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Name:            Raymond Louter

Position:        Professor of Theatre Arts

Institution:    Redeemer University College

 

Title of Project: Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Type of Project: Theatre production

Author(s): Written by Salman Rushdie, Adapted by David Tushingham, Tim Supple

Your Role: Director/Instructor

 

Participants (number and their status)

Performers: Third year performance students

Designers:  Myself

Assistants: Lighting designer/operator (student)

Other Collaborators: Power Point slides designer (alumnus Ryan Sero), Original Prop Designer: Mike Peng

Budget:  $150

 

Development period: September – December, 2016

Rehearsal Period: 4-6 hours per week

Performance Dates: December 8-10

Performance Venue: Studio Theatre, Redeemer University College

 

Purpose of Peer Review:

1. To gain peer feedback on my directorial work at Redeemer University College.

2. To foster conversation about theatre work from concept through execution.

3.  To enliven conversation between RUC and local theatre artists

3. To offer this production and my work on it as a ‘test case’ for the CATR ‘peer review’ seminar committee.

 

Brief Description of the Project (up to 200 words):

 

In the Fall of 2003 our department undertook the staging of this adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Originally conceived of as a fairly elaborate staging spectacle I wanted to revisit the script for two reasons. 1) Having an acquaintance with the text gave me a fairly direct understanding of the piece as a project I could quickly fold into an already existing 300 level performance course 2) As I was watching the larger version of the play in 2003 I became aware that the beautiful and evocative text of the play was sometimes being over shadowed by the elaborate staging approach that we had undertaken (full-sized Hoopoe costume, multiple rolling platforms, Cultmaster of Bezaban puppet etc. I wanted to do a simplified “radio play” of the text to put strong emphasis on the words of the play as the spectacle.

 

Please define your research or artistic question(s), the type of inquiry, the anticipated process and your outcome goal (up to 500 words):

 

The design of THR300 (Performance III) at RUC includes work on audition pieces and the staging of a significant theatrical work as a class. In this setting I am both instructor and director. My research question in the fall term of 2016 centres on Haroun… as a means by which I can teach 7 third year students about being in and creating a skilled speaking ensemble. Secondarily I had an interest in restaging a work with which I have familiarity for the reasons stated above. Obviously these two concerns connect. (One of the unstated goals of the course is to ensure that students who have not landed significant roles in our mainstage plays get such an opportunity in the THR300 project.)

 

The semester began with a discussion of the syllabus and my expectations of them for the course. I handed scripts out to them at the beginning of the course, and described the rehearsal process. Initially we spent every other class of 2 hours working on the text, but eventually, once the audition projects were done, we rehearsed M.W.F for 2 hours each (which is not really enough time). We played some vocal musicality games to prime the vocal pumps of the actors. I invited Dr. Deborah Bowen from the English department to speak with the students about the ideas in the play, and the history of the fatwa that was pronounced by the Ayatollah in 1989, as a way of facing into the theme of silencing. I assigned the multiple roles to various actors as we began to read the text together (only the actor playing Haroun plays one role).

 

Originally I’d hoped to cut the text down to one hour so that we would have enough time to really master the words, but once I began to do the cutting I found that deep cuts would savage the layered meanings of the play. I managed to cut out some of the text but the project was still too large for the space I had given it.

 

The focus of our work has been on words – the sounds of the vowels, the feeling of the words in our mouths, the peculiarities of accent as suggested by Rushdie, and so on. From the outset, though, I decided that verbal playfulness would be a stronger focus than South Asian, and other, accents.

 

The design is essentially an open space in front of a screen. On the screen, projected from the rear, will be illustrations that support the story of Haroun… The images look like they have been taken from children’s books from a number of different sources as the play itself accesses numerous literary and cultural artifacts as well. Occasionally the actors will create shadow imagery over the images on the screen. The shadow of Mudra, and the Cultmaster will grow in size by actors interposing themselves between the screen and the projector, for example.

 

The questions are: does the project work in this abbreviated and pared-down form? Did the project succeed partly because the actors have learned to trust words in a deeper way? Has the short rehearsal period impeded a deepened sense of words as performance? Lastly, did the production manage to capture the spirit of a world that is playful in the way that Rushdie is playful with text?

 

The verb tenses in this description change because we are very much in process at the time of writing.

 

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