Our Head of Graphics (A) and Head of Content Development (T) chatted about enjoying stories, interpreting them and preserving them as a whole.
So what exactly do we do at FRAGMENTS External Creatives?
We’re non-storytellers in a theatrical organization, which means that we don’t participate directly in the production of the musical. It is not the script that we write, nor is it the set that we design. The production is there and our job is only to show it to the world.
A: Now, having a firm and thorough understanding of the material you’re working with should be a prerequisite, shouldn’t it?
T: Well yes, I always believe that you need to truly understand a topic in order to introduce it well to someone else. Like when learning something for the first time, the moment we are able to retell what we learnt to others in our own words and even clarify questions, that’s when that knowledge is really ours. The same relationship goes for External Creatives and the story of our upcoming musical.
A: I guess at a theater like FRAGMENTS, the importance of storytelling would seem subdued when the ‘writers’ we’re mentioning aren’t playwrights and the ‘designers’ aren’t stage or costume designers. Strictly speaking, we External Creatives don’t fall among the storytellers, at least not theatrically, but during the last months I’ve realised how important it is to make sure that our members understand the musical to the same extent as FRAGMENTS’ production crew does. When you dive into the details of a good colour palette or a nice character introduction, the misunderstandings of a character’s personality or the role they play in the musical can be painfully clear. During the first few days of working with the plot, we’ve had multiple problems we never even knew could exist.
The Struggle
T: I myself interpreted the relationship between Eli and Hayley from A Bullet for My Valentine (ABFMV) wrong, and I did not know that until I sat through the plot reveal to the upcoming one and listened to Millie talk about her story writing. I always thought that the two of them developed something close to a romantic relationship and it couldn’t go any further due to external circumstances. I was so wrong. And it makes me think of why I immediately went for that interpretation and ignored details the musical provided that contradicted my thoughts.
I blame the romantic in me and also, the dominance of boy-meets-girl stories that I have been exposed to for years.
I also think that it was because I was only in touch with ABFMV as an audience member. The time of contact is just too short for me to grow past my initial assumptions and interpretations, which are heavily influenced by my own perception of the world.
When we first get to know a story, I think it’s very likely that we would start asking questions like who’s the main character, who’s the antagonist, who’s good, who’s bad and start assigning every character we encounter some generic or classic role.
A: I mean a lot of the time, the characters are meant to be representations or personifications of something bigger than themselves, and that is how they’re meant to be interpreted. I think a lot of our external creatives, including us, have at first approached the plot without thought about the roles our characters could play in their own stories moving forward and all the ways in which that could be interpreted.
T: We tend to easily forget how the characters in a musical are not just “characters.” They exist independently from the plot that we as audience members are told.
A: I think it’s important to understand that a character is a whole person beyond the role they fulfil in the plot, especially if you’re working directly with that character and creating something dedicated to them.
T: Sometimes during the process of solidifying the characters, to visualise them more easily, we would base them off personas that already exist. You know how people usually mix up actors/actresses with the characters they play—like how people still call Daniel Radcliffe “Harry Potter.” This phenomenon has a lot of meanings to it, but one that I feel is relevant to our topic of discussion is that sometimes, we forget to clarify that the character, despite similarities with our referenced figures, is a completely separate being.
The Light
T: So what we’ve been thinking about lately is how to build an actual functioning world for the musical, an environment that the characters actually live in and move around on their own.
A: Maybe it’s completely irrelevant to the musical’s plotline whether or not a character is allergic to cats or what their favourite book was as a child, but maybe just the asking of those questions would help you realise what you don’t yet know about them, and maybe the answering of those questions would give you a much closer, much more intimate picture of them. Make them make sense, make them complex and human, you know.
T: Really spending time with the plot, the story, like spending quality time with the characters will definitely give you much closer insights and discoveries about their core values, what they are as human beings. I think it’s something that we as members of a musical production should do, and I think it is a lot of fun to dive into that.
A: Yeah, and I think as External Creatives, what we have the ability to do is offer the audience this quality time. We’re a theater and the storytelling primarily takes place on stage, but we could give the audience a piece of the world in which our plot will occur and the people whom it’s going to move forth with.
A: The most successful characters are complex, are most human, because humans are well, complex. But even the most successful theatrical pieces can still only show so much. So that’s where we come in.
T: I think another goal of our job is to help the musical live on, after the show nights. I mentioned before how my contact with ABFMV was only through a show night, and it passed really quickly. It’s impossible to recall the whole show in its every single detail, and what happens is that my brain would start to fill in the missing pieces with concepts that are already familiar to me before, which might not even be valid but it makes sense to me. And we all know it resulted in a fully wrong interpretation of the musical. So what I hope we could do for the upcoming show is create enough material to bring out the characters and their world, so that the audience could come back every time and relive the moments to their entirety.
Well, it’s great to have a chance to put all these scrambled thoughts into words.
That’s all that we have for you today. Thank you for tuning in, and stay tuned. We promise there’s a lot coming your way.