Creating Our Brand

Posted on February 28, 2017 by Emily Wood

Kick A Pigeon Theatre was initially created within the Theatre Company module seminars. We quickly assembled as a company and became a focused group, working on a name and our individual production roles in order to become a functioning theatre company as quickly as possible. During the discussion of production roles, I realised that no one had shown interest in the directing role. As I have always had an interest in the role, but was unable to do the directing module on the course, I thought this would be an amazing opportunity to try my hand at being the director of the company. In addition to this, we established a code of conduct straight away, and began meeting regularly to establish initial ideas and begin to develop our final piece of work for the module.

Kick A Pigeon Production Roles (Kick A Pigeon, 2017)

After deciding on the roles, we began brainstorming the name of our company in order to create our branding. One of the most important elements of choosing a name is to ensure that the name of your company reflects your company and the people in it. This branding took some time and some trials. We went through a lot of other names, all equally representative of our theatre company, before settling on the name Kick a Pigeon Theatre. Our name, I feel, really represents our company as it shows our playfulness, and in addition, as our manifesto explains “They steal your food, use your car/head/whatever they can find as a toilet and just make a general nuisance of themselves. Like most of life’s problems, they’re unavoidable and can be found pretty much everywhere. And when dealing with life’s problems, you often find there’s only so much you can handle before you need to take action” (Kick A Pigeon, 2017). In addition to the description of Pigeon’s and problems, the name also represents the farcical comedy that we as a company will produce. I feel that so far as a company we have succeeded in linking all of our work in order to make it clear for our audience who we are as a company. We aim to be a fun company, producing comedy, but also highlighting the issues within the present day and displaying to the audience the fact that these events have occurred in the past, and that we will continue despite these events.

Kick A Pigeon Theatre Logo (Kick A Pigeon, 2017)

We have decided as a group that a straight play would be the best way in which to convey our ideas and present them to an audience. The farcical nature of the pieces of work that we wish to produce is also indicative of this style.In addition, this also plays to the strengths of many of the members of our group, and allows us to develop the characters and ideas within our time limit for the final performance. From today, we will begin to write the piece, and develop the ideas that everyone in the group has contributed so far into creating our final piece of work.

As director of the company, I feel that I will take on two different roles during the devising of our final performance. I feel that during the initial stages of the piece, I will be the facilitator of devising the scenes that will be refined with our writing team. I will need to work closely with the writing team in order to translate the piece from the page onto the stage. Later on within the process, once everything begins to come together and the script is complete, I will take on a much more authoritative role in order to ensure that the piece is refined and running smoothly in preparation for our final performance.

Works Cited: Kick A Pigeon Theatre (2017) Kick A Pigeon Theatre. Lincoln: Available from: https://kickapigeon.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/ [Accessed 28th February 2017 ]

In The Beginning

Posted on February 25, 2017 by Morwenna Murray

Right at the start of the process of developing our debut show, we decided as a company that we wanted to write our own scripted comedy that would be set in a previous decade – which, after much discussion, we eventually decided would be the 90’s since a lot of the events that happened in that decade are still affecting or have strong correlations with events that are happening now.

Since we had decided to write an almost “sitcom-style” comedy, and such style revolves around interesting characters being thrown into interesting situations, our first few company rehearsal sessions were all about the actors thinking of characters and situations that might be of use to the writing team. We each took part in a hot-seating exercise where we formed the bare bones of our characters (in particular their name and relationships to other characters) and were then paired off by the director and given a situation to improvise a scene with each other in order to see which characters ‘gelled’ well together (at least in their current fairly stereotypical and basic forms) and work out what potential plots could arise between them.

These improvised scenes helped to unlock the potential of our chosen characters since they were kept very simple – a pair waiting for a job interview, two people meeting after being arrested, someone losing their keys and asking a stranger to help them to find them, etc. – which allowed the focus to be placed on the characters we had each individually created and the possible relationships that could be formed between them; something that could help inform the general plot of the show and also our characterisation going forward.

The First Writing Session

Posted on February 24, 2017 by Jack Briggs

The process of making this show has begun. As a company we discussed ideas and narrowed them down to a comedic play set in the 1990’s, focusing on the lives of an ensemble of misfits. During one of our latest rehearsals we experimented with some improvisational scenario’s, and ended with a hot seating exercise to allow the cast to invent their own characters. The purpose of this was to produce a diverse set of characters with a variety of backgrounds, behaviour’s, and lifestyles to inform the writers during the production of the script.

Our writing team met for the first time the other night to discuss the possible direction we could take the story and what we could do with it. As a company we have already established this notion of our own era and that of the 90’s having an almost shared experience; that despite changes in culture, politics, technology, etc., the way people live their life doesn’t change.

“there are stories being told around us all the time and we have always that source of riches to draw from” (Noel Greig, 2005, 22)

During the writing session we discussed what exactly from modern life could be a shared experience for our characters. Several themes have made themselves apparent; including love, sub-culture, and loss. In further sessions we shall be exploring them further to see where we can take them.

Works Cited:

Greig, N. (2005) Playwriting: A Practical Guide. Abingdon: Routledge.

The beginning of an era…

Posted on February 22, 2017 by Amy Louise Blench

In our second theatre company session, the formation of our group was finalised. As a new company, it was important for us to establish a hierarchy with set roles early in the process in order for both the creative and production process to run smoothly. It was also necessary for us to begin thinking about the kind of company we wished to form, as well as the type of performance we wished to produce.

