Week 7: TIE (Storms)

Discussion

This week, we had a shorter lesson than normal and therefore couldn't create any new drama to add into the piece but we decided to have a class discussion about where we wanted the piece to go from the societal pressures on boys. We all said that we wanted the piece to take a slightly more serious route from here and we have done the comical sketches that hook the audience into the piece but now we need to start feeding in the ideas about the focal reason why we are doing this piece: to enlighten y10/y11 boys on the way that they communicate or the ways that they don't communicate and what dangers can come from this.

We all said that we wanted to start snapping out of the stereotypes that we have made and the comical situations and actually see what would happen if we put these people in a real life situation. We started then, to come up with different situations where a boys lack of communication could have some major repercussions on himself and those around him. In our pair we came up with 4 different scenarios:

• Bereavement  - Someone in a boys family has died and this boy has a younger sibling. He doesn't want to tell any of his friends in case they are insensitive or don't understand. We were saying that the boy might want to bottle his feelings up inside so that he could be there for his younger brother or sister and this would have a major strain on the boys emotions and also his mental state which could lead to him taking the grief that he feels and reproducing this into anger. Meaning that there is tension with himself and his peers. But if we were looking from our target audience perspective we said that not everyone would know the feeling directly because not everyone has lost someone but majority of people know someone who has, so we decided that it could work but it would have a bigger effect on some people than others.
• Relationship - A boy has a girlfriend and he also has a close girl who is just a friend. Would the boy feel comfortable in talking freely about his friend to his girlfriend? This sparked an interesting conversation as our teacher said that no male and female relationship can just be platonic and we said that it could. We said that maybe it's because of the gender difference (do girls only view the relationship as platonic but the boys think otherwise?) or maybe it's because of the age difference. I think that our generation has many more friendships that are platonic but we only have the perspective of a girl so we don't know what a boy views the relationship as. I looked on this website (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/men-and-women-cant-be-just-friends/) that said that the results they found "suggest that men, relative to women, have a particularly hard time being 'just friends'." Again if we look from our target audience perspective, our question was would they all have a friendship with a girl? And we wouldn't know the percentage of boys that do so again it may effect more boys than others.
• Friends - A boy has a grandparent who is in hospital and his friends have asked him whether he wants to come outside to play football. He doesn't tell them the real reason why he doesn't come and eventually he stops being invited out. We thought that this could take a massive strain on the boy's life as he now only has his family around him and some boys don't feel comfortable telling their family how they feel in case it puts more stress on them. We said that this might be hard to do especially showing the passage of time from the first time being asked to the last. We didn't think that this would be relevant to the majority of our target audience either because not everyone has experience the loss of friendship regarding a serious issue. Also we talked about a different issue that some boys might want to hide instead of an ill grandparent, and we came up with things like social anxiety at parties and not getting along with the group of friends any more.
• Exams- A boys friend asks him to come out but he has to revise and he doesn't want to say that he is stressed with all of his work load and so doesn't go out. We thought that with this age range, everybody is going to feel that stress at some point and it may affect some more than others but everybody is going to feel at least a little anxious about exams.

We then casually interviewed 4 y11 students and found that all of our assumptions we correct. We then decided we would now add in a scene that introduced one of these situations and establish the scenario in which the stereotype would be put into. We didn’t decide which one we wanted, because we decided that we would go away and next week come back with an idea about one of the scenes and we would then decide which ones we were going to put in the piece.

Week 6: TIE (Storms)

Adding Statistics

We first did a walk through of all that we have done so far and went over the order of what we have done and went over the reasons why we were doing it in such a way. "Banter" is quite an easy way to get an audience to relax and we want the audience to relax in order for them to open up to us about their feelings and how they view their communication skills. We then decided that the biological imperatives that boys are told they should have, need to be challenged on stage by us and we thought that the best way for us to do that would be for one of us to actually step out of the group and challenge what we have presented earlier on. For example, at the start we are stereotyping boys and exploring the ways that they are communicating, and almost criticizing that, but we thought that if we get some facts that compare the amount of boys to girls in different situations, it could propose a good pathway into introducing facts about suicide and the ideas that boys actions are caused by societal influences and not "just because they are boys." We wanted to unpick the stereotyping that we have presented onstage and show how each of them is a societal or peer influence instead of instinctual.

