Running up to the show (Not literally, I’m very unfit)
(Twisted Ivy, 2016)
As a newly formed Theatre Company, we had to choose an appropriate and eye-catching name. After many meetings and much deliberation, the group decided on the name ‘Twisted Ivy Productions’. This was chosen because in typical fairy-tale stories, there is some form of plant or flower prevalent. For instance, in the fairy-tale Snow White they incorporate a rose; “she took the rose trees with her…” (Brothers, 2016) and in the story ‘The Two Cakes’, they speak about many different flowers; “…that when you breathe, roses and jessamines may fall from your mouth…” (Giambattista, 2002).
The group discussed the idea of completely twisting the original story of a fairy-tale and having a completely alternative story which was based on surrealism. This idea also helped with the name of the company, as it is a ‘twisted’ idea and we felt it was necessary to have the company name reflect that also. The reason we used ‘Ivy’ in the name because we felt a need to keep the theme of a key plant or flower throughout the story. The choice of ‘Ivy’ as the focus plant because it is an unusual plant that will wrap itself around buildings and fixtures. This made Ivy a good metaphor for the story, as Cinderella was slowly letting the thoughts of revenge “wrap itself around” her and take its toll.
This then led the group to think of a name for the show itself, and based around the theme of flowers or plants within the name. Through this, the group unanimously decided on the name ‘Every Rose…’, as we liked the idea of using a Rose, specifically. The head of the rose holds great beauty, despite the sharp thorns that protect it from the outside world. This was another good metaphor for our Cinderella as she was beautiful in appearance but she could be dangerous once the sisters bullied her until she could no longer take it.
We came up with the idea of a twisted tale of Cinderella, taking inspiration from the original Cinderella story by Jacob and Wilheim Grimm. We liked the idea of a different idea towards a fairy-tale, as we all know fairy-tales to have a ‘and they lived happily ever after’ feel, we wanted our show to incorporate the story but make it completely different. The original story is a lot darker than any other versions we had read; “Cut off your toe. When you are queen you will no longer have to go on foot” (Grimm & Grimm, 2011). We liked the idea of the disgusting, abnormal, gruesome side to the Cinderella story we all knew and loved and so we wanted to keep the influence from the brothers Grimm in our performance somehow.
(Goodreads, 2016)
We’re all in the same boat – working together as an Ensemble:
(Twisted Ivy, 2016)
“…ensemble is a long-term relationship; a day-in, day-out collaboration in shared living, thinking and creating.” (Cohen, 2011)
Working as an ensemble can be challenging, long and confrontational, but sometimes that’s half the fun of it. Sometimes you will have your up’s and down’s as an ensemble but that’s usually because everyone is passionate about the work they are wanting to produce, but you work together through these ‘bumps’ because you are all part of a team; “…ensemble is simply the French word meaning ‘together'” (Cohen, 2011). Often it is when the ensemble is out of the work room that ideas flow better, for instance Duska (2013) states: “…ideas come to people sometimes, not when they are under pressure in the rehearsal room, but quite often it’s in the break that you go – ‘Well, I could try this?’ and ‘What about this?'”. Never force the work in a rehearsal room, once you are relaxed the ideas will come. We found that as soon as we did not have the stress of the space and we were conversing freely and more relaxed that our ideas became much better and more thought out, as we did not feel any pressure.
The evolution of the forest
After coming up with the idea of a twisted tale of Cinderella we decided we wanted to have a stage that was just one huge forest, we wanted a dark, horrible dingy looking forest with dirty needles and used condoms to make it look messy and dirty – symbolising Cinderella’s mind and all of her thoughts. After deliberating and deciding that this may not be possible with our £200 budget, we decided to look into different ways of making a forest. (Pictured below is our original idea) We had an idea of making two pieces of wood and slotting them together to make them stand freely and if a light was shone onto them, they would make an incredible, large, overwhelming shadow. As if it was a larger being looking over and scaring Cinderella. After discovering that these small slotted trees created amazing shadows and were reasonably easy to make (Winona may disagree with me there), we created two big versions of these wooden trees and placed them on stage.
(Twisted Ivy, 2016)
(Twisted Ivy, 2016)
Deciding on Surrealism
(Webneel, 2016) (Pinterest, 2016)
Salvador Dali was a well renowned flamboyant artist, sculptor, writer, advertiser and filmmaker. One of the quotes that Salvador Dali stated that made me grasp surrealism the most, was this:
“I would awake at sunrise, and without washing or dressing sit down before the easel which stood right beside my bed. Thus the first thing I saw on awakening was the painting I had begun, as it was the last I saw in the evening when I retired… I spent the whole day seated before my easel, my eyes staring fixedly, trying to ‘see’, like a medium (very much so indeed). The images that would spring up in my imagination. Often I saw these images exactly situated in the painting…” (Dali & M Chevalier, 1942).
This really made me think of the way in which I now saw surrealism. In our show, we decided on making a very surrealistic, dreamlike world for Cinderella. I took inspiration from this quote because Salvador Dali himself would wake up and paint whatever he dreamt about the night before, which is why his paintings were so weird but wonderful. I wanted the same impact in the performance, a weird and wonderful world which was all in Cinderella’s head, just like a dream. As Salvador had many different paintings of his dreams, which were usually completely random and the objects we saw in the paintings did not make sense, I felt that we needed this same essence for our final performance. We took inspiration from Salvador’s ideas and that helped us contribute towards the way in which the stage was going to look for the final performance, the weird wooden trees, the creepy hanging swing in the centre of the stage, the props left all over the floor to signify all the elements of Cinderella’s mind still sitting there, reminding her of what kind of person she had become.
