How can we speed up the process of making theatre?
- Convenor:
- Vanessa Oakes
- Attendees:
- David Bennett; Sarah Thom
- Description:
Should a play take 16 years to reach the stage? Something I’ve been thinking about since after talking to a Leicester based new writing company last week.
At what stage does the work in progress become the finished product?
The notion of the finished script/show.
A specific performance date focuses the mind – forces decisions/compromises to be made.
Funding/planning ahead means you/we can’t always react immediately to ideas – slave to funding cycles. e.g. is a show about the financial crisis less relevant after other companies have managed to react faster to the issue.
We need more things to happen now.
Less talking – just do it.
R&D = funding – encouragement of development which can slow/reverse process. Is this because funders won’t fund in retrospect – after show is made?
What’s development – what’s devising/making process?
Development encourages funding partner’s sense of ownership.
Time to try out stuff/buying time to build relationships.
Genuine R&D should be at a point when we don’t know if it will go to production.
Some funding development structures don’t necessarily help all forms of theatre e.g. devising vs. playwright.
Rep theatre style – show work constantly – if amateurs can do it e.g. Crescent - why can’t professionals?Making more work – make it last longer? Longer tours? Touring used to be 50+ shows not 6…
Who are we making it for?
Encourage audiences to get the theatre habit.
Does more work encourage more people to go to the theatre?
THE ACTIVITY FILLS THE TIME AVAILABLE
e.g. Theatre du Soleil or Robert Le Page 2yrs +
We’re all for people doing it faster.
EXPERIMENT – make work faster
1 comment on this issue so far...
On Thu 10 December 2009 at 8:59 am James Yarker said…
(permalink)
As I’ve said elsewhere, seemingly perpetual scratch/work in progress can be seen as a strategy to prevent too much work reaching ‘the market’ and highlighting the fact that there isn’t much work being booked.
This is a shame as you learn far more by making a finished show than any of these developmental stages. Stages which effectively invite people to make completed shows of varying lengths from short to very short.
Stan’s Cafe has just made THE JUST PRICE OF FLOWERS. I wrote the thing in five days, we rehearsed it for six and staged it over three performance. It was rough and raw but great fun and the audience responded to all that. It was an exercise in ‘just doing it’. We recycled old set and costumes, performers were paid a reduced rate for rehearsals (which came from profit made on an education project) and took a box office split for the performances.
Obviously as an Arts Council revenue client Stan’s Cafe has great advantages other companies, principally we have a venue, @ A E Harris, in which to stage the show and sound, lighting kit and seats to help make it possible.
We all have to balance a twin track approach of neither moaning and wanting it all done for us, nor suggesting all theatre can be made without subsidy. There is a place for the two year process and for the very quick turn around. We have to be proactive and positive not passive and negative.
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