The start of our theatre company marks the beginning of the busy development process up until our debut performance at Lincoln performing Arts Centre in May 2015. Our theatre company name ‘JumpCut’ was recently sourced through our desire to create work that is abrupt in order to switch audience attention and senses quickly. We hope to make our debut performance as visually and emotionally stimulating as possible through our jump cutting manner.

JumpCut is a small company consisting of four members, and therefore, each member had to take on more than one job role. I decided to take on the role as stage manager as my main job within our company, alongside being the media editor. These roles appealed to me as a pair in order for me to edit videos and sound to how I would operate them on the day of our performance. This hopefully will make my stage manager role less problematic when it comes to constructing the cue sheets as I would know exactly how each media cue would start and end.

Through our first couple of meetings we have decided as a company that we want to create devised work as our ideas have already started flowing. We are all very keen and confident that our own ideas can be developed into a performance that creates an interesting talking point for the audience. The main topic that was central to each discussion we have had in this early stage has revolved around the idea of the ‘perfect’ online identity. We discussed how we, in today’s society, use social media as a platform to present the ideal side of one’s self. The trend of the ‘selfie’ and creating the perfect online persona through those selfies inspired us to look at our own experiences with the topic in order to make this piece truthful and relatable to our audience. As a company of all female artists we felt this would be a great route to go down as this topic relates to all four of us as regular social media users.

Stacey Hartley – Stage Manager