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.