Creating and staging a devised performanceResearch

Never underestimate the importance of research. If you identify a theme or topic you’d like to explore, find out more about it. Use the internet, read around the subject, look for films or plays which might explore the same subject matter. How do they do it? Is there any inspiration you can take from them?

Although your initial stimulus is the main inspiration for your work, research helps to broaden your ideas and may help to shape your drama significantly. Keep a record of your individual and/or group ideas to track your progress and to demonstrate how your idea developed.

If you have chosen to create a Theatre in education piece then facts and statistics may be central to the work you devise. Look at Theatre in education for more information.

Using research in performance

A theatre company looked for inspiration in this painting called Going to Work by LS Lowry. It depicts Salford, an industrial town in Lancashire. When they discovered that it was painted in 1959, they researched what life was like in Salford in the 1950s. They uncovered great social deprivation and some vivid photographs that gave them ideas for characters. Researching Salford life led them to the play and film, A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney, written in 1958. This looked at the lives of young people outside the confines of society’s expectations. They explored this theme, setting their piece in both 1959 and the present day and used mechanical movement as a motif to represent oppression.