We researched some facts that we could use and we decided on these facts:

• Men are 40% more likely to speed.
• Men are 4 times more likely to lose their hearing.
• Men are 5 times more likely to go to prison
• Men are 3 times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD.
• 80% of all suicides are men.

We thought that on the last one, we could have someone step out and challenge that statement by saying, "so you're saying that being a boy is bad." And we would then move into the explanation of the societal views on men. We thought that we should highlight the expectations that are presented and forced onto boys from birth and see how they progress throughout a boys life.

We started experimenting with the expectations that are set upon boys and men throughout their lives. Here's what we came up with: https://youtu.be/gkvsHJ1FHy8

I liked the idea that we added some Goberesque style titles in for the audience to understand the age group that we are showing and also we are adding in the sharpness that Gober adds to performance, like when you snap in and out of different scenes. I think that we do need to work on the speed of the lines and the gaps in between the different scenes so that we keep the audience interested and engaged.

Week 6: Director's Challenge

Section 1

Because one of our cast wasn't here last week, we decided that we needed to begin with recapping the entrances and tell Joel where he was meant to be. We had previously asked him to watch the video of what we did last week so that he had a vague idea of what the set looks like and what was going on.

Rehearsal of the entrances we did last week: https://youtu.be/VrVVbOoi9HA

We also asked the whole cast to learn the lines of the movements that we blocked and we used that time to check whether they had. We then told them to plan of what we wanted to do this session, so that we were all on the same page and we all knew what we needed to get done and we think that this is one of the key things to getting our cast to work hard and productively. We told them what we expected to be done by the end of the sessions so that they knew what our goal was and how far we were from achieving that and it really fired up the cast to work collectively. We wanted to be able to do a full run through of Section 1 by the end of the session and we managed to achieve that which lifted the spirits of the group.

We asked their input on where they thought the audience would lose concentration and it was interesting to see where they thought we should put a movement and where we thought. We thought that the audience would lose interest a lot later than they did and so we decided to cut down the space between the movements so that they weren't as close together as they thought they should have been.
We then decided to give the cast a small bit of freedom to decide a move in pairs that could attract the audience's attention. We did offer them some support, saying that it doesn't have to be big and elaborate it could be as simple as swapping places and maintaining eye contact throughout the move. Our cast struggled with the concept of not telling a story with the movements so we had to make sure that our movements were juxtaposing to the lines that were being said so that the audience wouldn't be able to make a connection between the two.
We then watched each pair and discussed what we liked about there movements, things like it was simple enough to draw attention but not enough to make a story, and then we discussed some of the negatives that could come from those movements, the audience might think we are connected in some way etc.
Then we added those movements that we liked into section 1 and made sure that the lines still flowed and that the pace didn't dropped whilst a movement was happening.

Section 1 rehearsal with the movements: https://youtu.be/9Jk9kP63v9k

We were then later asked to perform a small section of what we had been working on and we showed this: https://youtu.be/Ph0oV9xAlMQ

I think that in both of the videos, the rehearsal and the performance, there were small movements from the cast onstage, things like them cracking their fingers, pulling down on their shirts or playing with their hair, and I think that we really need to get across to the cast that we can't have any natural movements because we want the bigger, planned movements to have the biggest impact and if the cast keep doing small movements then it will take away the emphasis on the large moves. I think that we could have been slightly more clearer at the start that this is what we meant because we did explain that they would be sitting/standing still for the majority of the play with only a few movements that attract the audience's attention back because this is what Etchells wanted. I think that next week, we really need to put emphasis on the movements that they are making and make them realise what they are actually doing and how distracting it could actually be.

Week 5: Director's Challenge

Wednesday

This week, we decide the people that we wanted in our cast. We got majority of the people that we had originally wanted in our heads and then a few extra people but we still got our ideal number of people, 6, and the ratio of older students to younger students was also what we wanted, one year 10 and 5 year 12s. We wanted this amount of lower BTECs to create a bigger juxtaposition between them and the one year 10 that we wanted their appearances to have an effect on the audience. We even wanted to extend that contrast by putting Maisie, our year 10, in a onezie to emphaise her age and give the audience something to  attract their attention to at the start.

