Week One of the Talking Birds Residency

After our lovely tour around The Nest, we started with a day of playing and devising. We printed out the stimuli from Nick, got Derek's piece of music playing and started mind-mapping and sharing our dream experiences. We made a list of the locations that we all mentioned and started exploring creative ways to link them. Following that, we started doing some improv. We placed the props around the room, and Liv started teaching some 'flocking'. In this, the actors had to keep their peripheral visions strong, and be able to join the flock whenever a clap was heard. During this, the props from TB were placed around the room, and actors were asked to interact with these items in as many creative ways as possible. For example, there was a briefcase which then turned into a boombox, which then was a bomb, then it was a seat at a bus stop. We did this for a few hours, just to see what we made from it. We used the locations we spoke about too, and had a go at creating links between everything we created. It was really nice to have a safe space to be silly and try a bunch of things out. The kind of ideas that sprung from this were so fun and exactly the kind of thing we wanted to do with the residency.

Throughout this, we were also looking at the texts we wanted to work from. Peer Gynt, a play from Ibsen, was the first text we looked at as the main character is always looking for a new lease of life; this links to the text stimuli from Nick, as it shows off the idea of the 7th dream. The thing we found with this text was that there wasn't much room for us to adapt the script as it is all written in verse. The language of the text felt much older too, which we agreed takes away from the idea of a 'new lease of life'. We'd like the words to seem more modern to suit the themes we most want to explore. So, we spent the next few days reading Gnit from Will Eno, which was a modern adaptation of Peer Gynt (the text from the day before). This instantly felt more suited to what we were trying to achieve. It was also incredibly funny and we spent a lot of the day in laughing fits just from reading the script. As a company we all felt like this was the way to go, and started researching the play and its themes. 

On the Friday at the end of the first week, we had a discussion with Janet and Derek about what we had been doing. It was a great conversation where we learned that the best way to use the Nest was to play and devise around the themes we wanted to address in the project. The text is a great resource, but it's very easy to get bogged down and chained to it, forgetting to go back to playing and devising. This was a really great insight for us, as we were sure to have fallen victim to the script, and gave us a push in the right direction.