Countdown to THE DREAM!
Every Scintilla show is a little bit different. If there’s one thing we love more than Hokkaido Cheese Tarts, it’s playing with different conventions, tones, and time periods. In the past, we’ve even based entire performance programs around thoroughly exploring a particular type of theatrical style or convention: Farce and site-specific theatre (The Importance of Being Earnest, 2017/2023); Poor Theatre (Peter Pan, 2018); non-naturalism and comedy (Crook’Ed, 2019).
In our 2024 Performance Program, The Dream, we’ll be exploring elements of Greek and Japanese theatre, commedia dell'arte, mask, puppetry, and physical theatre. It will also be our first-ever devised piece. Oh, and it will run for almost the entirety of 2024. What’s that? Ambitious, you say? Well, look… we’re Scintilla: We don’t do nothin’ by halves!
Over a series of five workshops, beginning this Saturday, a talented group of creatives - including actors, designers, writers, and stage technicians - will respond to improvisation tasks, dramatic scenarios, and a range of thematic stimuli to explore possibilities for the play’s characters, dialogue, and story. Their contributions will be documented, combined, designed, remixed, rewritten, lost, refound, rewritten again, and refined over an extended period of creative development (April - July), before the final playscript is presented to the general public as a fully-realised production in October.
Devising an entire show is something we’ve always wanted to do, but have been a bit daunted by the scale and resources required to create a show from scratch with a team of young performers. The Hero’s Journey Project, our 2020-2021 performance program, dipped a toe into the devising pool, shaping a series of filmed monologues around scripts and characters written and performed (brilliantly, we might add!) by the program participants. And in some ways, all Scintilla shows are actually a little bit devised - we deliberately choose plays with room for interpretation, scripts and stories that we can creatively respond to, that can be pushed and pulled in different directions to see what happens.
Scintilla exists to serve the needs of our participants, and we choose stories that they can feel a sense of ownership over, and can make their own. Theatre - especially theatre for young people - is at its best when it not only makes room for the audience to explore, but for the actors, too. We want our cast’s choices and ideas to have a demonstrable impact on each Scintilla show, and if that means tweaking, altering, or even throwing out the script entirely to accommodate them… well, that’s theatre, baby!
A key slide from our first devising workshop, with the collaborative values we all agree to uphold.
And so The Dream is our first fully devised performance program. Based on a scaffold provided by Scintilla, our program participants will have free reign over the look, feel, and tone of the show. We want to challenge them, stimulate them, bring them out of their comfort zone, and help them explore theatrical styles and ways of theatre-making that they’ve never encountered before. We want to give them a space where they can invent, experiment, and (sometimes) fail, safely and with full confidence that their ideas and contributions are valued and respected.
Tricky? Maybe. Risky? Sure. But as old Bill himself said: “The course of true love never did run smooth.” And we reckon creativity’s worth a little rough terrain!
See you in THE DREAM!
G & J
