SOLECA TEATRO COMPANY
Since beginning this drama course, the time spent studying has helped me discover direction for my career and what I want to achieve in my life. Over time, I have expanded on my love for acting, learning to take more risks and not being afraid of diving into the deep end of a role to find somewhere I have not been before.
A competitive streak has always ran through me, whilst growing up in a heavily sporting family. This competitive streak in sport has followed me to my career choice in the acting world and has helped me to discover a newfound desire to give the best during the process and in my performances. With this, it rediscovered a love for the arts and passion that will driver me into the next path which my life will take.
As a curious and inquisitive person, I have always found great interest in the world that surrounds me. I am a knowledgeable student with passions for many things in life, but most of all, I love to be in an environment without restrictions, an openness to 'play' and create. Throughout my life, I have found various subjects that interest me, but it is a life in the performing arts that has always attracted me.
My name is Oliver Holland and soon I will be graduating from Canterbury Christ Church University with a BA (Hons) in Drama. What drives me as an actor derives from wanting to view life from a different perspective, challenging my own, which develops a deeper rooted understanding with someone from a different background and culture. Being able to put myself in someone else's shoes, to understand the pain and suffering they may go through, has always been a challenge that I strive for. Acting can be a source of expression for myself, on occasions. What I mean by that is, authors can express feelings and emotions so eloquently, far more so than I feel I can, that it gives an opportunity for me express my own thoughts through the medium of performing.
About Me
Director and Actor
Our Research Question
Research Question:
'How can we use immersive theatre to explore the theme of isolation?'
At first it felt slightly paradoxical, being in a state of solitude yet involved within an immersive theatre piece. Whilst still wishing to use the Canterbury prison, when stepping into the prison cells, you felt alone and completely disconnected from the outside world, the only view of the outside was a small barred window about ten feet high in the cell, unable to view much at all other than the grey, dreary sky.
We began to research prisoners that had attended the Canterbury prison, researching what got them there, incidents in the prison and, if possible, find out what happened to these prisoners after they vacated the prison. The research was a perfect starting point to use their stories as a basis for characters that we could portray in our piece and their struggles with isolation. Unfortunately, before we could begin to work with these stories, COVID-19 had become a worldwide pandemic, thus, a rethink was in order to establish where our process would go next.
The pandemic had caused us to begin life working from home, with the university shut and vital learning resources unable to be used, we had to begin thinking of different ideas about where our performance would be set, as now the prison would be completely unavailable.
Fortunately, due to our research question directly linking to isolation, it fell into our hands that now as performers and theatre creatives, we would now be entirely isolated ourselves from each other. With physical interaction with our company members now impossible, our only form of communication was through technology, specifically social media platforms like Facebook and Skype. “Social media is a space for a performance of identities” (Lonergan, 2016, p. 3).
Instagram was another platform that was looked at when thinking about our research question, we still had the opportunity to create an immersive theatre performance while exploring the theme of isolation, creating a performance on Instagram would be our next task at accomplishing this. New challenges began to immediately surface, like how we would interact with followers, how would we create a performance while all being separated and so on.
Research
During early March, with little knowledge of what was just around the corner, nationally and globally, as a company we watched the performance of The Great Gatsby at ‘his mansion’ in central London. Here I witnessed my first immersive theatre experience came at the hands of The Great Gatsby, an opportunity to witness and take notes of what an immersive performance should be. Important information that we gained from their performance was how the story was told to the audience, and intriguingly, how the audience was divided and told stories from different perspectives, creating a performance, which may not leave you with the same outcomes when watching a second time. This further reinforced our decision at the time to perform in the Canterbury prison as a site-specific immersive theatre piece. Unfortunately, of course, this idea could not come to fruition. Due to the pandemic of COVID-19, we were unable to use a site-specific performance space for an attending audience. As a result of the speed in which our situation changed, we as a company had to adapt quickly too. Creating a new performance space for audiences, which they would not be allowed to physically attend would be a huge yet exciting challenge. How would we build on ideas already created and not let them go to waste? We decided to have an online performance using the platform Instagram to showcase out research question that had now become How can we use immersive theatre to explore the theme of isolation?
Instagram's Role
The immersive performance to be created to explore isolation in a digital setting was to be focused through Instagram, creating many scenes over the coming month. During this time it was important to constantly be interacting with our audience, which was new and quite nerve-wracking for all of us.
Our audience were the followers of our Instagram page, although some did not respond to our messages, we found audience members who would and our direction with them was to treat them as friends of our, asking them for advice about something that had either just been spoken about in a scene that had been posted or an upcoming post.
Asking audience members advice on secrets held by the characters, treating them like friends we all believed would help create a bond and all round closer connection between the audience and characters. ‘Buffering’, ‘loss of connection’, ‘frozen’ – these are common phrases we used on a daily basis towards each other, either in character or out of character. It demonstrated the performance’s aim was to showcase the delicate connection that the Internet brings, while this connection is what each character needed to keep them in touch with reality.
Our performance presented how the effects of a lack of human contact can have on human beings, how isolation damages relationships and the struggles attached to not creating connections with friends and family face-to-face.
Acting and Directing
During the performance I am playing the character Colin who is romantically coupled with Anastasia, a social media influencer who is blind to the obvious affection that Colin has for Carolina, another member of this friendship circle which the story basis itself around. The day before quarantine sets over the group as a deadly virus hurries its way around the globe, Colin and Carolina have sex (which later Carolina reveals as a big mistake). As the days go by, Colin’s desperation for Carolina grows, which only leads Carolina further away before their secret comes out.
Colin seemed to me a decent man who made the wrong decisions. At times his impulsive behaviour lead him to make those wrong decisions, yet always a person who was there for his friends and he tried to do right by them. One thing for sure with Colin is that he is absolutely infatuated with Carolina, not a moment goes by without her on his mind, like a teenage boys first secondary school crush, thinking she is the one despite her trying to avoid him at every turn.
Each character had their own colour, which most represented their outlook and life as a whole, for Colin, that colour was brown. To me, brown represents a reserved yet reliable nature, one that you can count on in times of need with great knowledge to help you through tougher times. Colin helps Yvonne through an on-and-off relationship and is there for her throughout. What Yvonne does not account for in Colin was his brief sexual relations with Carolina, whom Yvonne had grown strongly attached to. Colin’s biggest mistake, causing him to lose Yvonne and lost any chance at being closer to Carolina.
Blog Post
During this creative process, I have learned the value of thinking on your feet, looking to take initiative to progress the piece. Coming to the group with more exercises and workshops to attempt, it allows us to let go of any inhibitions holding us, release tension amongst the group, as well as focusing ourselves and creating an organized environment. Moreover, we could have had a more organised structure to base our focus as a group, which did not come to fruition until much later in the process due to a reactive response rather than a proactive one. This is something we perhaps could have seen coming, due to it being a similar issue we had before the COVID-19 outbreak, prior to changing our focus to an online-based project.
I have learned the power that research possesses and what you can learn from a performance based from it. It was a different perspective of which to view at approaching a theatre piece and one that the group struggled with early on, becoming too focused on creating a performance rather than building the foundations of research first. When initially finding information about the prisoners of the Canterbury prison, it had felt like a door had finally been opened to new ideas and losing the feeling of going round in circles trying to create from scratch.