As I addressed in my previous post, Making a Show, a concern for my piece is that it will not be interesting for an audience. Due to this, I have begun to think about additional ways to make my piece more engaging and interesting for the audience- primarily by ‘animating’ the story. Instead of simply talking to the audience about these journeys (like one of Spalding Gray’s productions) I intend to direct incorporate the audience into the piece.

For instance, in one of my memories I was sat in a 7-seat people carrier when we drove through a thick forest-like area. As we did, branches and sharp leaves of the trees started to scratch against the car and eventually got in through the windows (in those days air conditioning in hire cars was a luxury). Everyone in the car (me, my brothers, my dad and my sister’s boyfriend (at the time) frantically tried to close the window to prevent getting attacked. How I would want to show this on stage would be to set out 7 seats and have the audience sit in them, as if they were in the car with me. When they were in the ‘car’ I would use prop tree branches and brush against the side of the ‘car’ so that the story involved the audience (by placing them directly into the action). I have also thought about creating sound effects to go with this, such as making a high pitch screech to replicate the sound of the branches scratching the car. I would also use lighting to display changes in locations and temperature- when driving through the forest I would have the lighting change from a bright warm light to a dark green, creating a clear transition of location and further involving the audience into the story.

I may also have the audience ‘play’ the different characters in the story, for example, placing my dad’s hat and camera case on someone whilst in the car and asking them to mime driving. I am also planning to have scripts to give to the audience so that they can speak as different characters. By doing so, I want to create an intimate and engaging experience for the audience, they are not only listening to some of my fondest memories, but reliving them with me. I am considering limiting the audience to 6 people, thus creating a fun, friendly and intimate atmosphere (thereby recreating the emotions I felt whilst on my holidays for the audience).

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Giggs, J. (2015) Menorcan Cliffs. Unpublished Photograph.

Giggs, J. (2015) Dog Stone. Unpublished Photograph.

As my current idea stands, there is a concern that the stories I tell will be interesting to me but not so much for an audience. Therefore, I am beginning to experiment with how I can make my idea more interesting for an audience and thereby creating a show rather than simply forming an idea. I have begun to experiment with adding comedy to my piece, using exaggerated mannerisms and voices of my family members (as a means of showing their foibles). For example, for my father I experimented with making my voice hoarser whilst accentuating his speech patterns (particularly focusing on words and phrases that have almost become his catchphrases).

I also have decided to play with the idea of time and fading memories. As such, I am beginning to experiment with cutting and pasting different memories in random places as a means of replicating how the brain often jumps between memories and forgets other aspects. For instance, I may be talking through a memory of when I was crossing the swamp and suddenly break out into Eye of the Tiger (the version sang by the inebriated tourist). Even then the song would act as a fleeting moment, only featuring for 10 seconds- as it does in my memory. This is not only as a means of adding comedy to the piece, but to replicate sudden thought changes and how the brain associates certain memories to others. My show would not be told chronologically, often shifting between different memories and years to represent how our memories are imperfect.

I want the piece to end with the memory concerning the Cliffside. By doing so, I want to create a parallel between everyone’s memories and the stories being told, suggesting that much like the cliff, memories can only go so far- there is a limit to how much we can remember. Though we can remember some aspects of our lives more vividly than others, we can never truly remember everything perfectly, just as a cliff is never perfectly straight and often has pieces breaking away or falling off. The cliff is therefore not only a practical element of the story, but symbolic of the loss and imperfections of memory. Though I am yet to decide on how the piece starts and what the audience come into, I have thought of starting sat on the cliff and ending it in the same way- repeating the opening section at the end (again fortify the idea that memories are limited).

Memories are like a cliffside, you never know what’s gonna erode away.

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Giggs, J. (2015) Menorcan Cliffs. Unpublished Photograph.

Giggs, J. (2015) Cliffside Erosion. Unpublished Photograph.

As I talked about in one of my previous posts- A Memory of Music, I may want to include various songs that I have heard and come to love from my journeys around Menorca. I also said about placing a radio filter effect over this sound so that it would sound more authentic to how I remember it. Today I experimented with trying to make the Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger sound as if it was being played from a radio. Using the audio editing software Audacity, I applied two main effects to the music, Equalisation and a High Pass Filter. Equalisation allows you to amplify some sound frequencies whilst dampening others. This effect happens naturally on radio due to decrease in sound quality as it is transmitted. A High Pass Filter allows you to cut-off certain levels of frequency and reduces these frequencies that are lower than the set cut-off frequency. For the sake of this experiment I set the frequency cut-off quite high at 2000Hz in order to replicate the loss of sound quality found in radio. By combining these effects, the frequencies in the music are amplified and then restricted- resulting in a muffled sound. Below are the results:

And for comparison, below is the original song on YouTube:

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Giggs, J. (2015) Menorcan Rocks. Unpublished Photograph.

Survivor, 1982. Eye of the Tiger. In: Eye of the Tiger [Online]. Scotti Brothers Records [viewed 5th March 2017]. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btPJPFnesV4