PROJECT THREE (3): ‘Between Beasts’

Performed at: The Albany, with Upswing

March Twenty-Twenty-Six (2026)

Credits:

Production Manager: Keira Thompson Taitt

Assistant Production Manager: Praise Titus

Company Stage Manager: Allissa Flood

Deputy Stage Manager: Rijan Kc

Assistant Stage Manager/ Scribe: Praise Titus

Director: Victoria Dela Amedume

Assistant Director: Nathan Johnston

Devising for transition scenes: Victoria Dela Amedume | Elif Özkara | Praise Titus

Marketing: Nalan Asya Asenova | Corgil Chernova | Tara Choudhary

Props: Krystal Anderson | Corgil Chernova | Allissa Flood | Callum Sked | Keira Thompson Taitt

Scenic: Krystal Anderson | Nalan Asya Asenova | Allissa Flood | Callum Sked

Costume: Krystal Anderson | Corgil Chernova | Tara Choudhary | Allissa Flood

Lead Lighting Designer: Christine Zak

Associate Lighting Designer/ Lighting Programmer: Conor Costelloe

Assistant Lighting Designer: Saran Polchan

Lead Sound Designer/ Composer/ Production Sound Engineer: EJ Walker

Assistant Sound Design/ Sound Sourcing: Hal Munger | Keira Thompson Taitt

Module Leads: Victoria Dela Amedume | Nathan Johnston | Emily Orley

Poster Design: Nalan Asya Asenova

A song I associate with this project:

‘Like Dancers’ - FORAGER

EJ’s summary of this project:

‘A forty (40)-minute devised circus adaptation of a series of three short stories within Angela Carter’s collection, ‘The Bloody Chamber, and Other Stories’. The stories reinterpreted with a circus twist were, in order of appearance: ‘Lady of the House of Love’, ‘The Erl-King’, and ‘Wolf-Alice’. They were conjoined by the musings of a student writing an essay on Carter’s writings.’

What did EJ contribute to this project?

Roles: Devising for Act Three: ‘Wolf-Alice’, Lead Sound Designer, Composer, PSE

Development

Devising and Planning

As a group of five (5) devisers and our directors and performers, and then involving the rest of the cohort and other departments’ creative contributions, our approaches and drafts differed from each other way more than they had during our other devising processes. Here are a few iterations, scribed either by myself, or Allissa, Elif, Krystal and Praise:

Initial Post-It storyboard:

Building an initial timeline:

Fleshing out and finalising the rest of the piece, with Praise scribing:

My initial ideas, responding to group brainstorming and feedback from Vicki:

Fleshing out the introduction to the Act:

Connecting our section with the context of the entire show, with Praise and Elif:

While we did write a lot of our process down, a substantial portion was purely developed in the room, without the need to write things down. As such, here are some photos of the process:

Sound design, composition and PSE work:

In a similar vein to the devising process, the process for sound design and composition went through many more phases than it had done for the previous projects. Here are a few examples of the many plans and timelines I made for myself:

First of all, I sat down with each group and had their internal sound designer go through their thoughts. Here are the questions I asked all groups, with a few examples of notes from the ‘Lady of the House of Love’ group:

I then used this and the parts of the devising process I observed for each group to write ‘beat sheets’ for their pieces. Here’s an example, again from the ‘Lady of the House of Love’ group:

And, here’s the beat sheet for my group’s piece, which I fully sound designed for:

This was still relatively early on in the process, and so these would change quite considerably as time went on. So, as plans changed and I pivoted, I kept myself on track using timelines, as I had for Project Two (2):

Bonus screenshot: I also made myself a composition and SFX inspiration playlist, which I shared with the group:

It then came time to load everything into a master QLab document. This process was… interesting, for reasons you will see:

The cue sheet was relatively easy to follow…

However…

So that I could have individual control over every track in each composition, in order to more easily allocate sounds to different speakers and mix them together accordingly, I separated each instrument and track and imported them separately. This meant I was dealing with at least twelve (12) tracks per Act, plus SFX! In order to line them up and have them activate in time with each other, I ended up starting them all at once, and then fading them in and out when needed. This, in turn, meant that the QLab document was a sight only a parent could love, and was an absolute pain to cycle in and out of during tech rehearsals…:

The Final Product

AUDIO SAMPLES

These samples were rearranged and remixed for the purposes of displaying out of context, in a portfolio. So, they may sound a bit different to their show counterparts, and some of the editing may be a bit clunky.

LINK TO ARCHIVAL VIDEO OF THE PROJECT:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1euWp5OamSOOuaGq8eh1YRurmEAYKAv0T/view?usp=sharing

PHOTO GALLERY

Photo Credit: Celine McKillon, @celinemckphoto on Instagram