Seven Theatre Company
Seven Theatre Company emerged from the module Companies: Commission and Actualisation, during the third year of the Acting degree at York St John University. During this module, myself and six classmates created Seven, where we all devised, developed, and directed the show Void. It all started off from curiosity about researching into dementia and memory loss, braiding it with movement and musicality.
The nucleus of the piece came from a documentary called The Man With 7 Second Memory. It looks at the story of Clive Wearing who after a rare brain infection loses the vast majority of his long-term memory and can only retain short term memories for 7 seconds. The little he does recall from his past is his wife although details of their relationship are still lost to him. And the fact he has been ill and since his illness he has no recollection. The documentary led Seven to consider philosophical question around self and where oneself starts and ends. Does it start in the mind and end with the body or the body and then the mind or somewhere in between. This is the space Clive exists in where you see what one is without the other.
Music has been a heavy influence throughout the process, and we have used it to create material like the musical chairs game or experimentation with karaoke. When looking closer, we realised that music has a core connection to memory. It can encompass a feeling or emotion and is often the last thing to go when someone forgets. As a company, we wanted to experiment with this idea. The small details in some of these scenes are a product of that.
Although, every member contributed equally, personally, I coreographed the positions for everyone in most scenes, added multiple music instruments, planned the set, and designed/programmed lights and sound.
We began creating material largely using games. For example, musical chairs, this led to a discussion of games we played as a child and any strong memories we had. With Seven, we discovered that games and memories overlapped; exploring the use of karaoke where this could potentially implement participatory theatre within the performance. Gameplay has changed over the years, it can be understood in different terms as theatre did not use to be accessible to everybody. However, games have always been so when games began to be implemented into theatre this began involvement more people.
Seven Theatre Company has been a pleasure to work with, as it has always been very much of an equal contribution from every member. So much so, the results of every assessment and show-back have been successful, to the extent once we perform Void in TakeOver, we will be back into rehearsal rooms to prepare for putting Void on stages again, this time at the Edinburgh Fringe.
