Episode Nine - Tech & Performance Week

The ninth episode of The Impossible is Only the Untried: a Prologue Podcast with Mandy E. MacLean.

In this episode, Mandy shares what was found during the tech week and performance of  the students' year-end show, "That One Drama Class".

W. Ross Macdonald X Prologue Performing Arts Collaboration is supported by The Canada Council for the Arts and the Arthur and Audrey Cutten Foundation.

Learn more about the W. Ross MacDonald X Prologue Performing Arts collaboration at @prologuearts and www.prologue.org

Transcript

Episode Nine - Tech & Performance Week 

(student voices) The impossible. The impossible. The impossible. The impossible. The impossible. The impossible. The impossible is Only the Untried.

(Mandy) Welcome to Episode Nine of The Impossible is Only the Untried - a Prologue Performing Arts podcast. My name is Mandy E. MacLean, and I am the Project Coordinator for the collaboration between Prologue Performing Arts and the W. Ross Macdonald School for the Blind.

In this podcast, we're sharing findings that are being discovered and questions that are being asked when we think about how to make theatre more accessible to youth from the Low Vision and Blind community. A team of professional theatre artists - and the students of W. Ross MacDonald are exploring with us! 

In previous episodes, I have told you about our exploration sessions with the W. Ross Drama class, and the findings we have discovered, and how these will be implemented into their final year-end performance - and guess what? 

Performance week is finally here!

Creating a schedule for a production to tech & run is never an easy task. Time is your greatest resource, and there never seems to be enough of it! 

Traditionally, there are multiple parts to this process - these include (1) levelling - where designers and the team work together to program and set levels of the lights and sounds - how loud or how bright something is, (2) a cue to cue - where artists work together to create and run from tech cue to tech cue - and then (3) all of these things somehow culminating into a dress rehearsal. 

Of course, no two productions are the same! And how long each part of this process is can be dictated by a lot of different factors.

When working with our class during this process we discovered: 

During the levelling process, it is important to gather as many diverse perspectives from the Low Vision & Blind Community as possible. In our process, we attempted to approach this with as much care as possible, knowing no two members of our audience would be alike. Many members of this community identify as sound & light-sensitive, and while we found that directional sound & big lighting contrasts allowed students to experience these elements - it was important to also consider that for some this would also be troublesome. For this, we used our class and sat them in the role of the audience, we played through every technical cue - and we did our best to incorporate their perspectives & feedback while still keeping true to the artistic intentions of every scene. This takes time! And usually, an audience is not a part of this process. We carved out as much time as we could - Gray, a grade eleven student in our class, put it best: you can’t please everyone! 

Let’s unpack this statement for a second. I wonder if what Gray is getting at is you can’t approach accessibility with a “one size fits all approach”. Everyone in our audience experiences low vision & blindness differently - so therefore will have different opinions, comfort levels, and sensitivities to tech levels! But what was important is that we created the time in the schedule to consider this with an example audience in the room.

During the cue-to-cue process, a very important shift from the more traditional way of working emerged. In a traditional cue-to-cue, actors usually take the stage and run the section of the piece where a tech cue would occur, and then skip ahead to where the next tech cue would occur - and so on - until you reach the end of the play. Right away, it became clear that skipping ahead did not serve our students. The addition of new lights and sounds left some students disoriented - instead of skipping sections, it benefited the students to run things sequentially and have the tech added at the same time. Therefore, we teched the show as the students worked through it - clearly explaining what shifts were occurring, how and when. No corners could be cut.

A very clear example of this was when suddenly the directionality of the panning cut out in our system - since students were working with this as a way to orient for the majority of the day - they became unable to physically orient when suddenly sounds were only coming out of one speaker instead of multiple. The sound coming from different directions had taken the place of visual cues and was really important! Therefore, time needed to be carved out to adjust this, go back, run these things smoothly, and in the correct sequence. 

This showed care for the specific needs of our actors and allowed every individual student to prepare and orient in the way they needed to. Traditionally cue to cues always take a lot of time - but working in this way added time.

Then it was our Dress Rehearsal! At this point, we had run the entire show already in sequence with any newly added tech elements, so there was a sense of ease in the room - it was exciting to see the confidence emerge in the students. And it was evident that running the cue to cue the way we did had truly helped. We had Sam Gatez, an incredible photographer, join us to document the Dress Rehearsal. This was exciting for the class, as they hadn’t met Sam yet. I’ve worked with Sam before, and I knew she would be an awesome artist to have in the room for this moment - Sam has worked with so many artists of all different backgrounds - and her generosity and openness was the perfect energy. And you know what, they did awesome! It was exciting to see their energy rise every time they heard laughter from Sam. The class then concluded.

Finally, it was show day! The lights dimmed, and the first rumbling sounds moved directionally from one end of the theatre to the other - and the audience was along for the ride! It was incredible to see the actors on the stage orient, emote with energy, and share this story with their audience. At the end of the show, each student bowed to the applause of their fellow students, and classmates and family members. 

It was beautifully imperfect, embodied, filled with energy - and you know what? It was all them! And that’s what’s most important. It was built with students of the Low Vision & Blind Community for Students of the Low Vision & Blind Community. And to me, that’s what theatre is all about. Exciting experiences that work towards including everyone.

Do we still have a lot to learn? Of course, we do! Tune into our next episode, the final episode of The Impossible is Only the Untried, to hear the feedback from students who saw the final performance - and I’ll share with you some concluding thoughts from students in the W. Ross Drama Class. 

I encourage all of you to come up with questions, and if you are interested in exploring more, please reach out to Prologue to continue this conversation. Visit www.prologue.org or find us on social media at @prologuearts!

And here are those amazing students to send us off - 

(student voices) The impossible. The impossible. The impossible. The impossible. The impossible. The impossible. The impossible is Only the Untried.