alexander-nachtflug

[alexander-nachtflug]

Session One

The purpose of this blog is to document our group's progression as part of the Future Generations Climate Convention and Immersed Fringe Festival project. The project's theme was Utopias and the positive impact that has been made to combat the climate crisis.

Our group, which consisted of Arlo Sartain, Jake Jeremiah, Kyle Jones, and me, looked through the list of plays on Blackboard, comprised of numerous up-and-coming writing talents.

A photo of Arlo Sartain as the Flight Attendant.

A photo of Jake Jeremiah as the Sleepy Passenger.

A photo of Kyle Jones as the Nervous Passenger.

A photo of Alexander Green as the Impatient Passenger.

Every play varied in its style, approach towards climate change, and the requirements essential for creating a range of authentic and diverse experiences. We narrowed down our selection to the following three plays in order of preference:

Now by Wren Brian 

Nachtflug by Nathan Ellis 

Clothes Minded by Klae Bainter

Our initial reasoning behind choosing Now, written by Wren Brian, was that the play lacked any sense of clear direction. This allowed us more creative freedom as a group and would not limit us when devising the piece. Also, we liked that the play's message revolved around climate change and approached the subject subtly without feeling forced.

Upon reflection as a group and with advice from our lecturers, we decided not to pursue it further because the author preferred that "Every effort should be made for the play to be cast primarily, if not entirely, with actors who identify as disabled, female, BIPOC, and/or LGBTQIA2S+."

As an ensemble, we did not feel comfortable continuing because we did not believe that we fully matched the criteria of the author's desired vision. Our cast was entirely made up of white people, and we also failed to match other aspects of the brief. 

Therefore, we decided to go to our primary backup option, Nachtflug, by Nathan Ellis. We already had Nachtflug in mind because we liked that the play's message was not overt. It had impactful drama at its core, which we believed would resonate with an audience and that we could build a solid performance around (Script has been included at the end of the blog.)

We also chose Clothes Minded by Klae Bainter as another backup option because it was a well-written, humorous piece that was very to the point and offered us a lot of creative potential.

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Ecology and Practitioner

While thinking of our style, we didn't focus on anyone too specifically. However, Berthold Brecht's techniques seemed obvious for this script and the theming of the immersive festival. Some of the methods that we used were: 

Breaking the Fourth Wall Use of Narration 

Use of Technology 

Use of Character type 

 Although the first three techniques were very subtle, we wanted to include them since the whole point of the Immersed festival was to remind people to be kind to the globe and to realise the fundamental issue of climate change. To clarify that message, the subtle use of a narrator and breaking of the fourth wall occurred at the end of our performance, when our Flight Attendant started speaking to the audience, trying to relieve them that everything would be okay. 

Again, while we didn't delve deep into Brecht's method, his style is something we're all accustomed to and slotted in well. We also incorporated elements of physical theatre and more abstract styles early on, but again, without a key practitioner in mind.

As for connections to ecological practitioners, admittedly, we struggled. From the start, we knew we wanted to choose a piece that wasn't highly blatant about its message, wanting something we could develop ourselves. Therefore, when looking at practitioners, they have yet to prove that they are helpful for our working method. We investigated Carl Lavery's book "Introduction: Performance and Ecology – What Can Theatre Do?", his views of ecology being natural within the performance process, and how trying to force connections can hinder a piece of theatre. And in terms of performance styles, we looked at people such as Tara Fatehi and Karen Christopher. But no one felt particularly useful for our method of working. Either they focused too much on elements like dance, music and connections to nature. Therefore, we ultimately decided to forego a particular practitioner of ecology. That does not mean we didn't keep ecology in mind as we progressed. 

Our initial Connections to climate change and ecology included: 

The irony of someone fearing climate change but choosing to go on a flight (a big polluter) 

The performing space: The chairs used to build the plane's frame confined and cramped the environment. 

 Interactions between actors: The cramped space allowed for physical encounters, such as bumping into each other in the 'corridor.' 

