Week 3: Director's Challenge

Discussion between Directors

I am directing in a pair for our director's challenge and we decided that the best way to dedicate what directing was done by each person was to come up with our separate setting design, lighting designs and delivery of lines and then having a meeting just before we begin directing to establish the good ideas and formulate a rehearsal plan/schedule. I have drawn and written out some of the lighting and set design that interests me and have placed them all in a folder so that it is easy to look back on. 

My starting lighting ideas included a dimmed stage and then the cast walking on from different points like through the audience, through the door that the audience entered and from the sides and I would like to experiment with the idea of footsteps. For example, when one person is walking in you can only hear their footsteps but then contrast that with a group of 2 or 3 then you instantly know there is a group of people instead of just one and I feel like this could make a very interesting moment of orientation. I think a dimmed stage would work because I think we could play around with the idea that the audience know that something is going on but they don't know what and that suspense would help add to the author's intention as he wanted to see how far we could push an audience until they lost interest and focus and this sets that idea that something is going to happen and draws the audience in to the play. Although, evidently, nothing does actually happen it sets the play up for it's purpose very well because they would be able to see that someone is moving around but they might not be able to see their faces and as each group/person enters the space, the lights get brighter until everybody is on stage and the delivery of the first line lights the whole stage. Also if we have the cast members actually turning on some of the lights then the audience will be able to see the mechanics of the play and it will reiterate the fact that the audience are watching a play which adds to the Forced Entertainment style. We could also add in the element of costume to add to this idea as if we have the audience in their normal clothes but everyone is slightly different then we can have them take off their jackets like they are just coming in to perform. We could have the risk of the audience not knowing whether the actors are meant to be on stage or whether they are there by accident but again we could use this to our advantage.

We had a small meeting during the week about cutting down the script and discussing ideas for costume. We calculated the lowest cast number that we could have would be able to produce this with and we said 6 and we were later in formed that this would probably be the cast size that we would have and so we started cutting down the script and reassigning lines to other characters. We said that something could be easily gotten rid of but the only trouble we found was equally distributing the lines so that we didn't have some people saying a lot and others not saying anything. We realised that we would need actors who felt confident in learning lines and would be able to keep up with the pace of the piece as it is very fast to keep the audience guessing at what is going to happen next.

We put down some basic costume ideas that we would ideally want but then we also need to take into account what the actual cast want to wear as we want the element of them being comfortable on stage and being themselves without a character. We might need to add in something that make each person different for example we wrote down things like eyeliner and no shoes, just to add in a little element of difference between the cast on stage. Originally we wanted to have lots of little things going on, in different places on stage like someone making paper airplanes, someone winding a rope round a bar etc but then we realised that this is going to distract the audience and take away from the author's intention but we could add in some simple, unrelated movements like some of the paired frantic lifts that we have previously learnt, because that simple movement, juxtaposes with nothing happening onstage and would become so much more interesting to an audience who are watching and reflecting on the audience as a whole. 

Also from reading the back of the script where Etchells made his own notes on the play, he says "One way of thinking about theatre is to focus on the limited number of things in the space...and once the performance is rooted in the room...it then begins to go on excursions to other places...before we come crashing back down into the room. Several of our shows have followed similar principles. Think about Status Update in terms of a description of the world." I think that from this we can infer that this would be a good starting point for the cast to get to grips with the play and also could be a key element to our piece. 

Week 3: TIE (Storms)

Researching SToRMS

We started off the lesson discussing the aim of our TIE piece and we found out that a company called Storm DMC wanted us to do our piece about the way boys communicate or don't communicate and the problems that boys feel when they don't communicate. I researched the company and I found their website. http://stormsdmc.org/ I was reading through the information about them and they said that they are "a small organisation based in Sheffield, South Yorkshire and set up in July 2015. It is a fund within the South Yorkshire Community Foundation, a registered charity whose goal is to improve the lives of local people. Storms was set up in memory of Dan McAllister who unexpectedly took his own life in May 2015 aged nineteen." Storm stands for "Strategies to Reduce Male Suicide".

We also learnt that our age range was Y10-Y11 boys which means they are 15/16.  We agreed that we need to point out that there are certain male stereotypes that aren't healthy and talking about your problems or even just expressing how you feel in whatever way you can is important, as is acknowledging that other people might be feeling the same way or worse and there are problems that not communicating can arise. Our target audience is very close to our age and we discussed that it will be very difficult to approach as we are a whole cast of girls and so we don't actually know what it's like to not communicate and the stereotypes/expectations that there are for boys. We know of them just not what it feels like to have those placed over you since a young age. We could actually use this to our advantage and make a joke out of it especially if we establish that at an early stage because we think that boys of this age have quite a jokey nature but we then have the risk of taking a joke to far and if we have such a light feel to the piece then they won't take any of the things that we are talking about seriously and we need them to because it's about them and their lifestyle. We established that we need to do some research on the different ways that boys communicate or their lack of communication. 

