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?