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.