I found this website that highlights the ways that men and women communicate differently and I found it very interesting.

https://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2012/04/01/6-ways-men-and-women-communicate-differently/

It highlighted the ways that men's minds view things completely different to women and men's minds are always looking for a problem that needs to be solved so they use communicate to find out what the root of the problem is as soon as possible so they can deal with the aftermath. Whereas women are more concerned about the emotional side of the problem. They're not saying that men don't know how to take other people's feelings into consideration, they're just making the point that the different genders have different aims and approaches to every situation. A man's is to find the problem and deal with it, a woman's is to assess the feelings of everyone in the situation and then find the problem.

So this meant that we can't have the audience thinking we are accusing them of being inconsiderate but we can't go to the extent where we are making them feel weak as they will become defensive about the topics we are discussing. The Storms website says "In 2013 male suicide accounted for 78% of all suicides, which was the biggest cause of death in men aged 20 - 45 in the UK. The silence around suicide means that this statistic goes largely unrecognised." We want to raise this awareness and allow boys/men to feel comfortable with expressing how they are without feeling like they are weak or like they have to become defensive and guarded.

Week 2: TIE (Storms)

Investigating the concept of TIE

We began our session with a discussion about the aim of TIE and we came to the conclusion that it was to educate the people watching using theatre. We are being employed for a specific purpose whereas when we are directing, our purpose is to get people to come and watch. We all decided that throughout the process of creating a TIE piece we need to consciously be linking everything we do back to the aims and the needs of the client, who gives us the purpose for our piece. We found that knowing your target audience early allows you to define the correct language that will engage the audience and also the topics that your audience age range will connect and understand more. We then linked this to a real life situation such as the contrasting topics that would engage primary school and secondary school children.

We moved on to discussing the structure which we thought could be used for the most effective piece.

We discussed what parts of the piece we thought would be at the peaks and we decided that this was the point of high intensity or humor that gives us the audience's attention and allows them to really engage and listen to what we are saying and this would also be a good point to add in information as you would have the audience's complete attention but we thought that if we tried to add in too much information at a time, we would lose the engagement of the audience.

We then discussed what dynamic asides were and how we could use them. We created a fake story that we could play around with and add dramatic asides into. We decided that there is a boss at an educational institution and there's also a lecturer who works there and is very academically qualified to teach there but he's an alcoholic. He is turning up late, his work load has gone down but it's got to the point where the institute is relieving him of his post. If we put this scene at the start of the play means the audience doesn't have a background or connection with either characters on stage but that could also be an advantage as we could play around with the disconnection of the audience to the characters. We classed the dynamic asides as shortcuts and we found that they are majority used in Shakespeare and its a moment where the character comes out of role almost and/or breaks the 4th wall. We made institutional professionals and professionals susceptible to alcoholism our target audience.

We had to really think about the language that we used for the boss as we thought that they would have worked together for years and they have seen each other at there lowest so we thought that the boss would try and break the news in the kindest way possible. Taking this into considered, we added the idea of the boss still trying to help the lecturer even though he wasn't employed in the university anymore.

After experimenting with the scene, we added in some dynamic asides like: the lecturer knowing why he was having this meeting, the boss actually stating what the reason was for sacking him, the fears of both losing the job and keeping it and then the boss' regrets about letting him go.

We found that there were some problems with adding dynamic asides in:

• Hard to keep emphasizing with the character as they break character
• Hard to tell whether the characters were in the scene or out, slight hesitancy breaks the idea of these asides.
• Hard to maintain the emotional levels and content of the scene which means the audience isn't really taking in the new information that you're trying to put out.

We did think that the asides allowed us to see the characters more and understand what they were thinking and it was almost like we were drip-feeding the subtext to the audience and keeping them interested in what was going on. Using a juxtaposing tone and energy level  has a bigger effect on the audience.

Week 2: Director's Challenge

Researching Tim Etchells

www.timetchells.com

"Artist and writer based in the UK. Leader of the world-renowned performance group, Forced Entertainment."

"Working across different media and contexts opens up new possibilities and allows me to approach the ideas that interest me by different routes, shifting my perspective on the themes and experiences I want to investigate."

I found this really interesting as he is looking at events that have happened in his life and he's picking them apart to find other ways that he could have approached them and I think that he is always aware of how his actions are affecting other people. I think that this is what he's trying to show through his theatre pieces; how your actions effect other people and if you take a step backwards and review the situation you will find the real meaning behind your actions.

www.forcedentertainment.com

"Spectacular - A lone performer takes to the stage, explaining that the show we're watching is somehow different.

