Category Archives: Uncategorized

Cassette Tapes

Posted on by sourdoughtheatre

In rehearsals for Rogues and Wanderers this week, SourDough Theatre have been discussing cassette tapes. Poor dusty, old, abandoned cassette tapes. We have been discussing what we associate with them and how cassette tapes resonate for us as an old media.

Cassette Tapes

We shared a long list of associations, resonance and memories of the cassette tape. For instance, illicitly recording our favourite pop songs from the radio in order to create the ultimate compilation tape, ‘ultimate hits Feb ’97’, ‘ultimate hits March ’97’, ‘smash hits April ’97’ and so on and so on. The snippets of radio jingles sneaking on to the album before we had time to jump across the room to hit the stop button. It happened to the best of us.

Cassette Tape CollectionLong car journeys, equipped with your parents extensive cassette collection; for me the choice comprised of Chris de Burgh, James Taylor, Phil Collins and Kate Bush, I am eternally grateful for Kate Bush.

The frustration of chewed up cassette tapes. The terrible warble that sounded as your heart broke with the loss of what could have been your best compilation yet.

Probably the fondest memory of the cassette tape though is sitting in your sibling’s or best friend’s room recording home radio shows or your very own musical masterpieces. It was very valuable work experience for us all and it taught us a lot. I would give anything for the chance to listen back to those tapes. Even if I could find them, I don’t even own a CD player any more never mind a cassette player. (The death of the CD: another blog post for another time)

Chewed Up Cassette TapesOur discussions have progressed into talking about the quality of voice recording using cassette tapes and old Dictaphones etc. Is there something enchantingly reminiscent about the distortion of cassette recording in comparison to our superior digital replacement? Can we place cassette recording under the same net as home video? A media that is stigmatised by the familiar experience being forced to watch hours of unedited holiday videos when the most exciting clip is one of your Nana eating a German sausage.

Home videos have a quality that is somehow organic, humble and sincere, they capture memories and experiences as well as the spontaneous facial expression of a family member as they open a birthday present or  the sound of a loved one’s voice coming from behind the camera as they tell you to ‘dance for grandma!’. This ability is probably something home videos share with not only cassette sound recordings but with photographs too.

It was fun discussing and reminiscing about cassette tapes, we were probably the last generation to enjoy the wonders of  cassette tapes and we are keen to use them in rehearsals as a media because it clearly sparks our imaginations and a familiarity with them.

Monique Luckman

Joe’s Thoughts

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It’s been a week of clearing and tidying and getting our eye back on the ball after our wonderful weekend at Poltimore last week. We have been continuing our early workshops for Rogues and Wanderers (2nd,3rd, 4th November at The Bike Shed Theatre http://bit.ly/a1gZJY)

At the moment, we are taking it in turns to facilitate a workshop for the group. With each workshop, we are realising the extent to which we have a luxurious set of tools to play with as we explore each other’s more individual skills and expertise in these workshops. Even though, we all worked together at university at some point, we all took different classes and modules and had different experiences of making performance. This is now presenting us with an exciting opportunity to learn from each other and share anything that we have to put on the table.

May we take this opportunity to thank everyone who has been reading our blog so far. It’s really nice for us to be able to share our thoughts and justifications for what we’ve been doing. As we progress into more focussed rehearsals and we start to focus more on generating solid material, the importance of this blog will become more and more important in documenting our progress.

In the meantime, SourDough member Joe Sellman Leava would like to share his thoughts about the beginnings of SourDough Theatre and what we’ve up to this week. (We applaud him for approaching blog writing in such a creative way) Enjoy!

The first conversation

With every member of SourDough present seems like yesterday

But already months have passed

Already we have staged two different shadow puppet performances at Poltimore house

Already we have begun workshops and meetings to generate material for Rogues and Wanderers

As our show-making month of September draws closer


 

Between our day-jobs and our night jobs

Between our early starts and our late finishes

Amongst every obstacle that life places just a few feet in front of the rehearsal room

SourDough Theatre keeps moving forward


 

In the space of just one week, the SourDough kitchen has gone from a puppet workshop

With cardboard off-cuts and paper fasteners littering the floor

Designs and cutting mats on the work surfaces

And puppets pinned on the noticed boards

To a meeting room with people crowded round our tiny table

Talking through narrative structures

And character archetypes

And plot devices


 

Some of us come to workshops after early shifts

Some come knowing they face a late shift afterwards

But everyone engages with them fully

Immerses themselves in each one with every creative fibre they have

Everyone takes a turn in leading workshops

Guiding their collaborators through exercises

And placing their trust in those who guide them

 

And then there are conversations about the future of the company

Ones that map out our schedules in days and weeks

Or our rehearsal process in months

Or where SourDough will be in a year’s time


Conversations

That happen as we drag unwieldy chairs down old flights of steps

As we scribble notes by the laundrette window

As we polish glasses

And empty bottle bins

And pay our way through uncertainty


Conversations which remind us always why we’re here and what are goals are

And with each and every tiny breakthrough

With every baby step that takes us forward

Amongst the chaos and the calm

SourDough Theatre is working

Wings, Wasps and Feathers

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Wings, Wasps and Feathers

Wings, Wasps and Feathers

Yesterday saw our second visit to Poltimore House to provide entertainment at a fundraising event for the Poltimore House Trust. Due to the success of our shadow puppet show Tails of Exeter that we performed at the Big Lunch event in July, we decided to bring a new shadow puppet show for the Poltimore Falconry and County Crafts Day.

It has been a long and messy three weeks for the few in the company that have a particular talent for making shadow puppets, eventhough we all were having a go at times. We made 34 new puppets for the new show, many of which were made into the wee small hours in a very small cardboard cluttered kitchen, madly pinning stuff to the wall with a light bulb in tow.

Playing with Shadows

Playing with Shadows

At these Politmore House events we get the chance to perform for family audiences, something that we didn’t always get the chance to do at University. We find ourselves particularly draw to the challange of engaging children using age old forms such as shadow puppetry.

With both shows at Poltimore, we were experimenting with the idea of never sheilding the puppets or the puppeteers from the audience;  in fact, the audience were sat amongst the puppeteers with no boundary line between us at all. We played with making shadows on the wall in front of us and the audience placed between us and the wall. This way, the audience are free to look at the performers and material puppets as well as the shadows there were making on the wall. Our bodies were always visible in the shadow and the process of shadow making was never hidden.

This experiment was fuelled by the idea that the process of shadow making could be just as engaging as the shadows themselves. A big question for us was this: if a magician shows you a magic trick but afterwards shows you how he did it, which do you find more interesting? Is the process of the trickery just as interesting as the trick itself?

The children in the audience seemed engaged by both the shadows and the puppets as they kept switching from one to the other. Something we had discussed throughout the process of our two shadow puppet shows at Poltimore was the idea of dual-performances. Originally, Tails of Exeter was performed behind a screen, hiding the puppeteers and the other mechanics of the show, and framing the puppets on a modest screen. Deviating from this more traditional way of performing shadow theatre has allowed us to create shows which work much more organically and interactively.

SourDough at Poltimore House

SourDough at Poltimore House

I’m still not sure what it is about shadow puppetry that grasping our attention at the moment. We are all going through a fascination with the stuff you can do with just some shapes and some light. Eventhough I’m sure our attentions will shift and develop to lots of other forms as we continue to workshop for our November show at the Bike Shed, it will be interesting to see how shadow making might bleed into Rogues and Wanderers.

Monique Luckman

The SourDough Stamp

The SourDough Stamp

Our First Blog Post

Posted on by sourdoughtheatre

So, where to begin? SourDough Theatre is a brand new company based in Exeter. We are a group of recent graduates from the University of Exeter and somehow, we have found ourselves unwilling to leave. Although it’s sometimes difficult to articulate why, I think there was a collective feeling amongst us that Exeter was still largely unexplored, we had barely touched the surface of what could be a wonderful playground of rich, artistic surroundings and traditions as well as generous and supportive audiences; the perfect conditions for us to continue exploring our creative ambitions. We have begun to build our little but mighty settlement, turning our kitchens and living rooms into workshops (we wouldn’t have it any other way) as we start work on some exciting projects.

Our Workshop

Our Workshop

Our processes tend to be inspired by discoveries and explorations born through previous work. We reinvent shelved ideas, allowing them to grow and ripen at the centre of a new piece. There is always heartache when a perfectly fruitful and compelling idea is given up just because it doesn’t quite fit in to the piece we happen to be making at the time. It is for that reason, we are dedicated to storing material, allowing our relationship and understanding of it to enrich and mature each time we bring it into the rehearsal room.

At the moment, in our current projects, we are working collaboratively to investigate the possibilities of age old storytelling devices or what we like to call ‘old media’ such as shadow puppetry, puppetry, masks, reflections, torch light etc to generate our language for performance.

Tails of Exeter

Tails of Exeter

Three weeks ago we were lucky enough to be invited to Poltimore House in Exeter to provide entertainment at their Big Lunch fundraising event. We provided some jazz music, a short dance piece and storytelling on the lawn and turned the old operating theatre into a shadow puppetry theatre where we performed a piece for children called ‘Tails of Exeter’. It was a lot of fun for us and it was great to contribute to such an important local project.

We will be performing at Poltimore House again on Sunday 15th August for the Falconry Festival. This time, we have a new shadow puppet show called Wings, Wasps and Feathers. We have been busy bees making new puppets and a new story. So come along if your around, there may even be cake.

Wings, Wasps and Feathers

New Puppets for Wings, Wasps and Feathers

We are also in the early stages of making a piece of work that will be performed at the Bike Shed Theatre in Exeter in November. We are extremely fortunate to have gained oodles of support and encouragement from the Bike Shed and we are very excited to have the chance to make a piece for the new space there. We will be in the studio from now until November preparing for the show! It will be called Rouges and Wanderers, it will explore a world of carnival and chaos. We will be posting lots more about our process on this blog in the next coming weeks.

Rogues and Wanderers

Rogues and Wanderers

We hope this blog will help us document our development and progress and more importantly, allow anyone who’s interested the chance to keep up to date with what we’re getting up to. So thank you for reading this and watch this space.

Monique Luckman