Your first Performance! - Part 1 - Devising the Play
The first performance given by any Drama Group or Community Theatre company is one of the most exciting experiences for everyone, and a very proud moment of collective achievement! This week we concentrate on devising our first play, following up next week with an article on production.
After trying out a few little pieces similiar to the one included in last week's article, Pen to Page to Stage, and further workshops on characterisation, your drama group will be ready to work towards putting on their first One Act devised drama performance.
To ensure success, the abilities and aspirations of all participants must be considered. If someone wants a part, it must be written in; if someone prefers, this time around, to gain experience in costume design or making, they should be encouraged to do so; and if someone wants to gain lighting skills, or work in stage managment, this could be their first opportunity. Not everyone wants to act in every play.
The creative process leading to the first performance is really more important than the actual performance, for it is this process that develop's your drama group and bring's fulfillment and a sense of worth to each and every member. Therefore it must be carefully and sensitively planned to be all inclusive.
The process of devising a play for performance is the same whatever theme your choose, but for the purpose of this workshop, we will use the theme of local history. The local theme, involves everyone in something that belongs to the community, including the audience that will be paying to see the performance.
The first step in the process, is to research and gather information on various local notable characters from different times in your communities history. You can find this information in the local history department of your library. These notables need not be famous in a worldwide sense, in fact, if they are little known but extraordinary characters, locally noted, all the more interesting, since people enjoy learning about their own local heroes.
The gathering of this information can be done in two or three ways. Either the Drama Worker or the Director could collect it, or all members of the drama group could be asked to go out and find an interesting character from their communities past that they'd like to see included in the play to be devised. Any tiny piece of information known about the characters should be written down in the "notes" you will be collecting. Another way, is to arrange with your librarian to set aside a date and time for you all to go along to the library and meet, and let your librarian know roughly what your after, i.e: information on local notables, and he/she will have everything you need waiting for you all. This method saves lots of time and needless searching through irrelevant papers.
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