Spectacular is about the now of the performance moment, the trembling edge of laughter, possibility and invention. It's about death and playing dead, about the strange contact between what they are watching and what they're being told."

I was researching other plays that Tim Etchells has created in order to understand his style and the messages that he is trying to convey.

I also researched past production's of Status Update to see how it was staged and I found a production by The Great Torrington School.

I like this layout of the different actors as we can see each one of them clearly and each one has got at least one object on their desk that reflects the type of person they are. I feel like I could use the simplicity of the staging in my piece as it's quite easy to determine who would be speaking as we could get them to move around or stand up from their desks. I know that Tim Etchells wanted the audience to focus on the message of the piece and not get emotionally attached to the characters which is why they don't have names, they are merely referenced by letters. I also found that there isn't the letter "I" as that would mean that they are referencing themselves and none of the people onstage talk about themselves, they only state facts about the people and things around them which helps back up the idea of getting the audience to think about things bigger than themselves.

I think the problem with putting this staging in our facility would be that we only have a certain number of raised seating and I think that it would be hard to see all the different actors from that audience perspective. If we were in a full sized theatre, I think this staging would be very effective but putting it in our performance area I think we would have to position some of the people, especially those at the back, onto risers or crates to lift them up into the audience's view.

I carried on researching Tim Etchells and found that he is also an artist and some of his work reflects the message he's trying to tell through his theatre work as well. This is one of his pieces of artwork that was originally written on the walls of a art exhibition, and each sentence was on a different wall so that as you walked around you read each sentence in this order.

I think that Etchells wanted everyone to understand and think that every conversation you have is the most important one as you learn something about the person you are conversing with as your talking no matter how short your conversation is. I think this is the message that Etchells wants people to take away from all of his work.

Wednesday

We started discussing the good points and the bad points about our directors last year and we discussed the different ways to approach directing and we said that if you always start with a read through of the scene that you are doing allows the cast to establish a really basic character, understand the humor (if there is any), understand the meaning of a scene and get an overall "feel" for the scene.

We then discussed what our Mesenscene is and how it would benefit us when directing. A mesenscene is the director having a full idea of what is happening in the scene they are directing. Sometimes having a defined mesenscene could be distracting as you may not take on board any other ideas that are been thrown towards you and you only want your idea to be the outcome. On the other hand, a detailed mesenscene could enable you to push your cast into ideas that they might not have thought of before.

We then had a go at staging one of the scenes of Our Country's Good, I decided to stage scene 3 which involved 4 characters and they were having a conversation about the slaves that were being brought in and it was intertwined with a conversation about bird shooting. On my first read through I thought the atmosphere was quite light-hearted despite the serious topic of the killing of slaves. Once I was given a group of people to work with I immediately got them to read through the scene together and talked about the differences between the characters and we all established the social ranking of the characters. I feel like I could have prompted more discussions about the individual characters than the group as a whole. I then asked them if they could do a read through of the scene on the actual set and gave them free range of the set and let them move where they thought. Something that I could have done to help them would be adding in some facts about the characters to help them decide where they should move to. I then added in restrictions for each character about the staging that they were allowed to move on. I think that I could have explained why I put those restrictions in place and also encouraged and praised the cast a little more to give them guidance that what they were doing was good and maybe this would have allowed me to push them a little more in the right direction.

Y13 monologues

My chosen monologues

I wanted to choose monologues that would allow me to show all of my skills that I have build up over the course and I wanted the monologues to have juxtaposing story-lines because then I would be able to show different characters that I could play.

My 1st monologue is from Twelfth Night and is performed by Viola.

"I left no ring with her. What means this lady?

Fortune forbid my outside have not charmed her.

She made good view of me; indeed, so much

That, as methought, her eyes had lost her tongue,

For she did speak in starts distractedly.

She loves me sure; the cunning of her passion

Invites me in this churlish messenger.

None of my lord's ring? Why, he sent her none.

I am the man. If it be so, as 'tis,

Poor lady, she were better love a dream.

Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness

Wherein the pregnant enemy does much.

How easy is it for the proper false

In women's waxen hearts to set their forms!

Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we,

For such as we are made of, such we be.

How will this fadge? My master loves her dearly;

And I (poor monster) fond as much on him;

And she (mistaken) seems to dote on me.

What will become of this? As I am man,

My state is desperate for my master's love.

As I am woman (now alas the day!),

What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe?

O Time, thou must untangle this, not I;

It is too hard a knot for me t' untie."

My 2nd monologue is called Next in Line and is performed by Lucille.

"In this monologue, Lucille verbally abuses customers for no apparent reason.  This is a comedy and meant to be a monologue skit.   It’s as if a retail worker can actually speak their mind, this is what might come out.  The character is a real bitch, full of sarcasm and attitude.  Not someone you would like but it works for the piece written.

LUCILLE: Next in line!