We are quite an eclectic group of people, and having not worked with half of the group in a creative capacity before, it proved interesting to learn where each person’s interests lay in relation to what we want our company and our show to be. We learned early on that we all wanted to create a traditionally scripted play, and that we are all interested in different forms of comedy, especially that of a dark and farcical nature which led to us unanimously agreeing upon this being the basis of our show. However, as a group we were split when trying to decide on a theme within this – a few members of the group wished to create a politically charged piece of theatre, with the other half wishing to do something less political and more light-hearted. As this was an initial meeting with the whole company, we chose to think over the type of comedy we wished to create, leaving talk of politics and social themes aside for our first devising session.

We also used this session to assign roles and establish a hierarchy. This was a key milestone in the formation of our company. Although we had agreed that our show would be created by us as a collective, with each of us having input towards scenarios for the script within devising sessions, we also needed a sense of order within the company. A hierarchy would provide us with a clear set of roles, along with who each role is answerable to, as well as telling us who has final say in the event of a disagreement within the group. It was agreed that the Director would have final say regarding all creative decisions, but the Producer would have final say overall, especially regarding anything which affects budget or how we run as a company.

Figure 1- Heirarchy (Bailey, 2017)

I am acting as stage manager within the company. This means I act as “the channel of communication between all the people and departments contributing to [the] production” (Hawkins and Menear, 2011) as well as “[having] overall responsibility for the stage management team” (Pallin, 2010). The stage management team would typically consist of Stage Manager, Deputy Stage Manager and Assistant Stage Manager, all of whom would oversee the different technical and production roles within the company. However, within our company each production and technical role has already been assigned, meaning only one Stage Manager is needed. It was also decided early on that I would have another role as a performer. Stage managing and performing are not usually roles which are paired together, so it will most likely be a challenging task juggling both roles. Having never before stage managed, it will also be exciting to experience a different side of a show from a production role, as well as pushing myself by placing myself in a position of organising a group.

Works cited:

Hawkins, T and Menear, P. (2011) Stage Management and Theatre Administration. London: Phaidon Press limited.

Pallin, G. (2010) Stage management: the essential handbook, 3^rd edition. London: Nick Hern Books Limited.

Figures:

Figure 1 – Bailey, N. (2017) Screenshot of Heirarchy. Lincoln.

First Stages of Marketing

Posted on February 17, 2017 by Kimberley Bowe

It is crucial to monitor what is posted on the social media websites as “social media (can be viewed) as a performance space” (Lonergan, 2016, 34). It was important to decipher what kind of social media posts would suit the theme and essence of the theatre company as a whole. We wanted to reach out to new audiences, we achieved this by releasing previews of our performance and promoted our Kickstarter page which helped raise money for our performance.

So how was Kick a Pigeon Theatre promoted?

Facebook

Out of all the social media websites that was set up by Marketing, Facebook is by far our most successful. We have high audience interaction and used this platform to advertise all our fundraising events and our main marketing campaign and fun ‘face in the hole’ images were uploaded. This allowed us to promote that our show was to be set in the 90s as we took famous 90s films and music artists and replaced their faces with cast members.

One cast member agreed to dye their hair into a style fit for the 90s, in order for this to take place, a campaign was set up on social media. The terms were; when our Facebook page hits 300 likes, the hair dying will take place LIVE. This campaign was chosen to be sponsored, therefore it had more of an audience outreach. By spending £9, in enabled our company to be more widespread advertised resulting in us hitting our desired 300 likes.

Many images and videos were posted onto Facebook, the most popular marketing source was the boomerangs which were uploaded. Boomerangs are four second videos which make an image appear to go backwards and forwards – this was a great application to use in order to give our audiences previews of our work.

We used Facebook to introduce the cast members one by one. Giving the audience and insight into their lives by adding 90s related question and answers along with an image of the cast member. Our posts were targeted to be posted at around 17:00 – 18:00, peak hours for when Facebook users were returning from work.

Facebook was used to promote our two fundraiser events which were our quiz – ‘Quizzing in the Name of’ and a film night where we showed Jurassic Park in the Platform Bar.

Facebook will be the host of our 7 day countdown to our show Record ’97.

(Kick A Pigeon Theatre, 2017a)

(Kick A Pigeon Theatre, 2017b)

Twitter

Our Twitter page is proving difficult to establish a large following, this could be due to the mass of tweets which are posted daily from other users making it possible for our tweets to get lost. Next time, in order to overcome this, the Twitter page should be advertised more widely on our more successful social media platforms.

(Kick A Pigeon Theatre, 2017c)

Instagram

Despite far less users being on Instagram than Facebook, it has proven to be a popular marketing tool for us. We were able to use hashtags which worked in getting more widespread attention from other users who used the same hashtags as us an example being #internationalwomensday where the female members of the cast recreated a Spice Girls famous pose, which linked in to our 90s nostalgia theme.

(Kick A Pigeon Theatre, 2017d)

With Instagram being a visual social media platform, it proved easy for us to give people insights into our rehearsals.

Snapchat

A snapchat account was created, however was not used to its full potential. We advertised certain ‘takeovers’ where in one writing session, the writers gave the snapchat users a preview of the work they were creating. Compared to other platforms, it isn’t as successful as Facebook.

Works Cited

Lonergan, P. (2015) Theatre and Social Media. London: Palgrave.

Kick A Pigeon Theatre. (2017a) Film Night Event. [image] Lincoln Performing Arts Centre: Kick A Pigeon Theatre.

Kick A Pigeon Theatre. (2017b) Quiz Night Image. [image] Lincoln Performing Arts Centre: Kick A Pigeon Theatre.

Kick A Pigeon Theatre. (2017c) Twitter Image. [image] Lincoln Performing Arts Centre: Kick A Pigeon Theatre.

Kick A Pigeon Theatre. (2017d) Spice Girls Instagram Image. [image] Lincoln Performing Arts Centre: Kick A Pigeon Theatre.