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The Birth of Death was performed by Joanne Tremarco. This one woman show was performed live at Malvern Cube on the 25th September 2021, as part of the Feast Festival. This festival was about bringing both regional and international theatre to a community that wouldn’t necessarily have access to, which took place within performance spaces in the Malvern Hills.

From the start of this impressive performance I found myself engaging with the dynamics offered in both positive and negative ways. The performer started in the audience and she played a gong, very loudly, meaning everyone turned to face her. This in itself was an engaging way to start a performance, as the performer and audience could feel like one unit and part of her journey. However, due to the noise emanating from the gong, it affected the audience sitting directly in front or to the side.

Tremarco used her mother’s death as a focus on the performance, which is something that I felt empathy and compassion for, but I fortunately couldn’t relate to losing a parent. The hard-hitting topic had a varied effect on the audience, from people crying, feeling numb and not showing any feeling at all. The use of comedy within this seemed strange at first because I felt it was a performance I shouldn’t be laughing at and often found myself feeling uncomfortable. Throughout, she asked the audience personal questions about death, which kept me hooked but also felt like an invasion of their privacy. Furthermore, I started thinking about how I would answer the question, but found it difficult.

Overall, the performance was a rollercoaster of emotions, from happy to sad. After a few days, I found myself still thinking about the context of the performance. I had mixed emotions to The Birth of Death, but the audience interaction kept me focused throughout the performance. The performance fitted in with the festivals aim, as it was very different to anything I have seen in Malvern previously, thus, reaching the aim of getting a variety of theatre to a smaller, accessible venue.

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War of the Worlds was a great performance by Rhum and Clay Theatre Company, performed at the Warwick Arts Centre on 13th October 2021. Based on Orson Welles’s radio broadcast in 1938, the script helps to bring the sci-fi story to life.

Although the majority of performances have the technicians on a gantry behind or to the side of the audience, the tech support happened to be centre stage, just behind the walls of the ‘house’. I believe this was a positive and interesting change to the ‘normal’ theatre set-up, and meant that the technician was included and appreciated in the performance the whole way through, rather than just at the end. The variety of ways that lighting was used within the performance, won my attention immediately. From using traditional stage lights, to torches and silhouette lighting, each lighting state emphasised the story and gave myself as an audience member different feelings. These feelings ranged from calm, to worried and fear for the characters within the story, and not knowing what’s going to happen next for them.

The storyline itself was easy to follow, because of several aspects used. The main one being the use of a variety of physicality throughout the show. Rhum and Clay had the audience sitting on the edge of their seats, whilst reeling them into the fake news stories, through the dynamic use of lifts and big movements around the stage. Physical theatre is something that grabs my attention in performances as you can tell a lot about a character from the way they move. So in my opinion, this is something they executed well as a theatre company.

War of the World’s was another great adaptation on the novel and broadcast, that had me interested for the entire duration. The technical side of it really showed how much you need lighting and sound to make a performance come to life. Furthermore, the physicality left me wanting to improve my own practice in physical theatre.

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Groan-Ups was performed by Mischief Theatre. I watched this show at Malvern Theatres on the 2nd February 2022 with an older family member.

This comedic story following a group of children as they grow up through school, captured my attention from the start due to the detailed scenography. The use of enlarging the set demonstrated how we as an audience are able to imagine the characters being the age they are playing and not their actual age. In addition to this the introduction of each character set the performance off with a barrel of laughter emanating from the audience. Every character presented a ‘show and tell’ about their home lives, some revealing too much about themselves (or their parents) then they should have done. From this opening, you get an idea of their personality traits and popularity among the class. As they grow up, the set becomes smaller, which was both hilarious in parts and cleverly executed.

Throughout the play, the relationships between the characters as a whole and individuals continuously change. They touched on an aspect of the LGBTQ+ community, which I believe could have been taken further for the audience to have a clear understanding of how Archie felt growing up knowing he wanted to be with a male but having to hide it. The body language Archie presented gave the audience a slight incline into his thoughts, but would have become lost on other audience members, such as the family member I was with.

Groan ups was an overall playful, wacky and witty script with some serious topics that happen in childhood covered. This performance reminded myself of being a child and then a teenager, growing up in a school with the same characters as the play. I have a strong feeling that many audience members, no matter their age, felt the same way and reminisced their childhood days.

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As a developing performer, I am interested in physical theatre and how the use of lighting aids the atmosphere of a performance. With that in mind, over the past few months I have watched performances that focus on at least one of my interests and they have each inspired me to continue developing and have given me an insight into how it can be approached in various ways. The first performance that I enjoyed and took a lot from was Daniel Kitson’s production of It’s always right now until it’s later (2018), viewed on Vimeo. The aspect of this performance that drew me in was the use of lighting within the space and how that affected his movements around the stage. Daniel uses lightbulbs as a lighting source instead of traditional theatre lighting, which has inspired me to start thinking of different ways I can create light on stage. Furthermore, these lightbulbs represent different thoughts that the actor is thinking, so he moves around the stage, often at a quick pace as if he has just had a ‘lightbulb moment’. I also took note of this as I don’t often think about exploring the stage in on an abstract route, but it is something that I would like to experiment with in future work. With this in mind, I did start to explore this when creating my solo scratch show, where I used the theatre lighting to only light up specific spaces on stage for me to then travel to and continue with the next piece of script, therefore linking that to Daniel’s show.

Another performance that influenced my developing practice was Bettina Wagner-Bergelt production of Kontakthof presented at Saddler’s Wells, February 2022. This performance was largely physical based, but with an abstract approach. The mixture of gentle and harsh movements stayed on my mind after the show, as I have never mixed the two opposite moves together. Therefore, in my future work I am going to use this technique in order to show a contradiction between a characters feelings. Physical theatre, to me, can sometimes tell a story better than a piece of text as you are putting your whole body and breath into the movement. The characters in Kontakthof also used a lot of mouth noises, for example different speeds of breathing, which I have had a go at in the past but didn’t succeed. Therefore, after seeing this show, I could pick up on how they control this breathing in order to not become visibly out of breath. This then inspired me to go away and have another go at this technique, using clips of Bausch’s breathing techniques off YouTube. I will continue developing this, as I would like to include breathing in my physical sequences whether that be in a solo or group performance. So, although it wasn’t the context or the overarching story of this performance that I absorbed myself in, I still found myself being inspired by Pina’s use of manipulating the body to represent emotions and conversations and therefore wanting to experiment with this straight after the performance.

To sum up, my personal practice within theatre is strongly physical based, but I also enjoy creating lighting plots for my performances. From each performance that I watch (whether that be live or online) I will always look out for similarities to my practice as an artist, in order to improve and develop my skills.

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Tremarco, J. (circa 2017) The Birth Of Death. Directed by Yael Karavan Malvern. September 2021.

Lynn, I. (circa 2019) War Of The Worlds. Directed by Hamish Macdougall and Julian Spooner. Rhum + Clay, Warwick, October 2021.

Lewis, H. Sayer, J. Shields H. (circa 2019) Groan Ups. Directed by Henry Lewis, Jonathon Sayer, Kirsty Patrick Ward. Mischief Theatre, Malvern, February 2022.

Kitson, D. (2018) It's Always Right Now, Until It's Later. [Vimeo]. Directed by Daniel Kitson and Ewan Jones Morris. 2021.

Bausch, P. (circa 1978) Kontakthof. Directed by Bettina Wagner-Bergelt. Tanztheater Wuppertal, London, February 2022.