000, as Mokwa states, ‘marketing’s role is, therefore, not to influence the kind of art produced but solely ‘to match the artist’s creations and interpretations with an appropriate audience'(Hill 2003, p.2). Our marketing strategy is not to sell a product, but to promote our work and the message behind it. The emphasis is on the art form rather than making money, we want to sell seats to get people to listen rather than sell seats to make a profit.

Therefore our marketing strategy will reside on being accurate to WAKEUP and our manifesto, being committed in making thought-provoking theatre through originality in the hope that the audience leave the theatre questioning the world they live in.

 

Derbyshire, Harry (2007) ‘’Roy Williams’’: Representing Multicultural Britain in Fallout’, Modern Drama. pp.414-434

Fearless Against Crime Charity: Online:  http://www.fearless.org/ (accessed 21st March 2013)

Griffin, Caroline (2007) This way up: A flat-pack guide to marketing the Arts, Cambridge : AMA and Arts Council England.

Hill, Liz, Catherine O’Sullivan and Terry O’Sullivan (2003) ‘’Chapter I: The Evolution and Context of Arts Marketing’’, Creative Arts Marketing, pp: 1-35.

 

From the Beginning……

Jessica Helen Crosby

Wake up Theatre Company started in a studio at the Lincoln School of Performing Arts within a third year module ‘Theatre Company’, in the first session we were asked to get into groups and discuss the following:

-What theatre do we like?

-What theatre have we seen that we liked or disliked?

– What are you passionate about?

-What specialities do you possess from doing a drama course that could contribute to a theatre company?

Consequently this sparked a conversation about our interests and passions. Immediately we all agreed that we love musicals, however, the ones we preferred where musicals that had a real story behind them. For example, Les Miserables is based on the French revolution and Billy Elliot the Musical is based on the miners’ strike of 1984. We considered doing a musical but decided against it due to the high reliance on spectacle and strong musical ability. We were unsure whether we could successfully produce this so moved on to other ideas. The discussion then lead onto a conversation about performances we had previously seen, in which the narratives or inspiration for the piece were based on real issues in today’s society. One performance that was mentioned was DV8 ‘Can We Talk About this’, a physical theatre piece concerning multiculturalism, freedom of speech and Islam. The production uses verbatim material as its primary source of script.  Lloyd Newson, founder and director of DV8 wanted to produce a piece that would raise awareness to the issues of having Sharia Councils that operate in Britain, these councils do not allow Muslim women equal rights to Muslim men. One result of this is Muslim women are unable to divorce their husband if subjected to domestic violence. Along with many other issues such as murder, forced marriages and racism, this performance left me as an audience member, questioning the world that I live in. Consequently we started to talk about the world we live in and issues such as, terrorism, the London riots, domestic violence, knife crime, the lack of trust in the government and corrupt elements of our justice system.

Through producing our companies manifesto and mission statement we decided that we are a theatre company who are passionate about telling real stories and talking about the problems that exist in society today, we will do this through the uses of verbatim and fictitious writing. We want to create a piece of theatre that will spark a similar reaction to the one that DV8 had stimulated, and hope to do this through creating a powerful and compassionate performance which provokes the audience to question the world around them.

We decided to focus on knife crime as our primary stimulus, as this is a current and growing problem that claims on average 130,000 lives a year. The decision then had to be made whether we should devise a piece or reproduce a play. After a group discussion and the readings of several plays concerned with the subject of knife crime, we decided that we would do both. We settled on using a published play, adding our own elements of verbatim. Initially we considered using Caryl Churchill’s play, Love and Information, because the content had real situations emphasised by fictional characters. However after our production and creative team had read the play, it was decided that Love and information was not specific enough for what we wanted to portray with regards to knife crime.  Therefore we are taking Roy Williams play, Fallout inspired by the case of Damilola Taylor and Stephen Lawrence, real stories about innocent victims who died from a knife attacked.   Along with verbatim interviews,  Fallout will be adapted and edited as our script, quoting directly from the official trial transcript of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry, we will merge fiction and reality.

Another aspect which was a point of discussion was to use dark comedy as a component to our piece, similar to Brecht’s A-effect or Verfremdung affect. The A-effect is based on the audience being alienated in order for them to engage critically, ‘to provoke critical engagement the audience must be moved beyond detached speculation’( Reinelt 1994, p.8). Using Brecht’s A-effect will allow us to have a more effective impact on the audience, ‘what is ‘natural’ must have the force of what is startling’ ( Brecht 1964, p.70). We will create the starling aspect of the natural by contrasting fictional humour against emotional verbatim; therefore by placing the incongruous with the sympathetic will potentially alienated the audience into critically analysing the issues of knife crime today.  We do not market ourselves as a political theatre company as we do not directly talk about politics, however, we are exploring and commenting on current issues and real life events and therefore are indirectly political. Our primary motivation is informing people to what is happening around them, not to give them a lesson on politics.

When deciding on a name for our company, we thought to call it ‘Bliss’. This came from the idea of the common saying ‘ignorance is bliss’, blissful ignorance is defined as ‘complete unawareness of something important or unpleasant’ (OED) However,  on reflection and with help from a focus group, we decided that Bliss was not the right name for our company. The name Bliss is more connected to piece we are currently focusing on rather than our Theatre Company as a whole.  We then decided on ‘WAKE UP’, as this was clear and concise to our purpose as company. We want our audiences to wake up the realities of the world around them.  This name allows us, as a company, to approach other current issues within society and use them as a basis for future performances.

 

Brecht, Bertold (1964) ‘Interview with Luth Otto’, in John Willett, Hill and Wang (ed) Brecht on Theatre: the Development of an Aesthetic, New York, pp. 70-71.

Oxford English Dictionary Online : onlinehttp://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/blissful (accessed 21st March 2013).

Reinelt, Janelle (1994) After Brecht British Epic Theatre, Michiga: University Press.