(Looking at the items the customer wishes to purchase)

What is that?  You’re actually going to buy that?

HAHAHAHA

Hey, whatever floats your boat lady.

(beat)

What do I mean?  Nothing, I’ll get fired, nevermind.  Sorry I spoke.

(looking at the next item)

Oh God!  Hahaha.  Are you serious about those underwears?  You can fit a dinosaur in those.  Jesus!  Why don’t you lose some weight or something?  God, my uncles a truck driver and gets extremely lonely on long drives and even HE would pass up on what wears those!

I’m sorry, I’ll shut up now.  I’m bad, I know I’m bad.  I’m just opinio—Oh NO!  BROWNIES!!!  You’re going to buy a box, NO, one, two, THREE, THREE boxes of brownies??!!! Wow, hey, be my guest…go for it.  Come back in a week for a bigger size of undies.  You can always exchange….

(trying not to laugh but then)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What?  My manager?  My manager is off duty right now.  He’s too busy porking the woman who works nextdoor at Subway.

What?  You ARE speaking to someone…ME.

(smiles sarcastically)

Come on, come on.  Just pass over the next item so you can get back to the farm.  Let’s go, keep it moving, let’s go.  Come on, come on.  Send it down.

Awwwwww, now THAT’S nice.  That is really really….HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.  YEAH RIGHT!  AS IF!!!

A poco dot dress!  God, now it makes sense, you work for the circus don’t you?  You’re one of those freaks!  Do you have free tickets?  Do ya?  Come on, do ya?  Just one, give me a pass for one.

(beat)

Why is your face turning beat red?  Are you okay?  That’s why you gotta lay off the pasta there babe.  I’ll tell you what.  Why don’t you go back in the store and buy yourself a salad?  A nice healthy salad.  Go on, you do that and I’ll be right here waiting for you.  Chop, chop!  Go on!  I’ll give you a recipe!

NEXT IN LINE!

Hello sir!  HAHAHA.  Oh yeah, you’re gonna need those!  Why bother?  Condoms?  Like you are actually getting laid?

HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

Go buy a mirror instead and take a haaaaard and I mean haaaaard look at

yourself there pal. Whew! Isle seven pal. Yeah, right next to isle six where we sell facial cream, which I strongly suggest you use for those holes in your

face. God have mercy on you! Church! Go to church and say a selfish prayer, be sure to catch the late night mass so you don’t scare anybody.

NEXT IN LINE!!!!"

My 3rd monologue is called Your money's worth and is performed by Carla

You give up so easily! You don't get validation, you walk away. You don't get enough attention, you take some pills. That's the problem with your generation, really. You're over-indulged by your parents and you're spoiled and impatient and entitled. Hence the so-called suicide attempts. You don't want to die, you want people to pity you. It's pathetic.

If you wanted to die, you'd be dead. You would keep trying, over And over, until you got it right. But you don't drink bleach. You don't hang yourself or jump off a bridge or crash your car into a wall. You take pills. You stick your head in the oven. It's a cry for help. So stop wasting your time idealizing and romanticizing death and accept the fact that everyone is miserable. Life is hell for everyone. They just fake it better.

Who are you to think you deserve to be different? Just grow up already! Lose 80 pounds, buy some new clothes. Get a haircut and put on some make-up. Stop looking for fairness and authenticity and inspiration, because they don't exist. Get a job at a bank and get a manicure once a week. Marry a dentist. But for God's sake, don't have children, because your DNA is filled with idealism, and no kid deserves to be saddled with that. When you're unhappy, go shopping. Run five miles a day and grow your own tomatoes. Volunteer at a soup kitchen. Read to visually impaired gay senior citizens. All you have to do is quit whining, show some willpower! You're not special. You are just like everyone else. You think you're in pain, but that's all in your head. Just SNAP OUT OF IT.

I decide on these monologues as I feel that each one lets me show a different side to what characters I can act in and I really think that I could push some of these monologues to the extreme, especially in the last one and she is very unstable and she has varying levels of anger and upset throughout the entire monologue as we think she has herself under control yet she begins another round of complaining and dissapointment.

For each monologue there were multiple things that I needed to consider as I was going through them:

• Where am I?
• What time of day is it?
• Are there are objects around me?
• Do I focus on any of the objects?
• If I do, why?
• Are there other people who I can see?
• Can they see me?
• Do they talk to me?
• Who am I talking to?

Each monologue is set in a different place and so visualizing where I am and the exact places of each thing really helps me get into the character.

Y13 Week 1: Classwork

Over the holidays, we were sent a list of plays that we could choose from to direct for one of our units. We have to choose from: FOMO  by Suhayla El-Bushra, Status Update by Tim Etchells and DNA by Dennis Kelly. As I was looking through the series of plays I found something interesting about the author of Status Update.

