swallow

An immersive play presenting 3 women’s experience of love and lovelessness.
‍A character-heavy drama exploring the continuities of self-destruction and self-realisation in an expressive world of negative spaces and urgent explosivity

Recording →

1h 45 mins

3 actors, 2 ADs

Classroom A-602
BPGC Drama Club

Playmaking

The process was centered on an approach of problem-solving; I entered playmaking with a concrete set of playmaking problems/questions to be answered from the script towards the play’s form. Answering these questions was an experimental process of improvising with elements from the script and allowing ingredients to develop. We first developed the characters’ anchoring situations as basic actions & attitudes, from which the form of the world emerged as a narrative world of “suggestion,” a physically expressive space with violence directed towards the play world itself, which we then substantiated through scene work.

Week I - IV

Entering character

Direction
Physicalising core intentions

Improvising behaviour patterns inherent in the progressions of each character

Identifying a physical score for different impulses in the characters through brief compositions

Playing the emotional states at the starting point of the play

Design
Sense of shape & movement

3 glasses as dynamic symbols for doors, windows, canvas, mirror as targets for emotions

Negative spaces as initial “stasis” of each character’s

Circular movements indicating passage between spaces and scenes

Symmetry in narratives of 2 characters surrounding the 1 “anchor” character.

Week V - VI

Entering play world

Direction
Composing key moments

Integrating tempo-rhythms of key moments of the script with the physical “score”

Identifying emergening narrative devices & direction

Design
Sense of aesthetic

Stillness & urgency Pulsation between characters’ passive actions in their negative spaces and urgent, explosive acts of violence towards play world itself

A world rooted in dreamy timeless actions where months could pass naturalistically

Changing relationship with glasses & wallpaper; sublimating forms of self-destruction into forms of release backbones the narrative

Suggestion of objects, of counterplayers, of time passing, of foreshadowing action; exploiting distance between story being told and story being shown

Unbalanced symmetries of closeness and distance emerged as a recurring theme in spatial relationships

Week VII - XII

Composing play

Direction
Unravelling relationships

As we composed the script progression by progression, the score, scenes and stage concept came together in the encounter between the 3 characters. The space they offered each other was the force that drove the play and brought them to release. This phase was purely about being there with the play, absorbing its dynamics, and rigorously re-composing its mechanics.

Design
Realisation

Reflection

This play to me was an experiment in using composition and improvisation as a way of making sense of the play from each element to the whole. We tried to build these characters physically in detail within their own worlds before we entered 1 play world and in this process the play world itself became this idea of 3 separate worlds sharing the dramatic logic of 1 rehearsal space. I viewed this process as a dialogue between the writing and the actors, in which my role was purely to facilitate the script’s patterns in the physical language of the 3 actors and their shared imagination. The play we ultimately made was a dreamy, nearly 2-hour long piece played in a continuous act in the passive world of these characters’ negative spaces. It might have benefited from a broader range of diegetic sounds in the backdrop and from being compressed 15 minutes further but the script’s core rupture from darkness to lightness flowed well through this perspective of being “zoomed in” to these characters as they changed over time, and the world retained intensity over its stretched out duration. While watching another production of Swallow just a couple of weeks after this play, however, I noticed a layer of comedy across the play that we had treated perhaps too self-deprecatingly and wondered how else we could have approached that.