MY FINAL DISSERTATION: WORKING ON AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE

I am here reflecting on the process of working on an autobiographical narrative. Let me take you on a summary journey of what I did and realised.

This project has emerged and applied everything I have learnt in my studies this year; therefore, it will look at my final project and different parts of other projects.

The objectives of this final project were:

1. Understand what is an autobiographical performance and reflect on the different approaches to adapting an autobiographical piece from theatre to film.
2. Transform multi-rolling in single-played roles while keeping the essence of the autobiographical narrative. (Please see more about this topic in this link).
3. Transform Epic Theatre and Theatre of Cruelty to Realism by adapting different acting methodologies: From Artaud and Brecht to Stanislavski, improvisation and Method acting. (Please see more about this topic in this link).
4. Portray different filming techniques like the concept of repetition related to the idea of time. (Please see more about this topic in this link).
5. Combine the traditional use of masks in theatre with digital media. (Please see more about this topic in this link).
6. Connect new social media applications with theatre and performance. (Please see more about this topic in this link).

As Terry O'Leary suggests, 'by seeing their own situations reflected on stage, there is the potential for audience members to recognise that it is possible to effect change in situations and to escape from cycles of behaviour in which they felt trapped' (Govan, Nicholson and Normington, 2008).

I started writing the play 'Gift: and now what?', an autobiographical play about a single-parent family during the lockdown (please see more about this topic in this link); it devised the consequences of the pandemic and lockdown on the family's relationship and how those events influenced and changed the family's behaviour. In the play, I aimed to make the audience muse about what happens on stage, following one of the Epic theatre's characteristics of Brecht -inciting the audience to think (please see more about this topic in this link). Set on a precise time frame shared by many. As Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw state, 'biographical sourcing is not just a personal truth, (but) a creative truth: one in which the real, the fantasy, the fictional get mixed up together'. (Aston and Harris, 2008).

Though the play had many fictional elements, many truthful details were present. The objective was not to share my life with an audience but to narrate a story many audience members could relate to. The lockdown and the pandemic were both events everyone experienced and lived. I aimed to share some elements of my life during that period that could help others to ponder their experience, overcome trauma and improve their family dynamics. Soshana Felman, a trauma studies scholar, argues, 'large-scale traumas such as the Holocaust can prove to be overwhelming and incomprehensible, yet, through the narration of a personal story, an individual may make sense of it within their own psyche'. (Govan, Nicholson and Normington, 2008).

Since I started writing this project, I wanted the audience to reflect on their lives after seeing it (please see more about this topic in this link). One of the reasons I chose to talk about the changes in the family relationships during the lockdown in the pandemic was because I wanted to make the audience contemplate their family interactions, those more vulnerable in their houses and how those events affected them. The pandemic and the lockdown increased screen time within the family: I aimed the audience to contemplate how it influenced a change in the interactions within their families (please see more about the topic 'striving to create a piece that touches the audience's heart' in this link). I hoped the public would cogitate about their own family, looking to make a difference in those families affected and increasing their time together instead of spending their free time in front of a screen.

Working on this project, my family grew closer and did things together: My son participated in the project by making the child's mask, and my parents collaborated in the film as actors. (Please see more about this topic in this link).

'The worst and the best days of my life' was the film adaptation of the play 'Gift: and now what?' (Please see my previous experience/research adapting a screenplay to a film in this link). I encountered significant challenges in adapting the theatrical play to a movie while keeping fidelity to the source material. The first thing was changing it from English to Spanish and adapting the story from happening in the UK to happening in an unknown part of the world. When filming, I had to adjust the libretto to the actors who participated in the project: the child's character changed into a dependent grandfather, and, consequently, the mother became the daughter.

This change allowed me to explore Maria's character, the mother and now a daughter (please see more on the creation of a character in this link). How the same personage representing the caregiver (a parent, in this case, the mother) fluctuated between being the natural caregiver (in the relationship between child-mother) and the designated caregiver (in the relationship between grandfather/father-daughter), and how portraying different characters affected the role.

The play's characters were classified as follows according to the classification of Carl Jun and his 12 archetypes: the child represented the innocent, the mother the hero and caregiver and the narrator the sage. On the other side, in the movie, the father/grandfather was the innocent, the mother the caregiver, and the mother/grandmother the sage.

While keeping many of the events that happened to the child in the script, I adapted it with autobiographical elements my father and mother could relate to. From that adaptation, I created the character of a dependent father without deliberating, specifying 'the father' to give my father more freedom to play it. I helped my father with his character by writing a specific script for each scene, allowing him freedom within the lines but marking the main elements of the story he should cover in our dialogues. Before shooting, I explained the story and the film's aim, so he had a general idea of what we were doing. Keeping him aside from the entire script helped to make his performance more realistic and spontaneous. Every scene between the daughter and the father/grandfather is improvised lightly, following a few directions.

As Petonell Archer writes, '(Stanislavski) used improvisation as a key tool to enable the actors to explore their inner emotions, and encouraged them to train their bodies and voices in readiness for the physical and emotional demands of a role' (Archer, 2017). In this case, we used improvisation not only to enable us to explore our inner emotions but to allow us to give a truthful performance by using elements of acting techniques actors use when training.