Status Update

I first looked into the play-write and found that he is a part of a group of 6 people who are based in Sheffield called Forced Entertainment and they make performances in all types of different media and contexts. They have worked in many different styles of theater from being very brash and theatrical to text-based and quite minimalist. "In everything we do we are trying to find ways to talk about contemporary experience, and to create exciting and intimate encounters with audiences."

Here is a link to a video of Speak Bitterness by Forced Entertainment.

https://youtu.be/bgwAQ_-VwWY

I found watching this very interesting as only some of the lines are actually choreographed and some of the actors are told when to stand and others aren't and I find it very interesting that the director put so much trust in their actors in order for the play to be portrayed as it is. I think that this would be a very hard way to try and direct a group of people as there was so little planning involved but that also my be the point of this style? I think that if I were to do it in this style I would struggle as I like to have everything planned and know that my actors also know what is going on but I would try and add some elements of this, if the style was required.

Wednesday

We started off the lesson discussing Director's Challenge that would be a complete module in our course. We tried to identify all of the things that a director needs to think about when they are either planning a performance or during the rehearsal process.

We started off by discussing how important the author's intention is throughout the process of creating a piece as it should be the starting point of all directing as that is the main thing that you are trying to communicate to the audience. To establish what the intention is, we need to find the key elements of what they want.

Once you do find out what the author's intentions are but you wanted your piece to have a different driving purpose then you need an intention that is still along the same line so that your piece can still reflect the core values that it would have originally had. What you are doing with the script and play needs to reflect what the intention of the piece, whether you are following those intentions exactly or whether your interpreting it, throughout.

We made a list as a class of all of the things that we thought a director needs to be constantly aware of throughout the entire process and we applied how the authors intention was portrayed through some of the bullet points to the production of Antigone that we performed last year:

• Casting: A description of Antigone was given at the start of the play and so that was taken into account, also deciding whether Antigone was the protagonist or antagonist effected the casting as you would therefore look for characteristics in the actor to fit that part.
• Editing the script/Interpreting the script: Jean Anouilh wanted the guards to be rude and coarse so to enhance that intention, we purposefully added in more swearing and we also had to change some of the words as it was translated from french so in order for the audience to understand the intention we had to change the language to help that.
• Props/Costume/Staging Shape:  We added in cards for the guards as there was a description of them playing cards in the Chorus' opening speech. We also added machetes to intensify the violence aspects of the brother's fight for the throne. We added in a movement sequence for the Ismene scene about the tumbrel as it was relevant to the time that it was written in so we knew that Anouilh had put that description in for a reason and so we accentuated that by adding in a movement sequence especially with the mob as well, it directly linked to the intention and it drew the audience into the piece.
• Lighting/sound/music: We added in birds for when Antigone is burying her brother and also at the start, our director wanted to establish the setting before any of the actors had actually entered the room, and so added sound effects of cars to emphasis the fact that we were in a studio and we made the lighting rigs visible on stage to help reiterate where we were.
• Audience Positioning: We tried to make the audience as close to the stage as possible so that we could emphasize the style of the play which was metatheatre, so the lines that were directed towards the audience had a bigger impact due to the closeness of the audience.

We decided to order the list into what we thought should be the order that we address each one:

1. Author's Interpretation
2. Research
3. Interpreting play
4. Style
5. Casting
6. Rehearsal Schedule
7. Editing
8. Actor Training
9. Atmosphere of rehearsal
10. Disaster Management
11. Set/Staging
12. Audience Positioning
13. Deadlines
14. Sound/music/lights
15. Props/costume
16. Health and Safety

We said that this didn't have to be followed step by step, each director's list may be a little different as different styles and challenges arise. Here are some of the lists that were made:

We also tried to decide whether style or editing came first and we came to the conclusion that it is up to the director because sometimes you need to find out what style helps show the author's intention best before you start deciding if you need to cut any scenes. We also agreed that sometimes costume needs to b established early if each character needs to be aware of what they are wearing and it depends on what the needs of the play are. With actor training, your cast needs to be considered as you need to find out what experience they might already have but if you need to teach them a new style like Godber, you need to feed that into your rehearsal schedule.

We started looking at a text called "Our Country's Good" by Timberlake Wertenbaker and we used this as though we were going to be directing this play and so the first thing that we needed to do was find out what the author's intention was. We found that the play is actually n adaptation of another play called "The Playmaker" which was written in 1987 which is based on historical facts about a performance that took place in Sydney in 1789. We decided that it is a modernized play about oppression as the original performance was in a prison and performed by the prisoners themselves. It's a riddle wrapped in an enigma.

