Developing 'Bouncers' - analysing this week's (13th - 17th oct) work on 'Bouncers', developing performance workshop unit.

1. This week (13th - 17th oct), working on bouncers we focused a lot on the girl sections of the play of which we had to play a stereotypical bunch of females on a night out at a club. We focused a lot on this because this is definitely one of the most challenging aspect of the play to fulfil as we it is all about believably playing the opposite sex. We had done a lot of different exercises and techniques to strengthen our performance as females to ensure that our girl characters are portrayed to the best. These activities and exercises included focusing on physicality and adaptions to our walks and stances to different characters in scenarios to ensure that physicality is strongly versatile, and gradually our female walks and stances and actions got more and more believable. We also focused on voice of the actor, ensuring that our tone of voices change depending on the character (emphasising our female characters). These exercises and techniques dilated our creativity on characterisation, physicality and voice to intensify our abilities on playing a stereotypical group of girls on a night out, and to play it well. Independently, we created spider-diagrams on our ideas of how our different characters within the play should be played - my general ideas for the girls was ditzy, over the top and bitchy. This really helped me get into my female character very much so to make sure my performance is believable to an audience.

2. Techniques we have explored this week as a company are physicality, voice and general characterisation of our multiple roles within the play. Physicality is a very effective technique to focus and include, especially with a play like bouncers where there is a lot of multi-roling, as it establishes the differences of one character to the next, for example, from 'lads' to 'Bouncers', or from 'Bouncers' to 'girls', as physicality is all about body language which is a very obvious aspect to focus on when multi roling. Tone of voice is also a vital technique to focus on with a play like this, as like physicality, it establishes difference, but a lot more so - so this is a fatal technique to strengthen. It's exceptionally hard to pick out voice tone for girls as you need to be extra careful that you don't sound to much like a gay male, rather than a female. 

4. Throughout this week, I would say the strengths were improving in physicality of the different characters. I feel that, as a company, our body language for the different main group of characters - lads, girls and bouncers - has strengthened a lot, to a point where our multi-roling skills are becoming a lot more effective and the different groups of characters are becoming more and more unique to eachother, emphasising the change between roles to meet this technique of multi-roling. I'd say the only weakness at the moment are when playing bouncers, ensuring that space is used and we are not just all bunch up to together - which could bore an audience- , to really add some movement and to engage audience a bit more. This could be done by reacting with audience and keeping the audience involved by going down to where they are sitting, still delivering the scene.

6. My recommendations for developing the production further, in an ideal world with a budget, would be that I'd like to hire out a club for a night and put the performance on in there to give it that extra feeling and atmosphere which is the sheer centre of the play. Putting then play on in a club rather than just a theatre will intensify the mood of the play and help us keep the audience involved and engaged throughout, for example, have the bar at the club actually open for audience members to purchase so they feel like that they a part of the performance. Also, as the actor, the atmosphere of being in the club and performing bouncers will help with our characterisation and getting into our characters more, to ensure that our performance is believable and at it's best. 

'Bouncers' research and, developing and shaping ideas creatively for performance - working on the opening of the play

Video of 2012 National Tour of bouncers - Show real:  http://youtu.be/CMqZFXfaknA   (Watch til 1:51) 

Watching this opening of the 2012 National Tour of bouncers really sparked some ideas in our heads, on creating an audience-engaging, effective and comical opening to this comdet play written by John Godber. Traditionally, this play is opened by some sort of scripted comical rap kind of thing, done by the four bouncers to leer the audience into the performance and to initiate the characters throughout the play and the atmosphere of a nightclub from the perspective of the bouncers. Although we did like this idea, I thought that opening the play this way would give away a lot of the comedy evolved from the multi-rolling aspect of the play, especially when playing girls, which stereotypically is very funny to watch males play females. We thought, as a company, that the comedy - that comes from the playing of different roles throughout the performance and from the change in physicality, voice, and in one case, in gender - should come as a surprise to the audience so that it is an element they are least expecting, which I think will enable us to reach the aspect of engaging the audience as they will be totally oblivious in regards to what to expect. Also, finding different ways to open the play, strongly conveys the unit of Performance Workshop (one of our units covered within this assignment) as we will be trying out and developing lots of different ideas and approaches to create a very effective opening that an audience will enjoy very much so - drawing them into the performance from the start. 

We came across this video of the opening (from start to 1:51 of the video) of a version of the play which was the 2012 National Tour of bouncers We very much liked the idea, as a company, of how they opened their version because it was very comical in a way where it is unexpected as you could never picture bouncers, on duty, dancing and grooving to the music playing in the club, as the stereotypical reputation of bouncers; being big and muscular, bold, tough, intimidating and responsible, would all be lost. So we thought this would be a good way to engage the audience in from the start, as they would find it very enjoyable to watch.

We decided to go with this idea but in a our own way, where the bouncers, one by one, come on and initiate the fact that they are a bouncer by doing things like making eye contact with audience and threatening them not to cause any trouble in the club, glare at an audience member to give an intimidating kind of feeling, patrol around etc. to then break into a ridiculous and humerous dance, to almost, 'cancel out' the fact that we had each come on and initiated us as bouncers by carrying out lots of stereotypical bouncer gestures and actions. 

The song we chose for this opening, we agreed had to be a current club song with a good drop thatis always  danced to in nightclubs - so we chose Gecko 'Overdrive'.