If there are tickets sold – I made the right marketing decisions:
(Twisted Ivy, 2016)
(Pictured above is the leaflet/poster for our finalised show “Every Rose…”) Taking a break from the performance, I was also one half of marketing and of course I needed to start creating the leaflets and posters to market our show. Originally the photo above was not the idea that we had in our heads. At the beginning we got a friend of the group to take various different photographs of the cast in various ways to try and get the perfect picture for our poster.
(Instagram, 2016)
(Pictured above, our original photograph) We originally wanted to put this photo as our poster/leaflet photo but after discussing this with each other and getting some help from our lecturer we decided that it wasn’t the right image for us. It didn’t explain anything about the show or pose any questions to the audience, so we decided to change it. We really liked the idea of having a picture that was illustrated to make it more original to us, rather than just a photograph. We asked another friend and he kindly drew up a rough copy on what we wanted for the picture. Instantly we knew that this was the perfect portrayal of our piece in photo form. It portrayed perfectly the ‘peep’ into Cinderella’s mind and how wonderful and weird it was going to be, and it would keep the audience members guessing, so they wouldn’t know what to expect.
My final bow on the LPAC stage
Show day finally came and all the hard work seemed to pay off, as we received some lovely, positive feedback from the audience. I came out of the performance and asked myself a few questions, just in case we ever decided to carry on with Twisted Ivy at a more professional level.
- What went right? – The whole show came together so well, every joke landed perfectly on the night and they were very well received. Each of the company’s characters were all played well, and you could tell who was who, the characterisation of each character just went massive on the night and made the characters really come to life on stage.
- What went wrong? – Although many things on the night went right, it’s always good to process the negatives so that you can work on them in the future. In the final scene between the fairy godmother and Cinderella, the fairy godmother was meant to bring on a rose to give to Cinderella. Unfortunately on the night it was not picked up, so I had to collect the rose and shout to the fairy godmother to give it to her, but because of the nature of the play (an adult pantomime) it was in keeping with the play really well and many people said that they didn’t even notice that it wasn’t part of the play. In another scene of the play myself and another character had to wear moustaches as part of our costume for that specific scene, unfortunately whilst we were doing the scene the moustaches slowly started to fall off, we had to spit them off and make it look like it was part of the show, otherwise it would have been embarrassing for us. But once again, upon asking the audience afterwards they also said they did not notice this mistake and thought it was part of the scene.
- What would you change if you had to do it next time round? – If I had to change anything if we were to perform this specific show again, I would change the amount of time we had to rehearse with the staging, lights and costume. It was difficult to rehearse in the space we were performing on as it was being used for various different shows as well as ours, so we could only rehearse with everything we had on the day of the show.
Although I would have changed a few things, and a few things went wrong, I couldn’t have pictured a better play and a better way to finish my time at university and the end of this theatre company process.
References:
Brothers, G., 2016. Snow White and Rose Red. [Online] Available at: http://www.authorama.com/grimms-fairy-tales-63.html [Accessed 25 May 2016].
Cohen, R., 2011. Working Together in theatre: Collaboration and leadership. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dali, S. & M Chevalier, H., 1942. The Secret Life of Salvador Dali. New York: Dover Publications.
Giambattista, B., 2002. The Story of Stories. [Online] Available at: http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/pentamerone/23twocakes1911.html [Accessed 25 May 2016].
Goodreads, 2016. Cinderella and Other Tales by the Brothers Grimm Book and Charm. [Online] Available at: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/251299.Cinderella_and_Other_Tales_by_the_Brothers_Grimm_Book_and_Charm [Accessed 25 May 2016].
Grimm, J. & Grimm, W., 2011. Cinderella. [Online] Available at: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm021.html [Accessed 25 May 2016].
Instagram (2016) Our first warmup (ft. our warm up) [Image]. Available from https://www.instagram.com/p/BB74i94LYOC/?taken-by=twistedivy16&hl=en [accessed 24 May 2016]
Pinterest, 2016. Salvador Dali Paintings. [Online] Available at: https://uk.pinterest.com/explore/salvador-dali-paintings/ [Accessed 24 May 2016].
Radosavljevic, D., 2013. The Contemporary Ensemble: Interviews with Theatre-makers. Oxford: Routledge.
Twisted Ivy (2016) Sneak preview of our set [Image]. Available from https://www.instagram.com/p/BFZSI3pLYAb/?taken-by=twistedivy16 [accessed May 24 2016]
Twisted Ivy Theatre Company (2016) The newest logo [Facebook]. 3 March. Available from https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1262198173809012&set=g.575261872642879&type=1&theater [accessed May 24 2016]
Twisted Ivy Theatre Company (2016) Testing out ideas for the performance [Facebook]. 1 March. Available from https://www.facebook.com/TwistedIvy16/photos/pb.688165994619701.-2207520000.1464190403./697989860303981/?type=3&theater [accessed May 24 2016]
Twisted Ivy (2016) Every Rose… Lincoln: Twisted Ivy.
Webneel, 2016. 25 Famous Salvador Dali Paintings – Surreal and Optical illusion Paintings. [Online] Available at: http://webneel.com/salvador-dali-famous-surreal-optical-illusion-paintings [Accessed 24 May 2016].