As soon as we started our rehearsal with our cast, we gave out the scripts and their parts so that we could start work on the script straight away and use the amount of time we have to our advantage. We also gave them, our ideas about their costume and asked them whether it would reflect what they actually wore and some of them, we had to change slightly as we wanted them to be themselves onstage and if we gave them a costume that didn't reflect them then it wouldn't link with what we wanted our play to be. We gave them a small exercise which was to write down the first 3 words that someone would say if they met them. We then explore the reasons why they said those things and then told them that we purposefully put them as their letter because of the traits that we found in them and told them the characteristics that we thought we saw through the subject of the lines they would be talking about.

We then introduced them to the style of forced entertainment and told them that we wanted that whole point of the play was to see how far we could push and audience until they lost concentration. Obviously the cast were asking questions like: so are we just going to be stood there? And why would you do this? We answered these questions in the only way that we could. Yes you're going to be stood for quite a lot of the piece but we are going to be adding in movements, big and small, to attract the audience's attention back to the piece and we told them that it reflected the activity that we did in the carousel: it's a social experiment.

We then gave them the freedom of where they wanted to come onto the stage, where they wanted to sit on the stage and the order that they came on. When we were planning it, we originally thought that this would be too much freedom for them but we decided to add in some of our ideas, like who we wanted to come on first and our lighting ideas which guided them into the kind of idea that we wanted. We said that we would like Peter to come on first as he is very authorial and so we gave him the part of A because he knows how to hold himself onstage and we thought that he could set a good atmosphere on his entrance. We also added in that we wanted him to walk on in the dark with a torch and through the audience and then he added in that maybe he could move around the chair and turn on some of the lights on stage. And everybody pitched in ideas about coming from different areas and we wanted them to come on in their own way to reflect themselves. We then moved onto interesting ways that we could experiment with the audience's concentration right away and we introduced the idea of the timings of the entrances and all of us, including the cast, decided that Peter should be onstage by himself for a while and then everyone else should come on within about 5 seconds of each other except for Hannah, who is the last person to come onstage. Me and Alexis suggested that Hannah could wait for longer before she came on as this could be our first stage of seeing how long the audience can maintain their focus. We the spent the rest of the time experimenting with the lines and positioning with the rest of the cast.

Experimenting with the entrances and first lines: https://youtu.be/zCnvHUMU5UU

Week 5: TIE (Storms)

Adding Banter

We started by reviewing the start that we created last week and we went through each bit carefully and made sure that we hadn't missed anything. We also tried to make sure that the energy was high for the transformation of us into boys so that we could get the jokey atmosphere which we think will allow the audience to know that we are open to them talking to us and to show that we are able to be a listening ear to them further in the performance if they need us to be. We always have the idea of what the client wants in the back of our minds and we were saying that our opening could be seen as being inconsiderate as we are making fun and stereotyping boys and the company Storms is reflecting a very personal topic surrounding suicide. But on the other hand, we have all done research that shows that boys/men are more likely to open up and talk about their feelings if there is a more relaxed and jokey atmosphere. I think that this is what we are trying to achieve with our start as we are setting the scene/atmosphere so the audience are on our side and then as we address the idea of suicide we are then going to see if the boys will understand the ways that they communicate or, opposingly, the ways that they do not communicate.

We then moved onto a discussion about the percentage of a performance that is dedicated to the audience and what percentage is dedicated to your fellow actors on stage.
For a real performance, we said that 85% of your acting would be to the people on stage and 15% would be to the audience because if it were a realistic play, you would want to be immersed in the lines and the story line and you want your audience to believe that you are feeling the way that you say you are. The 15% that goes towards the audience includes things like: not turning your back, keeping your volume high, facing a certain way so the audience can see your facial expressions or to hid the mechanisms of a lift.
Whereas when you're doing Theatre In Education the percentages change a little: 40% performance to the people onstage and 60% to the audience. This is due to the piece being for educational purposes so we need to acknowledge the audience to check if they are interested and understand what we are trying to portray.

