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.