After our workshop with Rachel Briscoe, we decided to set ourselves a task which would motivate us to start getting some ideas formulated and some work on its feet in the studio. As a three we set ourselves the task of finding some striking music which would enable the opportunity to create mini tableaus/scenes as a response to the tracks.
“More or less the way my method works is you have got to find the opening credit sequence first. That starts it off from me. I find the personality of the piece through the music that is going to be in it… It is the rhythm of the film. Once I know I want to do something, then it is a simple matter of me diving into my record collection and finding the songs that give me the rhythm of my movie.” – Quentin Tarantino
When considering iconic moments in film, music plays a big part in contributing to this, and Tarantino is a master of finding the perfect soundtrack for his movies. Tarantino during his career has had some spectacular sequences in his movies, but in doing this he began by finding the right soundtrack to match the scene/sequence he constructed. I felt that finding different pieces of music that don’t have a relationship between one another may pose an opportunity to create a narrative as a product of the soundtracks we shared as a group.
When we came together we sat in silence listening to each track we brought in and we responded and discussed how each track made us feel. The following tracks were –
Procession – The Moody Blues, every good boy deserves favour
Moonage Daydream – David Bowie, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
One of These Days – Pink Floyd, Meddle
Caliban’s Dream – Underworld, Alex Trimble, Isles of Wonder: Music for the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games
These songs were chosen at random by each participant within the collaboration. There were no rules of what to choose and what not. It was a simple case of bringing something in to spark discussion. As a three, in past works we have created, music artists have influenced our work, or our work has involved music. However, although we have had music artist’s influence in our past works, their music only entered our works as a product to support and justify the story/narrative we already had in place. As a product of creating a new piece collaboratively, from the get go we wanted to challenge ways of devising and taking risks as opposed to working in the traditional sense. We wanted to use music to potentially dictate the score of our piece of work which was an avenue we had not yet considered.
After listening to each song, we described the feelings they evoked and the enriching potential they had to create moments which had the potential, to begin with: The Moody Blues’ Procession was an unusual instrumental which had unusual chants and evoked feelings of vented anger/frustration but made me feel like it was a soundtrack for a range of different thoughts only I could hear in my own mind. Moonage Daydream by David Bowie, the second song of our revised sample soundtrack was better known by us as a collective and was equally as psychedelic as the first track, but because it was heavily lyric based it evoked feelings of rebellion and David Bowie’s apparent concept which he created within his album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. For me, Moonage Daydream exposed the opportunity that as theatre makers, to move away from the confines of doing something we have done before and be more experimental. The third song One of These Days by Pink Floyd had an incredible build up and speed which was rich and had we felt had the opportunity to exploit this to create something which involved a tense build up with repeated notions of actions suited to the story which we had not yet found. The fourth and final song Caliban’s Dream by Underworld and Alex Trimble was somewhat calmer and soothing compared to the other three songs. This song felt amongst all the chaos which the other songs evoked feelings of, that Caliban’s Dream would essentially evoke a moment of reflection. After listening to each song, we tried to tie them together in order to bring together a sample storyboard. We felt that each song had a place and a potential to tell a story of struggles we have in life. The songs presented moods of anger, frustration, loss and dreams. After discussing and creating images as a response from these songs, we explored further in how to articulate these themes, which lead us to explore a certain existing text…