 Sound effects: the use of sounds allowed us a naturalistic source to react physically.

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Session Two

Once we had decided to use Nachtflug as our performance text, we methodically read through the play. We split it up into five distinct scenes that felt like progressions in the ongoing narrative of our characters' thoughts and feelings. The scenes were separated based on their different stages of emotional turmoil, so the script had clear and distinctive points that allowed us to be sure when the piece would descend into a darker undertone and how our characters would react.

Photos of our script split up into five distinct sections.

Photos of our script with the text split up into individual lines.

Then, we divided the piece into singular lines of dialogue so that we could perform it as the four actors. We held a readthrough where we assigned all our lines to each other based on how we felt they would best suit each actor's character traits. For example, if one of the characters was a nervous flyer, it made sense for them to have more lines reflecting that worry. 

After we had settled on that, we felt it was best to start staging the piece and committing the dialogue to different movements, which was done via the following various exercises/practices:

A timed script readthrough which lasted approximately 4 minutes and 45 seconds. 

A readthrough where every actor randomly walked around different areas of the space. 

A readthrough where each actor sat in different areas of the space to test the various circles of attention.

When you speak a line, you must walk around a set space; if you have no line, you stay sat down. 

You must sit down when you speak a line; if you have no line, you must walk around a set space.

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Session Three

As a group, we decided to incorporate more movement into our devising, except this time, it would be more appropriate to include props, i.e. chairs. During this devising session, we used wheelie chairs as they were the easiest to manoeuvre around the space, allowing for relatively quiet, precise, and fluid movements within our piece.

As our piece was set on a plane, we wanted to incorporate chairs into our movement. It would help give the impression of that space, and it would have looked odd not to have included them as if you were on a plane; you would not have stood up all the time, especially when in flight.

We moved around the space in a square shape while standing behind our chairs and pushing them in front of us as we delivered our lines. Then, for the diagonal pushes, we would sit in our chairs, spin in them, and push ourselves in and out of the centre of the space.

[alexander-nachtflug]

Session Four

Once we had attempted to perform this devised piece in front of our classmates and lecturers, we quickly realised that this way of thinking and developing our piece was unsustainable as, upon critical reflection and feedback, it felt very GCSE level and impractical for what we wanted to show our audience for them to feel when they responded to what we were doing with the text. 

The feedback we were given to consider as we progressed with our piece:

Consider our blocking and how it works with the traverse staging.

Be off-book ASAP to rehearse our movements properly.

Ensure the audience is engaged and believes in your world. 

Who are you talking to? Is it the void, each other, or the audience? 

Think and commit to our character's wants/needs and emotions.

Communicate the play's message/meaning clearly and its desire for the audience to think about climate change. It must address both aspects in a particular way. 

The aim is for our performances to change people's mindsets about climate change and to leave them considering what they can do.

Recognise the moments of change and how you manage them in terms of meaning and subtlety.

Some groups need to recognise and acknowledge the comedy in the pieces; not all of them are theatre pieces.

What is the nature of our script? Where does it sit regarding pacing?

Think about props and sounds and their place within the pieces. 

An awareness that we are creating a series of stage pictures. Ensure we use the space, accordingly, always balancing the stage.

Having decided to try a new format and layout for our piece, we quickly thought that it would be more effective to be confined to a cramped space. Allowing our circle of attention which we developed from Sphysicaltanislavski to be less broad and more personal would make our characters feel more interconnected as we all played a shared consciousness rather than individuals. 

To facilitate this, we built a mock-up aeroplane set comprising six chairs. Two chairs were rolled on to symbolise suitcases, and the other four were carried on representing hand luggage. Then, we began to practice our piece in this new layout to determine if this was a viable way of working in the future, which we all concluded that it was. 

A photo showcasing our new set in development.

A photo showcasing our new set in development.

A photo of Arlo Sartain demonstrating how parts of our set would be carried on and off stage.