When Wertenbaker went to see a performance in 1988, that was also performed in a prison, she got to speak to them afterwards and she said that "that night was pivotal for the acting and writing of Our Country's Good: it confirmed all our feelings about the power and the value of theatre." After this, we decided that she intentions were to show the audience how powerful and valuable theatre can be especially when performed by a certain cast, for example, convicts or outcasts. We also found out that somebody proposed that she could do an adaptation of the original play and she accepted straight away as she thought it would be a good way for her to accelerate her knowledge, understanding and to show her interpretation of the play. She has said that she is a very emotionally private person, so immediately we would expect it to have a political message as she wouldn't want to show outright feelings.

Some questions that we decided need to have an answer before directing the first scene:

• What was happening at the time the play is set?
• What happens in the play as a whole?
• Can I infer/search what is happening to the characters to help me understand?
• Is there a style that has already been established before?
• What is the message the author wants the audience to leave with?
• What is happening at the time the play was being written?

After deciding on these questions we read through the first scene and stated some facts that we found, for example, it's very short, everyone that talks is talking about a different subject to the rest, the language is very disjointed, it would be quite hard to do it in a realistic style and this could be what the author wanted us to find out from the first scene.

We then begin researching the style that it was performed in and we came across epic theatre which was based off of Brecht. Some elements are episodic scenes with juxtaposing settings which helps accentuate the political message. The audience shouldn't be drawn into the emotional stories, and shouldn't be driven by the need for a hero to succeed instead the idea is that the audience would look at the piece and ask why is this happening? It should make them tilt their heads a little and look at a different perspective "to make the familiar strange."

We found out that Brecht was a bisexual, a political activist, he was on Hitler's death list and had to flee to America. He was also the creator of the quote "Art is not a mirror to reflect reality more a hammer to shape it with." He was influenced by a wide range of writers and practitioners including Chinese theatre and Karl Marx. He believed that while the audience were attached to the action on stage, they then became emotionally involved and they lost the ability to think and to judge. He wanted his audiences to remain distant from the characters so they could make rational judgments on the social comments that he presented through his work. In order for the audience to think this way he used lots of different theatrical devices so that the audience were being constantly reminded that they were watching a performance and not real life. He called the distancing of the audience's emotional involvement the verfremdungseffekt.

We then moved onto thinking about the set design and applied some restrictions to each group:

• 1st group had the budget of the Barbican Theatre - we found that this was very projection based as they could show the contrasting scenes through projections on sheets.

• 2nd group had the budget of The Royal Court - we found that this was more lighting based as they didn't have enough room or budget to have any more complex designs.

• Our group had the budget of the Globe - we decided that we would have a basic set that would be able to have elements that could be added for the different sets and we realized that with the budget we had, it would have to be very simple and we suddenly realized that because the Globe is outside, we had to filter in the element of natural lighting so we couldn't actually have any lights that weren't under the cover of the stage.

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After thinking about set design, we started to look at staging and we all agreed that starting with your set early on in the rehearsal process let's actors know what they are doing and when they can walk. Especially if you are wanting to us height in your piece then using the risers early will allow the actors to understand what the stage will be like.

We looked at a possible staging type that included minimal budget, so we used quite robotic staging that wouldn't necessarily be moved.

We started thinking of how to show the audience what time frame you are in immediately before any lines are said:

- Title with date, said out loud.

- Props, our example was a gun. So depending on the type of gun you have it would immediately place the audience in the time frame.

-Costume, our example was a soldier's uniform. Like the props, as soon as a character would dress in a certain way, then that would influence the audience's interpretation of them.

-Projection onto a board - have two cast members come onstage with a blank white board and then project the date and the time.

We then read through some of the scripts of the plays that we have the option of directing and picked out some features that we thought were interesting to play about with:

• Status Update 

- Spotlights to emphasize who is speaking or all characters on stage being lit?

- Do we want movement around the stage or keep it quite minimal?

- How do we want the conversational lines to be delivered? To the audience or to each other to create some repore between the characters?

• FOMO

- Is it a criticism of our generation or more a comment on what's going on?

- Would people of the same age take it as though its a mockery of them?

-Would a light-hearted tone be better? 

Frantic Assembly Workshop

Frantic Assembly

https://www.franticassembly.co.uk/

Before we did the Frantic Assembly workshop I did a bit of research about the origins of frantic and their basics. 

"Can you be terrified and fearless? That is how we started Frantic Assembly. We began with little more than a fierce work ethic and a desire to do something different and to do it differently. The name Frantic Assembly gives it all away. It conjures an energy created by joining together. It has always been about this energy and learning from each other. From a reckless leap into the unknown Frantic Assembly has developed into one of the most studied and praised theatre companies working today. Our ambition is that we continue to learn and remain committed to making brave and bold theatre. At times it is physically dynamic and brutal. At others it's proudly tender and fragile. Frantic Assembly has always been about more than the work on the stage. It is about the ethos of collaboration, of empowerment, of that constant desire to improve. It is about telling stories in a voice we don't always hear and about finding talent in places we don't always look. Over the years the Frantic Method of devising theatre has helped people understand and make work throughout the world. Founded in 1994 by Scott Graham, we have toured extensively across Great Britain and worked in over 40 different countries internationally collaborating with some of today's most inspiring artists."

