Creating and staging a devised performanceExperimenting with structure

It’s a good idea to write each scene and a brief outline of its content on cards. You can then place the scenes in different orders and consider how this affects your play. If you can, show various versions to an audience and ask them which they prefer and to give reasons for their choices.

Transitions and flow

However you’ve decided to structure your work, it’s important that the scenes flow smoothly. The movement from one scene to another is called a transition. Nothing breaks the tension and flow of work more than messy transitions. If you have to interrupt the action for clumsy costume changes or to rearrange the set, you will lose the attention of your audience.

It’s tempting to use lighting blackouts to cover transitions and mask scene or costume changes. Blackouts should be used for the end of the drama and could make the audience think that the play has ended! It’s much more interesting to try and incorporate any essential changes as part of the piece. Keeping costume and set changes to a minimum will help. If you’re devising a piece which has non-naturalistic or stylised elements this is easy to do.

Making transitions part of the drama

A theatre company devised a play centred on some elderly characters recalling their past experiences. The set was simple, consisting of just four chairs and a mirrorball. The chairs were rearranged between scenes to become a range of locations in the characters’ memories.

The company made the transitions part of their drama, dancing with the chairs into position to old time ballroom dance music. Different dances established the mood or emotion of the scene to come. When the scene was passionate or angry they tangoed into position and when it was wistful or sad they used a slow, romantic waltz. The mirror ball enhanced the dreamy mood, emphasising their theme of memory. This became a convention of their work, a theatrical device repeated throughout that the audience could attach meaning to. It worked excellently, echoing the gentle tragi-comic mood of their devised work.