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Session Five

Around this time, we set up a communal channel on a Discord server to preserve the documentation of our Immersed development process. We also had a group call to discuss which sound effects worked best for our performance. We settled on:

Aeroplane takeoff. 

Seat belt sign chimes.

Aeroplane cabin ambience.

Aeroplane encountering turbulence. 

Aeroplane crash landing. 

A photo of our chosen sound effects as MP3 files.

Once we were all back in university the following week, we began having timed rehearsals of our performances and incorporated the sound effects. 

One of our lecturers informed us that the initial aeroplane takeoff sound we had chosen was recorded from outside the aircraft. This did not make sense, considering we followed the plane and the passengers on their journey. We found a recording filmed from inside the cabin and used that to match the continuity of the rest of our cabin sounds. 

In practice, we realised the plane crash sound effect was too extreme as it made the ending less ambiguous than we wanted. Arlo advocated that a plane crash sound ending the piece would detract from the message of climate change, and therefore, we decided to remove the sound from our piece. 

Additionally, we decided not to continue with the cabin ambience as we struggled to find a balance where the sound did not overshadow the dialogue or where the sound was played at a high enough volume that felt believable. As we could not fully commit to having the sound play realistically without disrupting the clarity of our lines, we decided only to use the sounds we had chosen, as they felt more impactful in isolation and helped further represent the divide in the stages of the flight's journey. 

We also decided to carry on our set whilst in character at the beginning of our performance rather than during a blackout, as we wanted to build the suspense before the takeoff. During rehearsals, we experimented with how the chairs would be brought onto the stage altogether, in pairs of two or individually, with the next passenger not entering until the previous passenger was set up and seated. This widely varied our runtimes. Ultimately, we decided to have everyone enter together to emphasise the confined space further. 

A photo of us as an ensemble cast discussing how to move and construct our new set.

[alexander-nachtflug]

Session Six

During this period, we began doing dress rehearsals off-book. Our characters were dressed in the following: 

Kyle wore a hoodie and joggers and had a white shirt and tie under his hoodie. 

Jake wore pyjamas and slippers.

Arlo wore a suit.

 I wore a T-shirt with joggers and an oversized snoodie.

After our performance, this was the feedback we were given to progress our piece further:

Develop our characters more and make them feel more defined.

Add some quirks to our characters. Think of how people would behave on a plane and what they would do, i.e. sleeping, stretching, etc. 

Be aware of what audience members can see you. Try to look around more when not delivering any lines so that we can be seen more. 

What unites us all in anxiety? We need one moment/cue. Perhaps the sound of extreme plane turbulence. 

Our intent regarding the environment needs to be more apparent.

Around this point, we decided to make the characters separate entities and their people with their personas to reflect the different types of characters and their mental states as passengers on board a plane. The varying personalities are as follows:

Kyle was a nervous flyer.

Alex was an experienced and short-tempered flyer.

Jake was a relaxed and tired flyer.

Arlo was a Flight Stuart.

The main reason we decided to have a distinct shift in our characters' personalities was that our individual performances and the message our piece was meant to send to the audience were being hindered by having to continually shift our characterisation between playing nervousness and non-nervousness.

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Session Seven

With help from one of our classmates, Alexander Rondel, we met up in one of the university's recording studios to record his voiceover as the pilot who delivered the bad news over the aircraft's intercom to the passengers. We considered having one of us record the line. Although, we decided against that because we thought it would be confusing for an audience to suddenly hear one of our voices over the intercom, as there were no other multi-rolled parts. It took away from the character work that we had already established with us as the passengers. 

A photo of Alexander Rondel recording the voiceover as the Pilot.

[alexander-nachtflug]

Session Eight

Our final assessed performance took place in B218, so we were allocated some time to rehearse in the space and make any necessary adjustments. One of the changes we decided on was character movements, specifically how certain people entered and exited the space. 

For instance, one of the challenges of our performance space change was that when it came to Kyle's brief trolly dolly gag, there was now a lack of an exit as the wings were located behind where the audiences traversed seating instead of where our cabin was designed to end. We decided to use the wings as is, meaning he had to speed up his entrance and exit for the punchline to be effective. 