To start off with, we did an extensive warm up that engaged our whole body and one of the exercises was called Barbara Windsors. This was where you have your arms across the front of your body and then open them so that they are out at your sides and then you do the same again, so that you do each action 4 times. You then swing your arms up and down. We had to do this multiple times and it really made us work as a team because if one person was out of time we had to start again.

We then did a focus exercise where there was 3 chairs set up in a slalom type of thing and we had to run around the outside and then down the center of them. This made us really concentrate on what we were doing. We were given the advice to overshoot the distance around the chairs and use our legs to propel ourselves forward. We also said that it becomes more interesting to watch when the participates are completely focused on what they are doing and putting their all into getting around these chairs. We began to add more complexity to the slalom and so we said that when the person reaches the first chair, we were to make eye contact with the person at the start of the line and then together you would run to the next chair at the same time. Once you got to the last chair, you didn't stop and you had to run through the middle of the people crossing to the chairs at the side.

Maggie, our instructor, said that if Frantic were to put this on the stage, they would up the speed which would up the intensity and then they would put about 3 or 4 of these on stage at once and have them all intertwining. This would then make the entire piece really interesting as all actors on stage know that they are safe but the audience's brains can't understand how it's actually being performed as it seems quite frantic and misplaced.

We moved on to another focus exercise, which was in pairs and we had to place one hand on top of the other and guide each other round. We began to do this with one person's eyes open and the other person's closed.

https://youtu.be/SrSRBNjatXY

Afterwards we had a discussion about which position we found easier and personally I found having my eyes closed easier as all I had to worry about was the connection on my hand not being broken and making sure that I followed wherever this hand took me. When you have your eyes open all you can think about is making sure that everyone around this person isn't going to bump into them and you have to be spatially aware so that if there's a free space in the room then you need to take you partner there.

After we did this trust building exercise between our pairs, we started doing some small lifts that would be the building blocks for us later on. We started off by just leaning into each other and trying to lift the legs that were in the middle up so that we were counter balancing each other giving us the freedom to move our inside legs wherever we want.

Having learnt the basics for using each other to rely on, we began to put these ideas into small lifts. The first was a very easy lift to the side. You have to wrap your arm around your partner's waist and we found that the easiest thing was if the smaller person lifted the taller person because their hips were lower down and the bigger person could push more weight into their shoulders. All you had to do was lean to the side and the taller person would put all their weight into your hip and you would be able to balance. We then found that if we wanted to move your partner the best way was when they were at the top of the balance, they were the lightest and so that was the time that you would pivot and your partner would be able to walk out of the lift.

https://youtu.be/x47yuYq97to

Lift 1: https://youtu.be/GGvl4aiEn7U

We then progressed onto something slightly harder which was changing the grips so that your arm was around the front and this time your partner had to hold onto your shoulders instead of pushing on them because I would be in control of their hips and legs which therefore meant that they had to make sure that they stayed as close to my upper body as possible by pulling themselves in.

Lift 2: https://youtu.be/qT-8MzN7038

After getting some of the basic lifts under our belt, we then proceeded to move onto something a little more challenging which entailed on of the people being lifted over our shoulder. This meant that each person in the pair needed to be completely focused on what was to happen as the person who was being lifted needed to use the other's hips as a lever for them to stay up on so that was a kind of platform that they could use to hold on to. Also as their legs were being raised the more weight needed to be pushed into the lifters hips to counterbalance themselves and also to keep their chest from dragging them forwards.

Lift 3: https://youtu.be/A3F1pe7UJy8

Once we had experimented with all the different lifts, we had a break. Me and one of my partner's decided to make a small sequence with pulls added into the lifts so that all the lifts would be connected. We thought that this could be used in a flash mob for example and could be used as a smaller version of a bigger piece.

Lift sequence: https://youtu.be/0QhQGlNabVs

We then moved onto squeeze duets/trios which consisted of small movements where each person had to touch a part of their partners body and then they did the same. You would make them link together and they became a squeeze sequence. We found that adding in some of the lifts we had previously learnt, added extra intricacy and also playing around with the speed of the movements allowed us to make better eye contact with each other and relationships between us began to form.


https://youtu.be/8_bWWazhSak


After showing all of them to one another, we decided that we would look at two of them and start developing stories for them as this is one of frantic's ideas: you create the movement and then you add the story. We looked one of the pairs and we discussed possible stories that could unfold: broken relationship, a relationship that was good at the start and then took a turn for the worst or a friendship that has been destroyed over time. We originally didn't specifically say which story it was but we decided to add a rule to one of the people which was every move that she makes towards the other person whether that be a touch, reach or grab needs to be an apology. We then saw the story developing as the character that was saying sorry eventually left and we said that she had enough of saying sorry and she'd had enough.

