Friday Flop Research and Development Project
(March-July 2019)
Impact Report
1 What we achieved, compared with the original aims of
the project:
The proposed project comprised a number
of activities including rehearsal, performances and open workshops, all of
which were carried out as planned. In rehearsal, a total of over 100 full days
of artist employment were funded, shared between 5 core performers and 3
collaborating artists. 5 public
performances were given, one per month, as planned, at the Rosemary Branch
Theatre. 5 open workshops were held, 3 at specialised performer training
institutions (Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, Rose Bruford College
and London Metropolitan University), one at a community arts centre (Kentish
Town Community Centre) and one at Rosemary Branch Theatre. Each workshop had at least a dual function:
firstly, to further the process of the project’s research and development by
involving participants directly in the questions and practice relevant to the
participating artists at the time of the workshop; and secondly, to share
ongoing findings, skills and approaches with participants such that the latter
might reuse the experiences in their own artistic, personal, social and/or
educational development. Each workshop took a unique focus, determined by the
nature of the participating venue and users.
‘Practical Clowning Research’ at London
Metropolitan University shared with performing arts students the starting
points that project artists had taken in the process of developing performance
from training.
‘Clowning Experiments’ at Rose Bruford
College invited students to create new links between training and performance.
‘To Laugh or Not To Laugh? Artists' Day’
at Rosemary Branch Theatre brought together resident and other artists at the
theatre to experiment with some of the project findings and their impact on
their own artistic development.
‘Community Arts Clowning’ at Kentish
Town Community Centre used clowning and basic clown training in the context of
social club events designed to bring neighbours of all ages together.
‘Clowning Practice as Research’ at Royal
Central School of Speech and Drama invited staff and postgraduate students to
ask practical questions about how clown training works within the wider context
of performer training.
Rehearsals focused on the processes of
bringing laughter-response clown training to the public stage. A total of 21
main exercises underwent this process of staging and were tested a number of
times in the five public performances given.
The rehearsals also looked at how
laughter-response training might bear upon non-clown, but related, forms such
as circus and stand-up comedy, using the exercises to ‘filter’ these genres.
These were also tested in the public performances.
The performances thus served as
experimental opportunities to gauge the effect of such training on the quality
of the dynamic relationships between performers and audiences.
Ongoing evaluation and monitoring of the
project was carried out as proposed, using real-time online feedback through
social media to gauge responses to work in progress.
2 What we learned, and how the project has helped us to
develop:
Learning and development arose from all three
of the main activities in the project: rehearsal, performances and open
workshops.
Rehearsals: staging of training exercises
was carried out in a variety of different ways - in bare form, with set-ups,
with added narrative, or as filters for existing material. Work in rehearsals
focused on:
1.
Adapting the
exercise for stage, addressing how the information necessary to read the performance
can be transmitted to a live audience without explaining the content as if it were
an open workshop. This included staging means to set up the action and
sometimes to add situational elements.
2.
Training in the
execution of the exercises. This involved finding ways for performers to be
autonomous without the need for the workshop teacher’s framing. Constant
practice needed.
Through engagement with these testing
methods for staging, a minimum set of requirements was developed for each of
the 21 exercises. Also developed were staged versions with a maximum amount of
added elements which still allowed for the clown dynamics of the exercise to
drive the performance, without recourse to fictional layers of scripting. The
forms which emerged thus drew their staged effects primarily from the clowning
dynamics which the original exercises were designed to train, fulfilling the
aims of the research which was to create clown performance derived from
laughter response rather than from fictional characters, roles, narratives,
sketches or variety acts.
Performances: each staged form was
tested at least twice over the run of five public performances. These choices
were presented in sequences which sketched out a bare skeleton of a structure
for an hour’s performance. Focus, however, was on the testing of each segment,
rather than on the unity of the show as a whole at this stage.
It was found that some stagings/exercises
proved more successful in public performance in terms of engagement of audience,
laughter response, and ‘readability’ for spectators. Those stagings which were
least successful were subjected to further research in rehearsals as well as
open workshops before being re-presented in public.
Open workshops: over the course of the
five open workshops, a variety of developments occurred.
At ‘Practical Clowning Research’ at
London Metropolitan University there emerged new, unexpected and more complex forms
of a group of exercises focusing on the intrusion of clowning into other genres
of performance.
At ‘Clowning Experiments’ at Rose
Bruford College, participants helped develop new ways to experiment with
specific exercises which we had yet to find way of staging. There emerged several
options for training concerned with the immediate visual and vocal impacts of
clowning.
At ‘To Laugh or Not To Laugh? Artists'
Day’ at Rosemary Branch Theatre, participants and project artists worked
together to develop a range of responses to the specific architecture and space
of the theatre from the starting point of clowns in response to laughter.
At ‘Community Arts Clowning’ at Kentish
Town Community Centre, participants joined project artists in basic clown training
exercises before trying simple stagings of them. The event tested the extent to
which non-performers might engage with the training ad performance of laughter-response
clowning, with considerable success. This potentially confirms the hypothesis that
this form of clowning reflects some fundamental notions of how clowning works
which are shared across ages, communities and cultural experiences.
At ‘Clowning Practice as Research’ at
Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, participants came up with a variety of
preliminary conclusions about the divergence of laughter-response clowning from
mainstream actor training methods (including orthodox clown training current in
UK drama universities).
3 Longer term impact the project has had:
The development of new staging choices
derived from laughter-response clown training has led to a number of impacts
beyond the process itself.
From training to performance:
The tested stagings were presented in
sequences which sketched out a bare skeleton of a structure for an hour’s
performance. Although the focus was on the testing of each segment, rather than
on the unity of the show as a whole at this stage, there emerged ways to create
‘bundles’ of stagings, which led performers and spectators from the simpler
phases of the training on through ever more complex structures. Thus it was that
sections of the performance presentations also began to work in a parallel path
of ‘learning’. This pointed in the direction of a larger scale dramaturgy that
would perhaps mirror the programme of training as it develops over the period
of a training workshop or course. This long form can thereby act as the
starting point for the building of a whole show, based upon the findings of
this R&D project.
The varied and intensive nature of the open
workshops, bringing project artists together with students, teachers and
community and other artists, suggested future impacts which include:
- - New approaches to
be developed by non-project workshop participants in their own fields of
performance, educational and community activity. These paths might draw upon
the new links suggested by the project between training and performance, which
may be applicable both to clowning and non-clowning work.
- - Personal artistic
development of project artists. Via the participation in the delivery of the open
workshops, participating artists were able to evolve in their own practical knowledge
and insights into facilitating workshops, opening up new avenues for individual
artists’ future development as facilitators.
Photography
The project’s use of ongoing visual
documentation by a professional photographer enabled a parallel research to be collaboratively
developed into how clowning might be perceive, recognise or understood outside
of the actual moments of performance. Visual images, still and moving, were
regularly tested via social media to assess the impact of the clowning under
exploration. The contribution of the professional photographer was thus
extensive, via three main photo shoots covering rehearsals, performances and
workshops. This served two main aims: firstly, to document the project;
secondly, to explore visual images of clowning as a dynamic relationship
between performer and spectator, researching means by which to communicate and
chime with a contemporary audience who might be disposed to the experience of
this new type of clown performance.
In conclusion, this period of research
and development has enabled us to move to a position where the creation of a complete
show may be envisaged clearly as the next phase in our artistic development.
