Mermaid: an Insight into Research & Development

We had a great week in March exploring Mermaid with a wonderful group of actors who created some astonishing images captured by the artist and photographer Kristin Perers. The research and development process is always a really exciting part of making a show: seeing the potential for the piece and feeling it coming to life for the first time. Laura Farnworth, our new Apprentice Director, gives a unique insight into this stage of the creative process below.

My name is Laura Farnworth and I’m thrilled to be joining Shared Experience as Apprentice Director, alongside Apprentice Producer, Gemma Rowan. My first apprenticeship undertaking has been to spend time in Oxford, assisting Polly on the research and development of the company’s new show, Mermaid, which will tour this time next year.The week aimed to test and explore Polly’s scripted adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen story, The Little Mermaid. Much of the work focused on exploring the mermaid world of the first half of the play. To inspire an open and instinctive rehearsal room, the actors were encouraged to think physically using their bodies. Each day began with a vigorous physical warm-up led by Movement Director, Liz Ranken.

To explore the physical language of movement beneath the ocean, exercises looked at playing with weightlessness and buoyancy, promoting a heightened state of physical responsiveness and alertness to each other’s movements. One of the first exercises was playing with random bits of human detritus, objects that might have drifted down from the human world to the bottom of the ocean, and physically imagining how each object might move under water and shift around in the currents on the seabed. We explored the many different qualities of water, from peaceful, sensual currents to turbulence and the violence and destructiveness of a storm. It was really exciting to see how potent the water imagery was as a stimulus and how the mermaids could embody its changing nature. These tasks established early a language, a movement vocabulary, that the actors could use and develop in their own way. It was fascinating to discover the physicality and personality of the mermaids, and to begin to understand them as curious, instinctive animals free from the self-consciousness of humans. It became very clear the difference between the mermaid and human world: the first - free, fluid and sensual; the latter - tense, self-conscious and affected. The play begins in the bedroom of a thirteen-year-old girl who receives a video from her friends who are at a party she hasn’t been invited to. We explored the paranoid fantasies that unfold as she tries to alter herself to gain approval and her friends become a rabid chorus of critical thoughts.