Author: Stacey Hartley

Insecurities, Inspiration & Ideas

Stacey Hartley Stacey Hartley, Uncategorized

Choosing to devise our own piece, we wanted to gather inspiration from other theatre companies and artists occupying a similar concept. We looked into Louise Orwin’s piece Pretty Ugly and discovered the integral relation that she had to her concept. Orwin underwent a yearlong experiment, ‘liv[ing] online as three teenage alter-egos’ (Orwin, 2014), asking online strangers to rate her appearances. From this experiment, Orwin created a performance that had real lived-in moments that she experienced firsthand. We took this element as inspiration and proceeded with an in depth discussion about our own experience with our concept.

Firstly, with our performance based on our own ideas of online identities, we had to look at the ways in which we update our individual online profiles. Our first revelation was the large amount of selfies we take before uploading just one to social media. However, before uploading, that particular ‘perfect’ selfie needs a filter and editing, which results in an altered image which does not truthfully represent the person behind it.

Our discussion lead to the process of the selfie, and we dissected it to understand each other’s method as well as our own. A few of us have watch videos on YouTube and have researched makeup tutorials in order to enhance and better their look. We found a contouring tutorial on YouTube and chose the one with the most views to see how the mass have attempted to contour their faces.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dLSy75M46o

Contouring has become more and more popular and through these makeup tutorials, girls can contour their faces similar to their idols and celebrities. For example, this particular video is inspired by Kim Kardashian and is an attempt to create her look through contouring. We used this tutorial and tried it out ourselves and began to control the way our faces looked, such as a slimmer nose, slimmer cheeks, highlighted eyes, etc.

This lead the discussion to body image and how we feel about our own bodies in regards to the media. It seems that all four of us, including Orwin had noticed that ‘advertisments, magazines, film and television had been spoon-feeding images of unattainable ‘perfection’’ (Orwin, 2013). Although we do not want to focus on this too much, it has inspired us to use voice over to represent that the media and technology is still controlling the way we look.

We then discussed personal routines. Whilst just simply finding out more about each other and laughing about the silly things we do whilst getting ready, it seemed like all of us have the same problem. What do we wear? After frantically changing outfits many times, adjusting hair and makeup, whilst getting frustrated in the process, we thought this may be a good way for our piece to go. We all feel connected with this concept, and therefore, the performance will hopefully reflect our audience’s relation to their image and get a sense of our individual personalities within our company.

Another inspiration for our piece is comedian, Jena Kingsley, and in particular, her experiment on social networking in real life. Kingsley takes all things social media such as, poking, liking, commenting, etc, and brings them out in to reality.

This experiment tests boundaries of unsuspected people and determines that social media language and actions are seen as bizarre behaviour, yet it is acceptable behind the guard of their online persona. Although this piece is literally based on bringing social media to life, we feel that the idea of using social media names would stress the online influences in our performance. For example, we are going to take names from twitter for each of the actors, such as, @Harriet_Haynes, which will be read as ‘at Harriet underscore Haynes’.

 

Works cited:

GlamBooth TV. (2014) Contouring & Highlighting- Kim Kardashian’s Makeup secret!. [online video] Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dLSy75M46o [Accessed 10th April 2015].

Kingsley, J. (2015) Social Networking in Real Life -Social Experiment. [online video] Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pyJlERCrJE [Accessed 13th April 2015].

Orwin, L. (2013) Pretty Ugly: About the Project. [online] Available from: https://prettyorugly.wordpress.com/about-the-project/ [Accessed 21st March 2015].

Orwin, L. (2014) Louise Orwin: Pretty Ugly. [online] Available from: http://www.louiseorwin.com/pretty-ugly [Accessed 20th March 2015].

 

Stacey Hartley – Stage Manager

Development

Stacey Hartley Stacey Hartley

As stage manager, my overall responsibility is to keep ‘the technical, or back-stage aspects of every performance in line with the director and designer’s original concept’ (Maccoy, 2005, 16). I shall be working on the technical aspects of the performance, keeping in with the director’s vision. However, as we do not have specific lighting and sound designers, we shall all be collaborating with ideas and the final decision shall be made by our director, Chloe.

With this devised piece, the first few rehearsals are dedicated ‘to explor[ing] and experiment[ing] with ideas, images, concepts, themes, or specific stimuli that might include music, text, objects, paintings, or movement’ (Oddey, 1996, 1), to obtain what works and what does not work within our piece. At this point in the process it is difficult for me to start my job on the technical aspects of the performance as the first rehearsals are for experimenting with ideas on our concept. However, through our lengthy discussions, I have in mind the director’s vision for the piece, although this may change slightly, I can start suggesting ideas as an outside eye because Chloe is an actor in the piece and I am the only one who is not performing.

With our concept following online identities and how the media controls the way in which society should look, Chloe, and our set designer Rosie, wanted the stage to reveal all of the technical aspects of creating a performance such as, exposed cables, live feeds, etc. We have also discussed the use of multiple videos and a lot of technical elements so I know that soon I shall be conducting a rather large cue sheet alongside Chloe’s technical requirements.

Works cited:

Maccoy, P. (2005). Essentials of Stage Management. New York: Routledge.

Oddey, A. (1996) Devising Theatre: a practical and theoretical handbook. London: Routledge.

 

Stacey Hartley – Stage Manager

The making of JumpCut

Stacey Hartley Stacey Hartley

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