Practitioner focus: The Paper Birds, Part 2: 5 Key Ingredients

The Paper Birds is a devising theatre company with a social and political focus; UK leaders in verbatim theatre. We are artists, investigators, entrepreneurs, educators. We pride ourselves on taking complex, multi-faceted subjects and making them accessible.

Our vision is to provoke change, one encounter at a time. Our mission, to be quiet rebels, amplifying the voices of everyday people. We inspire change through the theatre we create.

The company was formed in 2003 by Co-Directors Kylie and Jemma; and is now led by a team of 6 women who work collaboratively alongside a wide range of freelance artists, designers and facilitators to deliver thought-provoking, urgent, and accessible theatre shows and workshops to a wide range of audiences.

Although each of our shows explores different topics and often features different performers; the essence of each show can always be traced back to the same five key ingredients; Verbatim, Movement, Character & Narrative, Exposing the Method, and Motif.

Here are a few exercises to sample each of these in practice and generate an understanding of the core principles of our work and process:

Exercise 1: Verbatim

a) NATURALISM

Interview your partner and write down everything they say; don't change or shorten their words. Write everything down EXACTLY how they say it. Then interview again but this time copy their gestures and body language. Conduct a ‘character study’.

Use their words on the page and your observations to re-create a NATURALISTIC version of your partner. You can't add anything else into the text. Perform your naturalistic representation of your interviewee as close to the original as possible.

b) HEIGHTENED

Swap texts with someone else in the room, NOT your partner. Read the interview as though you DON'T know who said it originally. Use your artistic licence to create a new character that speaks this text; make the character heightened, verging on stereotype. Be bold; think larger than life, use your vocal range, play around with accent and dialect. Perform your character as though it were a video recording; start on pause and then deliver the speech.

Exercise 2: Movement

Choreo-Cues

Choose one piece of text that already exists in the piece. Ask students to underline 10 words within that text where they are going to insert a choreographed move. The ‘move’ can be gestural, it could travel, or it could be dance. This is a simple but effective way of uniting the performers if they are in separate areas of the stage. Their moves can be the same or completely different, in sync, or in canon. Play, and find physical moves to accentuate the words they land on.

Exercise 3: Character & Narrative

Key dates

Ask students to consider any key dates within the story or character arc. Now ask each member of the group to write a piece of text that begins with this date using one of the following formats: a news story, diary entry, voicemail, letter, email.

Once these have been written, participants should share with the rest of their group and put them together in an inventive way – they do not have to be chronological, they do not have to go one at a time, they can repeat, overlap, split their sections up and slice together.

Exercise 4: Exposing the Method

In and Out of Character

Ask students to write a character profile for the main character they play, or a character that needs developing further. Then in a separate list, write their opinions about the character – do they think they are brave, are they selfish, are they inspiring? Include the reasons why. Next, compile a list of everything they (the performer in real life) have in common with the character, their similarities and differences.

Choose some of their character's text that already exists, a monologue or lines of theirs from a duologue, and use the lists you have made to add in ‘non-acting’ asides, breaks in the monologue where they comment as themselves. Formulate this into a script, and practise delivering; ‘multi-roling’ between themselves and the character.

Exercise 5: Motif

Choose a prop, a phrase, an image and a physical action that relates to your theme. Insert each item into your piece at least three times as a recurring motif.