We then wanted to add a little bit more onto the piece and so we decided to explore the things that boys focus on and we made scenes about the two emotions that we know are men’s focal emotions: Anger and Erotic. We made two scenes referring to each of them and incorporated in them into the scene after the chair stacking.

to expand on the word “banter” as this is what modern teenagers refer to their way of communicating and so we thought of subjects that boys might fine hard to speak about and so would create banter about as their way of communicating we decided that we would do: parents divorcing, failing exams and being broken up with. We referenced these along with the lines from our presenter “Noun - Banter, Verb - to banter and adjective - banterous.” With each different word group, a different scene was created. First of all was “Exam Banter” (https://youtu.be/_-DADSdvNS0) then it was mine and Hannah’s scene about "Divorce Banter" (https://youtu.be/eqE0w_OObcM) and then lastly "Breakup Banter" (https://youtu.be/mJ2vDaIn5OU)

I think that one of the best parts about our scene is the speed of the lines and especially the dialogue at the start when the boy refers to his problems as “nothing” and the other boy doesn’t delve any deeper in the subject instead he moves it onto something more comical as we found that men have a different way of dealing with conversation and have different aims. At this point, we thought that the boys wanted to avoid talking about their feelings and so they would avoid the subject causing them to move onto the next emotion that they naturally go to which is talking about girls/ something of an erotic nature, hence the “fit birds” I think that we need to work on the staging a little more so that when I ge the idea of her dad “banging a fit bird” then I can make it more obvious to the audience and get them involved.

Week 4: Director's Challenge

Before Wednesday's lesson, me and Alexis, my fellow director, had a discussion about the activity that we were going to do for our carousel. We wanted something that we introduce our play but not give too much away because we want the people who will be in our actual cast to be immersed in our play once the actual rehearsals start. We also wanted to have something that would sparks some people's imaginations and see who would be interested in doing our play.

In the back of the script there is a social experiment that Tim Etchells did with a group of 6 people, where he had a line of 6 chairs in the middle of the room and timed 1 minute and the cast were allowed to move around the space and do whatever they wanted and then in the last 10 seconds, Etchell's would count down and the cast had those 10 seconds to decide whether they wanted to stand in front of a chair or sit on a chair. He found that if half the people in the room stood up then the rest of the group would feel the instinctive to stand up as well but he also noticed that majority of the times he did it only 2 people stood up which meant that everybody else was sat down. If the people thought that they needed to stand up, then they were more concerned about those around them and what they were doing instead of concentrating on what they were doing and their own presence on stage. To add to this, we thought that we would write down missions on pieces of paper and give them out, adding more each round and this would also add to be another distract for the people and those who knew that someone had a mission were paying attention and trying to look for them but those who didn't know were the ones who were focused on themselves. We thought that this could link to some other practitioners like Stanislavski and his units and objectives as we could tell who was concentrating on their task and we could see who had a plan of what they were going to do to achieve that. We thought that we could even incorporate that idea of missions into our performance.

We then compared Brecht and Etchells as there are some things that are similar between these two practitioners and we wanted to make sure that we defined the differences between them. Brecht had characters but didn't want the audience to connect with them (also know as the "V" effect) whereas Etchells doesn't have any characters at all so there is no chance that the audience could relate/connect with a character onstage. They both, however, have characteristics that are shown so that the people onstage are recognisable as people.

This led me to researching one of Forced Entertainments newer pieces called "The Last Adventures" which is a collaboration with a Lebanese sound artists called Tarek Atoui. It mixes text, movement and images with electronic sound. "There is a rough, playful and unfinished feel to the aesthetic." This was a quote that Etchells said about his piece and this was something that we wanted to highlight in our play and I think that that should be the focal point of our play, the fact that nothing actually happens physically its centered around what happens mentally and the thought process that the audience goes through.

Other quotes that Etchells said:

"Props and costume are home made" - we can highlight this by the cast wearing their own clothes in our piece and it would also help accentuate the fact that they are being themselves on stage.
"The work made is always a kind of conversation or neogtiation."  - Like the people onstage are having a conversation between them but they are speaking to each other through the audience making them have the same thought pattern as the people onstage, making them more connected together.
"We don't walk onto the stage and say anything can happen! We like to put on a set of fixed points and framework in place. But within those parameters there is no desire to control or consolidate every moment - there's a freedom for the performers, to respond to each other, to follow instincts and to listen to each other. Keeping this level of fluidity and space for invention seems really important." - A key quote from Etchells in my opinion as it points out the basic ideas behind his work and if we take this into consideration then we will be following the true idea of what Etchells wanted this piece to be like.
"The desire is to make a space in which the audience has a lot of pleasurable work to do in imagining and making connections and making their own stories" - This is what we want to see when we're doing the carousel exercise. We, as the audience, want to be making stories just by looking at the people being themselves onstage.