We then looked at our groups piece and we were in a three. We decided to add a rule into ours as well which was giving Hannah a book and she had to read as much as she could whilst still taking part in our sequence. We found that it effected our piece quite a lot as the book became Hannah's focus which meant that when she was meant to be holding eye contact with one of us, she was looking down at the book instead which made us react to the book.

We then started to discuss the stories that could be around this sequence and we said that Hannah was almost lost in this book and the two of us were like people in the story guiding her round the sequence of events in the book. We were quite amazed at the fact that these stories just came from a small movement that we made up in 10 minutes and we were speculating about the amount of depth we could have gone into if we had spent a whole hour making this sequence more and more detailed.

We thought that this would be a good point to start doing some group lifts so that everyone could be involved in one big movement. We started off by doing some basic group lifts like a plank hold lift which required 6 people initially and it meant that everyone had to be connected and concentrating on the lift because we were lifting another person in the air and they were reliant on us as well. When you do the lift two or three times it gets to a point where you can start to take one hand of and this means that you can do the lift with less people. The does add a little more danger to the lift, but you only take a hand off when you know that the lift is safe and the person in the air is safe.

We then split into some more groups and those who had participated in the first lift when we were all learning it had to teach other people the roles which I found very enjoyable. We were able to tell people what they needed to do to keep everyone in the lift safe and if something went wrong we could step in and give them advice on what they needed to change.

The next lift that we learnt was called a Calipo lift which was literally where one person stood in the middle and we came around them. The person being lifted used the two bases shoulders to push themselves up and then once they were off the ground the two bases grabbed their feet and all the people around the outside helped push them up so that they were in the air.

The lift was slightly harder than the last because it involved more people and that was more people to engage and make sure were paying attention. Sometimes the problem was there were too many hands on the person which meant that it became slightly confusing as there wasn't enough space for that many people and so sometimes you had to take yourself out of the lift in order for the lift to be more successful. 

The next lift was again harder than the last because this time the person who was being lifted was on their back and they couldn't see whether the people underneath had them safely or not, so they had to put complete trust in the people who were lifting them and we had to make sure that we were in complete control over the person. We found that the best way to keep everyone safe was the person that was being lifted completely relaxed and didn't hold any of their weight back because if they did it made them become heavier because they were tensing all of their muscles.

After having a short break, we decided to refocus as a group and so we decided to do a focus activity called Quad which entailed us standing in lines of 4 horizontally and one behind the other. There was a piece of music playing and we had to get the beat in our heads and we progressed onto jumping to the beat. As we progressed and got used to the beat, we began adding in movements on nearly every beat so that it become much harder. I think that it really helped refocus the whole group and as we made it harder, we began to come together as a group and starting to help each other more and more. 

https://youtu.be/gdiXOOa9TdI

Having learnt all of these different lifts, we decided to start making some sequences that included all of the lifts and partner work that we had learnt earlier on. We started off with one person, who was going to be lifted, choosing 5 places in the room to walk to and the rest of the group had to use the lifts to get them to the next place. As we made these sequences, we tried to incorporate everyone in the group and as we were adding more lifts and moves in we made sure that everyone was doing something different and each lift had different people underneath so that everyone was involved.

https://youtu.be/h17s7jtOrQM

After showing them to each other, we discussed the stories that we beginning to show even though this was just a sequence of moves that we put together, there was still a story being formed in the audience's mind and this was kind of amazing. In our piece, it seemed that we were all children in a playground and Sarah wanted to play with me and the beginning but Caitlin didn't want us to play together and so took me off of Sarah. She then proceeded to try and find some other people to play with but she couldn't and then Charlotte shoved her out of the way and that was the kind of the last straw for her and that it where the calipo lift came in and she began to rise above Charlotte and stand up to her bully. We then all followed the action that was happening like we were small children and then when we thought something was about to happen, we walked off so that we wouldn't be apart of it.

After discussing these stories we revisited the sequences and added more elements that would add to the story. For example, me and Caitlin walked off arm in arm after the lift with Sarah and at the end when we would normally turn away when something was going to happen, we turn back to look again as though we were telling them that we were on Sarah's side and then when she walked off that was our cue to leave as though we were supporting her in her decision.

I really enjoyed the workshop as you could completely throw yourself into the activities and once we had gotten used to Maggie and the group as we had never worked in groups this big and a mixture of all the age groups, we could all comfortably work together and do anything. I also show the progression of some people from the beginning when they were scared to do things right up until the end where they were volunteering themselves to do activities that they would never have done before.