Since I am the creator and the actor, memory was crucial when adapting the play to the film. 'Memory is a key aspect in the creation of autobiographical performance. The human memory acts as a filter and, as a consequence, what is remembered may not be the truth but an embroidered version of the real' (Govan, Nicholson and Normington, 2008). I counted on the collaboration of my father as the father/grandfather and my mother as the mother. Both are amateur actors, and we worked closely with memory and improvisation to build their characters. The father's character depicted childish behaviour, letting my father use memories from seeing my child playing video games. The scenes with my mother over the phone had many autobiographical elements, allowing us to use our memory to give an honest performance.

The play's staging rotated entirely from the original idea to what it turned out to be. Initially, the set was white, with a projection of the narrator over the back wall and having the child seated, giving his back to the audience as in the art piece 'Charlie don't surf' by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan (please see more about this topic in this link). I wanted to shock the audience with the child's character (please see more about this topic in this link). Acknowledging the dependent member of the family (the child in the play and the father/grandfather in the movie) was crucial for me. I wanted the audience to think about how they experienced the lockdown during the pandemic and how they interacted with them at those times.

I moved into an open set with white walls and doors from that initial idea of a closed white set; The performance could be seen by those connected online and by everyone passing by (the stage was in a back corridor of the mews where my parents live in Spain). An open set granted me to discuss the play and its intention with those who saw me setting everything up before the play. It permitted me to connect with others who could relate to the project but wouldn't come and see the performance, still meeting the objective of making people think about the topic of the performance.

The scenery also allowed me to create a contrast between the story and how I staged it: Characters appeared outside, sitting by a door. This image brought memories from my childhood of grandparents in villages sitting outside their houses in summer talking to their neighbours, a traditional way to socialise in Spain. By doing that, I linked it with my previous idea of implementing parts belonging to my culture in the project (please see more about this topic here). 

That image was also something I witnessed in London during the lockdown; people would get out to their front gardens and talk to their neighbours, as it has always been in the villages of the south of Spain. The contrast between the story, the staging, and the similarities of memories of rural Spain and cosmopolitan London was vital to me. By giving elements that could look antagonistic at the beginning, I wanted to reach the goal of making the audience think about what happened on stage because the audience had to focus on following the story. By bringing similarities in such opposite worlds, I wanted to get together the idea of the event of pandemic and lockdown being a shared event by everyone, an event without precedence in the history of humanity.

Placing a computer screening the movie on the side, I explored how the effect of increasing the time using screens affected our lives. I searched for the audience to acknowledge looking at the screen instead of following the action happening live and considering if their attention, in their daily lives, also shifted and how they interacted with others (particularly their family members).

I included the element of multi-rolling in the play: I had to play three characters: the child, the narrator and the mother. To resolve the difficulty of multi-rolling, I decided to represent the child's character with a real-life puppet influenced by the tradition of puppetry in theatre (please see more about this topic here). 

I included an element of multimedia (a phone with an image of eyes looking in different directions), moved by an exercise we did last term related to the concept of the digital double of Antonin Artaud (please see more about this topic here). 

The narrator appeared on a screen, again influenced by the idea of the digital double of Artaud and applying one of the characteristics of the Brechtian theatre, the use of projections in his theatrical performances (please see more about this topic here).

I decided the child and the narrator would wear masks after reading the book 'Impro: Improvisation and the theatre' (2007) by Keith Johnstone and the suggestion of the masks having their personality (please see more about this topic here). The mask gave the narrator the characteristics of a narrator from the classic theatre as in the ancient Greek theatre (please see more about this topic here).

On a more technical part of a project, new technologies played a massive role in the creation of my project. I used a smartphone as a camera to film the short movie (please see more about this topic in this link) and a phone as a medium to showcase the play to the audience on new social media platforms.

Using a phone as a camera allowed me to shoot the scenes quickly. The frame and photography were those on the phone, and I could instantly review what I shot and decide if I had to retake the shoot, enabling me to work fast and efficiently (please see my previous project filmed with a phone in this link). I used the phone as the door to connect with the audience on new social media platforms, connecting in my profile on Tiktok and broadcasting the play (please see more about this topic in this link).

Working on this project has allowed me: to combine the learnings I had from the first semester (Stanislavski, Meisner, viewpoints, Method acting, acting for screen and the creation of a short), applying what I learned in the second semester (adapting a play to a movie and creating a story) and deepening that knowledge in my last semester with my research in autobiographical performances, Brecht and the Epic theatre and the digital double, combined with the continued study I started in the second semester about the relationship between social media and performance.

Let me finish this reflection on my project with a loving anecdote: there is a scene in the film where the father and the daughter eat pasta. I was playing along with my father, and that scene was the first scene we shot. As I have mentioned previously, my father is an amateur actor, and this was, in fact, his first ever acting experience. Our scenes were lightly scripted and heavily improvised. At one point, while filming the scene, my father said, 'this pasta is cold!', and I broke out laughing. He was right; the pasta was cold! We had so many laughs after it, he, my mother, and all my family (my mother told everyone, of course!), because we had to repeat the scene several times and we reached the point that we ran out of pasta and I had to make more for the scene. The take ended being the one with the just-cooked pasta served. I learnt my lesson: Get as realistic as possible on set; even if the audience cannot notice the difference, the actors should always be happy with what they eat. (Here, a little funny resume of our bloopers is in this link).

*Please find the play 'Gift: and now what?' in this link. 

*Please find the movie 'The worst and the best days of my life' in this link. 

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*This is a project for my MA Acting for Stage and Screen at UEL, London (2022)