Wednesday

We decided to use some of our Wednesday lesson to have a go at everyone's carousel ideas before we get multiple groups of people of varying degrees of drama experience, to see how we worked with the stimulus' and our ideas.

The list of missions that we used were:

-Make eye contact with every person in the group
-Move every chair as much as you can
- Sit on every chair
- Make a paper airplane
- Steal the paper airplane
- Call Chipp or Starbuck if they come in the room
-Cough every time someone sits down
-Try and untie someone else's shoe laces
- Try and touch everybody's shoulder with your nose.

An improvement that we got was to not introduce too much at the start about the idea behind it as it might alter how the younger years approach the idea of the missions and we want to see how they would naturally react to the introduction of the missions and if their focus shifts. So we changed it so that we explained the activity at the end and explained the style of our play at the end to try and see whether they understood it a bit more.


Time Lapse of our activity.

https://youtu.be/hLTaMkVMI_Y

We found that the older students understood the experiment much more than the younger ones which was what we expected as it was very hard for the younger ones to grasp that they were being influenced by the other people around them and not really focusing on themselves whereas the older students were and some of them were even concentrating to much and created a character for themselves which we reiterated was interesting to see but not what we would want in our play.

After this we went over our plan for next week so that we could change anything if we needed.

We decided that setting estimate times would help us keep on track and get each week completed and not have anything that would take longer than needed.

Week 4: TIE (Storms)

Putting the opening together

After developing our research about how men communicate over the weekend, we started by formulating a list of the main points that we found and we came up with:

• Men convert one feeling to another because they are considered feminine feelings
• Men find it hard to think and feel at the same time.
• Men feel pressured to take charge and not show insecurities
• Men view purposes of conversation differently.
• Men externalise their feelings - showing emotion through aggression.
• Men feel like they can only express their feelings through anger.

We then linked our list to suicide and our TIE intention which is to highlight the ways that men communicate or don't communicate and what that could lead to.

Expressing their emotions through anger - If this method doesn't work, for women the next step would be to find help but for men, they would be embarrassed that they were unable to find an outlet that allows them to express their feelings and so would turn to suicide. Our main question then became what if it's that men don't even recognise what they feel because the stereotypical feelings that they know they can/think they are only allowed to talk about are aggression and erotic. But if you are only talking about things that make you recognise those emotions then how can they know what they are feeling. They might presume that they can't/don't have any other feelings than those. When they can't think rationally about something would they think that the only way out is suicide? Would they think that their emotions are broken and they have this "sense" that they can't identify which keeps building and building until it becomes so overwhelming that they don't want to keep living with a "sense" that they can't register?

Approaching conversations differently - Men don't want to approach a conversation that doesn't have an end point. If men can't find a path that will allow them to find an answer then they won't have a conversation which increases the "sense" and draws the idea of suicide nearer.

We then decided to put all that we had learnt about how men communicate into a short starting point for our opening of TIE and we thought that the best way to start our pieces was to have quite a comedic sense so that it would allow the audience to open up more if we start off with a more relaxed atmosphere. 

First messy run through of our idea for the opening of TIE:

https://youtu.be/pS4rKiE8Y2U

Taking into consideration that this is our first run through of a possible opening, I think that it went quite well and we are already highlighting some of features that are expected of a man and I like the idea of us over-exaggerating them to show that we are acknowledging their feelings and the way that they act but also saying that when you look at it from an outside point of view then you see how it looks.
Obviously I think that we need to make sure that the lines are fluid and also I think that the speed that we are walking and putting the chairs on the stack needs to be quicker in order for the impact of Charlotte "trapping" her fingers to be bigger so that the audience stay engaged with piece. And I also think that the contrast between our first reaction to Charlotte (shocked - the natural reaction) and the reaction after Caitlin says that men can be "insensitive to other people's distress." (Jokey, making fun of Charlotte etc.) really shows how their reaction look to women in particular.