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Project Launch Night - 7 July 2009
After watching Round 1 I invited The Factory to take part in Hampstead Theatre's collaborative new writing festival this Autumn. This will be the third time we've hosted Daring Pairings and I wanted to find companies that would bring a very different approach to new writing to our own. The Factory's development process combines the singleauthored text with the rehearsal room. It's not devising but it doesn't involve notes and meetings with directors or dramaturgs. Is this new writing heresy? I hope so. We got together 50 writers, some familiar with The Factory, some completely new to them andput them in a room together. The aim was to demonstrate how the Factory worked and invite the writers to develop short plays with The Factory in time for Daring Pairings. There were some taster performances and a chance to quiz the actors and writers that had worked with the Factory before. The great advantage of the Factory approach is the spontaneity it encourages in performance and rehearsal. In two instances The Factory illustrated this most successfully. Firstly, they ran the same duologue twice using different actors to accentuate the variation available in recasting the same text and detaching assumptions of age, race and gender from the casting. Secondly, they ran two duologues in opposite halves of the rehearsal room, inviting the audience to move between them replicating the rehearsal room atmosphere and also making a moving target for the actors to negotiate - also apt for a company that makes use of found locations and props. The Factory's dogme style list of "obstructions" sparked a hotly contested discussion on the process. The Factory's advocates advanced the benefits of writing a script with no stage directions - more "robust" dialogue where essential action must be implied or expunged, No stage directions! Was this liberation of the text or convenience for actors? Those unfamiliar with The Factory process also questioned the lack of directorial continuity on the play development process: if actors were reinventing their interpretation of the text each time and there was no guiding hand of a single director or dramaturg to oversee the rehearsal process then wasn't this just going to provide fun for the actors without ever advancing the development of the play? The Factory actors and writers responded that the only constant is the text and that the writer is in complete control of the text's final cut. Rehearsal is entirely focused on what's on the page and the actors focus is entirely on using the space, the words and their voice and bodies to realise it. If it's in the text, it'll be in the play but the writer's discovery process comes in hearing and seeing what remains constant in the hands of surprisingly different performers and where unexpectedchoices by actors canopen up the text, revealing the play in ways theymight not have imagined.The writer thenmakes their own decisions about whether they rewrite, leave the play unaltered but explore it with different actors or bring in a totally different text to work on. The debate spilled into the bar til closing time and now it's up to the writers decide. Do they want to write a 10 minute playforHampstead main stagewith no stage directions, noset, props, lighting orsound effects that won't be cast until 10 seconds before the performance? Watch this space and find out or ask me again in 12 weeks. Neil Grutchfield | Neil Grutchfield Corrine Salisbury Tim Evans Alex Hassell John Hopkins Laura rees Colin Hurley Paul Chahidi Alexi Kaye Campbell Nigel Hastings Linda Broughton John Paul Connelly Marianne Oldham Alan Morrissey Kobna Holbrooke Smith Jethro Skinner Simon Muller Catherine Bailey Katie Morgan Hannah Patterson Elena Pavli Faye Thomas Paul Rigel Jenkins Suzanne Heathcote Federay Holmes Steve Bloomer Bob Collins Nick Harrop Clare Bayley Alistair Beaton Rosa Connor Jenny Davis Penny Gold Stacey Gregg Judy Hepburn David Kantounas Lucy Kirkwood Laura Lomas Nirjay Mahindru Simon Mendes Da Costa Barbara Norden James Parkes Stewart Permutt Peter Rumney Robin Soans Judy Upton Brian Walters Steve Waters Trevor Williams Alexis Zegerman |
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, Jul 28 2009, 10:35 AM EDT
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