“The practice of devising has been instrumental in enabling theatre-makers to develop artistically satisfying ways of working by stretching the limits of established practices and reshaping their creative process.” (Govan, 2007)
What was your key learning ‘block’?
The main challenge I faced whilst working on this piece was composing the music to fit the piece. As the only musician in the group I was tasked with organising the music for our performance. Very early on in the process I decided that I would write the music for our piece so that it would fit the timing of the movement we wanted to use rather than us having to fit the movement to the music we found.
However, one challenge of writing the music myself was making the music the right length for the movement that we choreographed. To combat this, I often found myself writing more music than I was needed as it was easier to delete music than add to it later. Also, as the rehearsal process went on the timing of different sections of performance changed as we became more familiar with the performance or added to a particular section. Therefore, the writing and timing of the music was an ongoing process and I was still adapting the music up until the performance itself.
Another, challenge that came with writing the music myself was making each section of the music sound different to portray different parts of the story. Each scene of our piece had a different atmosphere and therefore, each section of the music needed to portray a different atmosphere. To combat this, I researched different styles of music to use in our piece as these would help create different atmospheres for different scenes.
“Fairy tales are beautifully crafted stories. There will therefore be a moment in the hero/heroine’s journey when they have to make a decision that moves the story along. What would happen if they had made a different decision?” (Orti, 2014)
The following picture were all taken during the rehearsal process. Each one shows a different section of our pieces and helps to show how the piece was developed in rehearsal.
The Beast and I 