The Fabularium - Part 1 - Discovering and Clown School

In September I began rehearsals with an up and coming Coventry based company called The Fabularium, which creates unique outdoor work suitable for all the family. The performance we were working on was called 'The Town Band of Bremen' and was based on an old German Folk Tale. It included original music, mask, puppetry, physical work and text, so was a fantastic mix. There were four of us in the cast. It was also another opportunity to work with Gareth, which was great.

I'd like to tell you a bit about this project and share some pictures and clips too as it was a very visually interesting show and I hope you will enjoy it! I've decided to split this into three posts as there is quite a lot to show and tell! Here goes part 1...

Meeting The Animals

We began by exploring the fantastic headpieces the Fabularium have, commissioned by Strange Face.

Three of the headpieces

Rosie Lesurf and Gareth Price-Baghurst in rehearsal

I played the cat. Wearing the head pieces, we explored the physicality of our animals, the logistics of using the headpieces and archetypal characteristics of each creature. This exploration was a lot of fun.

Me as Tibalt the Cat

We worked occasionally with our associate director Glenn Noble and created a basic structure for the piece (as we already knew the story we had to tell). Glenn had lots of exciting ideas for the piece and has worked with The Fabularium a great deal in the past. He helped us stay true the style, through the scene content and language used.

Gareth Price-Baghurst and Joshua Patel, as well as being performers, are the company managers, and so had already put in a lot of work. Rosie Lesurf, who was the other actress, was part of the initial inception of The Fabularium. So from their previous work there were some songs and character archetypal traits already in their repertoire. We learnt these songs and discussed themes and also created some new songs together. The Town Band of Bremen is about four farmyard animals who play music together so it features a fair few songs!

I also learnt how to play the tin whistle a little for this play!

Clown School

We had the great opportunity of working with Holly Stoppit. She directed and encouraged us from the perspective of clowning. Our first day with Holly was an open group workshop. On the second day she worked with us helping us to add more play, clowning and interaction into our performance. It was very refreshing to look at performing with such a different outlook than I normally would. I have experienced clowning before through my training at Northampton but this was quite a different experience. Different clowning teachers have different techniques and Holly's approach was one that I found quite engaging. Her approach was to check in with how we were all feeling at the beginning and end of each session, use encouragement and a lot of play, clocking the audience (making eye contact with them) and gradually increasing our levels of interaction with the audience, being ourselves and letting the clowns emerge from truth within us. I really enjoy yoga practice and how it encourages you to be self-aware, and singing jazz which can encourage bearing your true emotions and self, and I was really surprised that clowning in this way could encompass these kinds of concepts. I think this is why I enjoyed it as it reflected other things I am gaining a lot of interest in, and encouraged being kind to yourself and quieting the inner critic. Obviously it would take a lot more than two days work to get the hang of all that but it was a very interesting approach to clowning for me to experience.

'Checking in' with ourselves and each other

Holly (left) explains a game to an actress

Playing a game directed by Holly

Working with Sonia 

We also worked with director and actress Sonia Ritter. Her approach was very different and more detailed than most, and so again it was useful to have a different perspective and way of looking at things. She encouraged us to concentrate on the details of our physicality and tell the story of everything we do through our movements rather than just words - show rather than tell. This helped our performance to become more engaging, visually interesting and capture the imagination.

Like the clowning, this encourages relationship with the audience, though in a very different way - not through eye contact, but rather through really drawing them into the story, helping them to believe it and allowing their imaginations to stretch even beyond what they see on stage. 

As part of our exploration, we performed the show at a school for children with Special Educational Needs. The performance was followed by a question and answer session to get some feedback from the children. This gave us some points to work on and develop and helped us see what worked and what didn't.

Performing at the school

Continuing to Develop

We continued to develop our performance using the mixture of techniques and approaches learnt from each director. As every director had a different focus, we came to a point where we decided which bits of each approach we would draw on, and so created our own unique performance quality - picking what we considered 'the best bits' of each part of the performance development.

I will tell you about where we went from there onwards in my next post! :) Thanks for reading!