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Final Performance

This was our assessed performance day, so it was our last chance to rehearse the performances before we would be performing them for an audience. 

We did technical rehearsals of the pieces whilst running the whole show with every group's performance back-to-back. This meant that we had to get used to working in a professional environment where each group would wait silently in the wings before and after their group performances so that we got used to the show's running order. 

We also found out where the three cameras would be positioned within the space so we could rehearse with them to ensure they could capture our performances. Here is our performance during the test recording that was made:

We were the second group in the running order of an ensemble of eight performances/groups. As an entire class, we briefly rehearsed the curtain call at the end of the showcase, during which members of every group entered the stage from each wing. Overall, the final performance went well, and the rehearsals were beneficial in refining our piece and making it the best quality it could be. 

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Nachtflug Script For Reference

Scene One

Arlo: I was flying over the Indian Ocean, thirty-five thousand feet up in the air, and I was sleeping.

Jake: I always sleep well on flights, I find the sound of the plane, the sound of the engines very calming, very soothing.

Alex: It’s not just the sound, though, it’s also the idea of flying, the sense of disconnection.

Kyle: The idea of being somewhere up above the earth, no contact, just us, on our own.

Alex: It’s a space where you can disconnect yourself, feel completely separated from the world, from humanity.

Arlo: You might think that sounds strange, but I like that feeling.

Jake: It helps me sleep.

Scene Two

Kyle: Anyway, it was several hours into the flight, when I woke and I’m not sure how, but I sensed something was very very wrong, something dreadful was happening.

Alex: As I say, I’m not sure how I knew, or even what it was.

Jake: I couldn’t tell if it was in the plane or down on the ground, but I had this sudden overwhelming sense that something terrible was happening.

Arlo: You know sometimes you feel that way, a sense of impending doom, they call it, in medical-speak, a sense of impending disaster.

Scene Three

Kyle: So, I woke up, feeling completely rotten, as I say, and the person next to me was awake, the rest of the cabin was dim.

Alex: Everyone else on the plane seemed to be sleeping, but the person next to me was awake.

Arlo: They were watching something on a screen, something romantic.

Jake: It had that sheen of romance behind it, pretty, American actors with nice teeth smiling at each other.

Kyle: The person took out their little earbuds and they said.

Arlo: “Are you alright?”

Kyle: And I said.

Jake: “Yes, I’m fine”

Alex: Though I felt very far from fine, in fact I felt almost nauseous with worry.

Scene Four

Arlo: I asked.

Kyle: “What time is it?”

Arlo: To have something to ask and they said.

Alex: “Hard to know, we’re somewhere over the Indian Ocean, but it’s hard to know isn’t it”

Jake: And I said yes.

Kyle: “You woke with a real start, were you having a bad dream?”

Jake: I didn’t quite know how to answer that question, so I just shrugged and said.

Kyle: “No, it’s all ok. I’m fine.”

Jake: And they smiled, and they put back in their earbuds and pressed play and the film went on.

Alex: That was almost an hour ago now.

Scene Five

Kyle: The film is still playing; it seems like the two pretty people might live happily together after all.

Arlo: I’ve seen several flight attendants rushing back and forth, one of them was crying, I am certain of it.

Jake: But all the other passengers are still sleeping, and it seems cruel to wake them.

Alex: At some point in the next few hours, as the sun rises in the windows and the passengers awake,

Kyle: I imagine the captain will speak through the intercom.

Alexander Rondell (V.O.): “This is your captain speaking. I’m sorry to say, something terrible has happened, something truly awful.”

Arlo: And I will turn to the person next to me, the droning sound of the engines will be so calming, and I will hold their hand, like we are in a movie, and say, as the credits roll, and the tears on their cheeks glisten in the flashing lights of the cabin, “It’s fine. It’s all alright. Go back to sleep. Wherever we are now, it’s not time to wake up yet.”