We are now a few days away from performing our production How I Got To The Moon And Back, and the past few weeks, although stressful, have been incredibly productive! Because of the nature of the show (a lot of physical theatre elements and ensemble work), it is imperative that we spend some time tweaking and refining specific parts of the show, and the past few weeks have allowed for us to do just that. Physical theatre aims to ‘confront the continuing hegemony of a theatre defined by its literary and verbal dimensions’ (Murray and Keefe, 2007, 6), and when a performance style is so reliant on non-literary elements, if ensemble work and tiny details are not fully rehearsed and slick, the final result can be underwhelming. We’ve spent a lot of time refining minute details that, although time consuming, will help us to push our performance to the next level. For example, we spent a few rehearsals working on facial expressions in scenes and focus points in order to fully flesh out the notion of an ensemble. We knew that it was these tiny details that an audience would pick up on, maybe even subconsciously, and would make the show more satisfying to watch.

As sound designer, I have been working closely with our director and assistant director from the start to establish a coherent and consistent style of music, although it was ultimately my decision what music was used. The past few weeks of refining the show have allowed me to work on this soundtrack to the show, and work out which pieces of music I can keep, and which pieces I can change. The fact that the devising process never really ends until the actual production means that I have had to spend a lot of time constantly tweaking the timings of certain songs and transitions in order to ensure that specific musical beats are hitting the right moments of action on stage. This meant looping certain tracks, or, when it came to the tracks that I had composed and produced myself, going into the Garageband files and tweaking the arrangements to lengthen the tracks without loosing the rhythm of the original version, as is sometimes the case with looping tracks.

The final scene has been a particular pain musically, as I needed a piece of music that would hit three different emotional changes in the scene but also have enough consistency as to not distract the audience. I played with the idea of creating an original piece of music, but over this past few weeks we have extended the last scene to almost ten minutes, so I decided to instead merge two existing tracks with a third original piece of music. If it wasn’t for this period of refining the show, we probably wouldn’t have ended up with such a poignant ending to the show, both musically and physically. I am incredibly proud of the state of the show at the moment, and am confident that the music is the perfect addition to the movements on stage, which will hopefully combine to create a truly powerful piece of physical theatre.

Murray, S. and Keefe, J. (2007) Physical Theatres: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge.