Week 8: Director's Challenge

Section 3

Again we had another cast member missing and so I had to step in as Luke as it was Alexis' week to be lead director and so I took a step back to watch and write down any changes that we could make. We used the first 10 minutes to go over the lift that we did last week so that we could add in the person that wasn't here last week. We then went straight into a run through of Section 1 and 2 to see how fluid we could get it. In the video it is still quite lumpy but we think that fluidity will come with the cast learning their lines and coming off script. We made sure that we highlighted that learning lines was the key to unlocking the potential of this play and so we had to put slightly more pressure on the cast to learn their lines. https://youtu.be/FAHDPfuVzzE (We were in a room with another group and so sometimes it is hard to hear the lines that are being said. Although we could this to our advantage and try to get the cast to speak over the noise so they are using their full vocal range but this may just add to the chaos.)

Improvements that I thought of and we discussed as directors:

• Synchronisation of movements - The sharpness of the unison look up and then down. We definitely need to reiterate what words that the two movements are on and make sure that each move is more defined to help emphasise the move. 
• Staging - From a different angle the chair that I am sat on could block the girl sat on the floor but with our actual staging she will be sat on a riser which brings her slightly higher but I think that we need to investigate a little more when we have our full set. 
• Natural movements/twitches - The small movements that we have previously told them to avoid are slowly making their way back in, so I think that we need to be stricter about the movements and so in the rehearsal in half term I think that needs to be one of our focal points throughout the rehearsal.
• Reactions to lines - We need to figure out whether we want the cast to react to each others lines because reactions are quite natural and we want the audience to realise that these actual people being themselves onstage not characters, but on the other hand if the reactions are too big then the audience's attention will snap to that reaction so maybe the compromise is that the reactions need to be big enough for themselves to be reflected but small enough not to attract attention.
• Lines being said over movement - I think that if there's a movement going on the rest of the cast who aren't involved need to watch the movement so that they help draw attention to it and then the lines commence. If the lines are said over the top of the movements I think that we lose the author's intention, to see how long an audience can go until they lose concentration, as the style isn't reiterated after the movement. The movements should offer the audience a break from the stillness of the lines and allow them something to think about and if this is overridden with lines then it defeats the purpose.
• Fumbling of lines or loss of place - Because we are in the early stages of practice, we expect these but I think that we need to tell the cast not to react if someone does as we want them to really understand the atmosphere that we are trying to set up and if the cast are laughing or breaking that atmosphere by reacting to the loss of lines then they are disrupting the whole piece.

At one point, I actually did a leg swap by accident as a natural move but I think that we could use that as a small move to re-attract the audience's attention. I also think that the synchro movement on the line "we know the sun sets in the west and rises in the east", looks really effective and the pause before Joel's line, which is after, really helps emphasize the movement and I think that we should add a pause after every movement as it sets it apart from the rest of the piece and it could accentuate the snap in and out of the stillness. 

After this run through when then did a read through of Section 3 with the cast adding in their ideas for movements and for the positioning of those movements. Because we have done this process will both of the past sections, the cast have started to look deeper where and why we were putting the movements in their places which is what we wanted to happen. We gave them slightly more freedom with section 3 as we wanted to allow them to feel a part of the directing process. Although we do want to let them have an input, we do keep adding in ideas that we actually want and then letting them expand of them. We then narrowed down the movements that we wanted into around 2/3 and slotted them into the section. We wanted our cast to feel like they are really apart of this process and so we started asking him questions about how we are going to do the movements. For example there are a series of lines that talk about the fact that the cast is always looking forward and they wouldn’t be able to tell “what’s happening behind” them and a specific line that we previously decided we wanted a movement on was “unless we turn around.” We knew that we wanted a movement here as it was an interesting concept that not everybody thinks about in a drama piece and so we asked the cast what do you think we should do. We had many ideas including a look over the shoulder, turning around and looking at each other I’m confusion as not many people think of that. As directors, Alexis commented that we would like the movement to be a turn around but then she sparked the question of  should it be the whole cast? We had a small discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of doing a whole cast turn around but then we decided that the positives outweigh the negatives and it would look very effective. So we told the cast to all stand on the word “camera” from the previous line and then, once the line had been said, to turn around it a circle in silence to emphasise the move.

The final thing that we did in this weeks rehearsal, was practice the fluidity of the lift so that when we showed it at the end of the session we could do it fluidly enough for everyone to see what it would be like in the actual performance. Some feedback that we got was, when Peter, the boy who has his back to the audience throughout the lift, says his line, it is directed towards the back. We knew this from practice but we thought that we would focus on the safety aspects of the lift as we are still in the early stages and so we didn't ask him to turn around as we wanted his focus to be on the lift. We did think, with practice, that Peter could help lift Leah and then just before they begin to rotate her, turn around and say his line to the audience. This would mean that only 4 people would be spinning Leah which could be a safety hazard and so we want to be absolutely certain that the 4 can do that before we put it in the real performance. Overall it was a very successful rehearsal, getting everything that we planned to do completed, staying on track to block everything in the next week and helping fuel the casts understanding of the play as a whole.

Week 8: TIE (Storms)

Developing scenes

We started off the lesson by reviewing all of what we had done so far. We specifically went over the 4 topics that we discussed last week where the miss-communication of a boys emotion could lead to something vital or lead to both themselves and their peers suffering. We managed to get them down to 3 main events, difficult home life, exam stress and bereavement, that we could show in small scenes as the build up of pressures on our focal male character, John Doe.

We wanted our first scene to establish the scenario and atmosphere and so we thought that we could use the difficult home lift as our first short scene. We used dramatic asides from both the dad's point of view and John to help add to the story-line and keep the audiences attention on what was going on. We thought that we should use the moment of orientation to set up the atmosphere and we said that we wanted a lot of things going on so that we could add in dual conversations. So we had the younger brother looking for his school bag, John some revision on the kitchen table and the father figure waiting for his breakfast. This allowed us to have the freedom of multiple conversation going on at the same time. We also had the event of water being split onto John's revision notes through the mum being pushed by the younger brother which sparked even more conversations and the atmosphere grew with the intensity of the lines. The dramatic aside that we used for John's character was "Parents are arguing again, doesn't happen all the time, but it's started happening more often. I have to get myself ready and I need to make sure my little brother's alright. I'm not stupid. I know money's tight, they're trying not to let on but it's kinda obvious and that just makes it worse." We think that this is a good way of settings the scene for the audience as they now understand that this is a reoccurring thing that has started to become a problem and it also shows John's perspective on it which adds to the insight on the pressures that have already started building up. We also changed one of the lines to help drip feed more pressures into John and so we added in to the father's aside that the mother is pregnant.

We the thought we could use the exam pressure scene next at it seemed to be in chronological order and at the end of the last scene the two boys were going to school so this seemed like the next best scene to add in.We set the scene of a optional revision session and some of the class were staying and others were wanting to leave and we thought that this would be a good opportunity to add in some more pressures such as the teacher, a girlfriend and a mate. The scene builds up with all of these different people adding to John's pressures as they all have different expectations on him. The teacher wants him to reach his potential, his mate wants him to come out to football and his girlfriend wants him to do whatever he wants. The dramatic aside we used was "Fuck's sake! S'not like I don't want to stay but I need to pick up my little brother because no one else can and my parents don't want him going home by himself. Don't get me wrong, I do want to stay and she's kinda fit, but I just can't today." After we had done the bereavement scene, we decided to change the lines from "no one else can," to "my parents have a hospital appointment," so that we were drip feeding information about other pressures that were going on and this could also reflect the pressure that John is putting on himself by not telling anyone about his other ongoing issue.

Our final installment of the short scenes was the bereavement and we have previously drip feed that the mother is pregnant and so we made it so that the parents have lost the baby and so they ask John to take some of the pressure off them by looking after his brother more but, in turn, this puts more pressure onto John, adding to the pressures that we have already build up in the previous scenes. We thought that the father should have another dynamic aside so that we could see the thought process of a grown male in this situation to show that it effects everyone. We also chose miscarriage instead of stillborn because the statistic of having a miscarriage is 1 in 4 so we thought that it would effect more people and therefore we could relate to more people.

We knew that we wanted all of the asides to have a juxtaposing atmosphere so if the scene was high intensity the aside might have a more casual tone and vice versa so that the change of tone invites the audience to listen and understand what's going on.

We then had a discussion with Mr Bashir, a teacher who specializes in dealing with students who have or show signs of mental health. He said that the main signs of deteriorating mental health is that they will start to isolate themselves as they don't know who to talk to or don't know how to access support. This sometimes progresses into risk taking and things such as smoking weed and drinking alcohol or even progressing onto self-harm in some extreme circumstances. There is normally an underlying mental health issue when people start moving towards suicide, which is the direction in which we want our piece to go so that we begin to talk about suicide prevention. Everyone is from a different background and are brought up in different ways so some boys might have been taught that it's okay to openly talk about their feelings, and others are taught "man-up" and that "big boys don't cry." We need to talk this into consideration and think about the contrasting ways that some people might react to suicide and the triggers that are there.

We thought that the main reaction was going to be defensive of their actions that we are claiming they have and so we thought that we could add in a scene that shows us acknowledging this action. We could have a teacher who has noticed some of the signs of deteriorating mental health and has called John into a meeting about it. We would have John reacting in a way that is quite defensive and this enables us to show that we understand how they react and why.

We carried on adding a few more scenes to the piece and one of which was a scene between John and his girlfriend, Holly, were she has caught him drunk with his friends. We thought that this was showing one of the routes that John could take to "forget" about all the problems that are going on in his life. I think that this is a good example of what someone might do in this modern age as alcohol is available to many more people that it should be and it is one of the easiest forms of distractions for people in our target audience age range.
We then followed this scene with another that presented the coming home of John to find his dad sitting in the hallway waiting to confront him about where he has been. I thought that this scene could be quite hard because it involves two male characters. Both will automatically channel there emotions through anger as they will both sense that this is a confrontation, and also the father will want to lecture the son on his behavior and show his power and dominance as the older male figure and "that is what a father should do." We made sure that the scene ended with the father gaining control over John and sending him to bed but also showing signs that he is just relieved that his home and safe. We thought that the father would been in a similar position as John and being dealing with his own stress in a similar way as he needs to step-up and keep his family together.

We had a small discussion about Forum theatre and we said that a forum, in the roman times, was a place where you had a discussion and in a modern sense this could be an online forum for example. So if a forum means discussion then forum theatre could also be called "discussion theatre." Which it is in a sense as the cast take a scenario and they take on board discursive points from the audience. A facilitator would begin asking the audience questions and establish the subject that they would be addressing. The cast would aim for a resolution through these discussion points and could also add in points that might fuel the discussion onward, possibly into the direction of the resolution. We found that this pushed us onto looking at Augusto Boal, who was the founder of Theatre of the Oppressed, "whose objective was to study, discuss and express issues concerning citizenship, culture and various forms of oppression using theatrical language... His objective was to work out issues citizens might be facing in their communities through theatre, and also to discuss the laws of the city of Rio with people on the streets... Boal also worked with prisoners in Rio and Sao Paulo. Boal argued that people in prison are not free in space, but that they are in time. and that the Theatre of the Oppressed strives to create different types of freedom so that people are able to imagine and think about the past, the present, and the future instead of having to wait for it All this was in order for prisoners to have a 'healthier and more creative lifestyle.'"(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Boal#Center_for_the_Theatre_of_the_Oppressed-CTO-Brazil ) Boal pioneered majority of the techniques that are used throughout Theatre In Education pieces and I have personally seen multiple T.I.E pieces, like "The Raft of the Medusa", and researching Boal has shown me the roots of where the techniques that I have seen, and are currently working with, come from. Applying this discursive technique to our piece, I think the Dad scene would be a key spot, where we could show our version and then ask the audience if they think either of the characters would react in a different way, or their body language might be slightly different and we could also ask them to put in some lines that they think either of them might say. There is a risk that our audience might not participate at all or they might think of it in more of a joky manner and take the scene out of hand. I think that we really need to think about our course of actions if that happens. Will one of us have to give them a line? How will we respond to any inappropriate comments? If the audience to participate, there are core responses that we can anticipate being said as lines, things like "I'm disappointed in you", "I'm angry at you" etc.
I think that this could be a good path into some workshop activities and audience participation and so we could come to a comedic end, re-establishing the audience's interest, in our "scientific" presentation. We could then snap out of our male characters and acknowledge the fact that we are all girls and we don't know how boys react we are just guessing and assuming. This would then lead us into Boal's "discursive points" with the audience.

Week 7: Director's Challenge

Section 2

This week, we had another member of the cast missing and so one of us had to step in to read the lines and also when we started experimenting with lifts, one of us had to step in again. This set us back slightly as we wanted to get as much of the script blocked in the first 4 weeks of rehearsal so that we could maximize the time perfecting it but we had to slightly adjust our plan. We then decided to experiment with frantic assembly lifts instead so that we could decide which ones worked better and which ones were easier and were easier to get into.

We decided that this week would be my week to be the central director and Alexis would be reading in the lines whilst I explained the lifts. She would also make notes throughout the process and then we would discuss the changes in a small director's meeting after the rehearsal. I also asked Alexis to be an extra spotter on each of the first times doing the lifts so that we were very aware of the safety of the person being lifted.

We kept to our original plan slightly in that we ran through section 1 to check that everyone had remembered where we put the movements in and we made sure that we reiterated the fact that we didn’t want any other movements to happen apart from the choreographed ones. This is something that the cast was struggling with both this week and last so next week I think we need to incorporate an activity into the warm-up that will allow them to get into the nature of the play and re-emphasise the need for no movements.

We then did a read through of section 2, which is the shortest section of the play, and asked the same question to the cast: when do you think the audience's attention will falter? We all established that we think it would be when the subject moves onto quite scientific statistics and ideas and so we all agreed that there needed to be a big movement at this point so that the audience would stay connected and interested through the lines that they might not understand.

This is where we brought in the idea of a frantic assembly lift as we have had previous experience of learning how to do them and we've also got videos that we can look back on to help remind us. Before this, me and Alexis went through the videos that we took at the workshop we did with frantic assembly and made sure that we knew all of the safety features that need to be established before we lifted anyone in the air. We started off the process in our cast, by establishing and giving each person a specific part in the lift for example, "the rock," "the sides" etc. And we made sure that everyone knew what their role was in the lift and we highlighted the danger aspects of the lift and made sure that everyone was focused on the person that we were lifting instead of anything else that was going on.  Despite me having to step in, we still carried on with doing the lifts instead of postponing it to next week because we knew we wanted the frantic lift to go into section 2 so if the majority of the cast know where it is, we could still do a run through of section 1 and section 2 together and we can just say the lines. Also we have had a chat to the year 12 who was missing and they understand the concept of the lift and what they need to do, we just need to do the full lift with everyone involved.
We started off with a plank lift which required everybody and I think that the cast adapted well to the corrections that we gave them, which included the placement of their hands and altering the way that they stood in order for them to have the most balance. Here is the first frantic lift we did: https://youtu.be/1ao29wgUEIU

After we had had a couple of tries at it, I made sure to ask the cast something that they found easy about the lift, something that they found hard and then something that they thought could be added if needed. Majority of the comments were that the coming down from the lift was very easy for everyone and everyone found it very easy to get to their next position. The hard comments were mainly about the going up of the lift as we established that Leah, who was being lifted, needed to lift a leg in order for her to push off the floor and also to get her weight onto "the rock." I then decided to step in and establish an idea that we could do for an improvement which was to add a turn in to the lift. So when Leah was stable in the air, we would then rotate her so that she went from her stomach to her back and then was placed down onto both feet. I thought that this small change could be added in as this would be the first big movement that the audience will have seen and so we wanted it to look as interesting as possible.  The cast agreed and we had a try. For this lift, we made sure that there was an extra spotter which was our teacher just in case we had a fall. https://youtu.be/ZGS2W0MmdzE

This was the full lift sequence that we want to incorporate into the piece. https://youtu.be/9e23XyvZ-ZU

After we established the full sequence we then did a run through of the whole of section 2 with the lift. https://youtu.be/ZfGvDtLMLyU We think that we need more fluidity between the lines and also we established that everyone is speaking in the same tone and so we need to highlight that they can still talk as themselves instead of having a dead tone of voice and not using their voice to juxtapose everyone from each other.

Week 7: TIE (Storms)

Discussion

This week, we had a shorter lesson than normal and therefore couldn't create any new drama to add into the piece but we decided to have a class discussion about where we wanted the piece to go from the societal pressures on boys. We all said that we wanted the piece to take a slightly more serious route from here and we have done the comical sketches that hook the audience into the piece but now we need to start feeding in the ideas about the focal reason why we are doing this piece: to enlighten y10/y11 boys on the way that they communicate or the ways that they don't communicate and what dangers can come from this.

We all said that we wanted to start snapping out of the stereotypes that we have made and the comical situations and actually see what would happen if we put these people in a real life situation. We started then, to come up with different situations where a boys lack of communication could have some major repercussions on himself and those around him. In our pair we came up with 4 different scenarios:

• Bereavement  - Someone in a boys family has died and this boy has a younger sibling. He doesn't want to tell any of his friends in case they are insensitive or don't understand. We were saying that the boy might want to bottle his feelings up inside so that he could be there for his younger brother or sister and this would have a major strain on the boys emotions and also his mental state which could lead to him taking the grief that he feels and reproducing this into anger. Meaning that there is tension with himself and his peers. But if we were looking from our target audience perspective we said that not everyone would know the feeling directly because not everyone has lost someone but majority of people know someone who has, so we decided that it could work but it would have a bigger effect on some people than others.
• Relationship - A boy has a girlfriend and he also has a close girl who is just a friend. Would the boy feel comfortable in talking freely about his friend to his girlfriend? This sparked an interesting conversation as our teacher said that no male and female relationship can just be platonic and we said that it could. We said that maybe it's because of the gender difference (do girls only view the relationship as platonic but the boys think otherwise?) or maybe it's because of the age difference. I think that our generation has many more friendships that are platonic but we only have the perspective of a girl so we don't know what a boy views the relationship as. I looked on this website (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/men-and-women-cant-be-just-friends/) that said that the results they found "suggest that men, relative to women, have a particularly hard time being 'just friends'." Again if we look from our target audience perspective, our question was would they all have a friendship with a girl? And we wouldn't know the percentage of boys that do so again it may effect more boys than others.
• Friends - A boy has a grandparent who is in hospital and his friends have asked him whether he wants to come outside to play football. He doesn't tell them the real reason why he doesn't come and eventually he stops being invited out. We thought that this could take a massive strain on the boy's life as he now only has his family around him and some boys don't feel comfortable telling their family how they feel in case it puts more stress on them. We said that this might be hard to do especially showing the passage of time from the first time being asked to the last. We didn't think that this would be relevant to the majority of our target audience either because not everyone has experience the loss of friendship regarding a serious issue. Also we talked about a different issue that some boys might want to hide instead of an ill grandparent, and we came up with things like social anxiety at parties and not getting along with the group of friends any more.
• Exams- A boys friend asks him to come out but he has to revise and he doesn't want to say that he is stressed with all of his work load and so doesn't go out. We thought that with this age range, everybody is going to feel that stress at some point and it may affect some more than others but everybody is going to feel at least a little anxious about exams.

We then casually interviewed 4 y11 students and found that all of our assumptions we correct. We then decided we would now add in a scene that introduced one of these situations and establish the scenario in which the stereotype would be put into. We didn’t decide which one we wanted, because we decided that we would go away and next week come back with an idea about one of the scenes and we would then decide which ones we were going to put in the piece.

Week 6: TIE (Storms)

Adding Statistics

We first did a walk through of all that we have done so far and went over the order of what we have done and went over the reasons why we were doing it in such a way. "Banter" is quite an easy way to get an audience to relax and we want the audience to relax in order for them to open up to us about their feelings and how they view their communication skills. We then decided that the biological imperatives that boys are told they should have, need to be challenged on stage by us and we thought that the best way for us to do that would be for one of us to actually step out of the group and challenge what we have presented earlier on. For example, at the start we are stereotyping boys and exploring the ways that they are communicating, and almost criticizing that, but we thought that if we get some facts that compare the amount of boys to girls in different situations, it could propose a good pathway into introducing facts about suicide and the ideas that boys actions are caused by societal influences and not "just because they are boys." We wanted to unpick the stereotyping that we have presented onstage and show how each of them is a societal or peer influence instead of instinctual.

We researched some facts that we could use and we decided on these facts:

• Men are 40% more likely to speed.
• Men are 4 times more likely to lose their hearing.
• Men are 5 times more likely to go to prison
• Men are 3 times more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD.
• 80% of all suicides are men.

We thought that on the last one, we could have someone step out and challenge that statement by saying, "so you're saying that being a boy is bad." And we would then move into the explanation of the societal views on men. We thought that we should highlight the expectations that are presented and forced onto boys from birth and see how they progress throughout a boys life.

We started experimenting with the expectations that are set upon boys and men throughout their lives. Here's what we came up with: https://youtu.be/gkvsHJ1FHy8

I liked the idea that we added some Goberesque style titles in for the audience to understand the age group that we are showing and also we are adding in the sharpness that Gober adds to performance, like when you snap in and out of different scenes. I think that we do need to work on the speed of the lines and the gaps in between the different scenes so that we keep the audience interested and engaged.

Week 6: Director's Challenge

Section 1

Because one of our cast wasn't here last week, we decided that we needed to begin with recapping the entrances and tell Joel where he was meant to be. We had previously asked him to watch the video of what we did last week so that he had a vague idea of what the set looks like and what was going on.

Rehearsal of the entrances we did last week: https://youtu.be/VrVVbOoi9HA

We also asked the whole cast to learn the lines of the movements that we blocked and we used that time to check whether they had. We then told them to plan of what we wanted to do this session, so that we were all on the same page and we all knew what we needed to get done and we think that this is one of the key things to getting our cast to work hard and productively. We told them what we expected to be done by the end of the sessions so that they knew what our goal was and how far we were from achieving that and it really fired up the cast to work collectively. We wanted to be able to do a full run through of Section 1 by the end of the session and we managed to achieve that which lifted the spirits of the group.

We asked their input on where they thought the audience would lose concentration and it was interesting to see where they thought we should put a movement and where we thought. We thought that the audience would lose interest a lot later than they did and so we decided to cut down the space between the movements so that they weren't as close together as they thought they should have been.
We then decided to give the cast a small bit of freedom to decide a move in pairs that could attract the audience's attention. We did offer them some support, saying that it doesn't have to be big and elaborate it could be as simple as swapping places and maintaining eye contact throughout the move. Our cast struggled with the concept of not telling a story with the movements so we had to make sure that our movements were juxtaposing to the lines that were being said so that the audience wouldn't be able to make a connection between the two.
We then watched each pair and discussed what we liked about there movements, things like it was simple enough to draw attention but not enough to make a story, and then we discussed some of the negatives that could come from those movements, the audience might think we are connected in some way etc.
Then we added those movements that we liked into section 1 and made sure that the lines still flowed and that the pace didn't dropped whilst a movement was happening.

Section 1 rehearsal with the movements: https://youtu.be/9Jk9kP63v9k

We were then later asked to perform a small section of what we had been working on and we showed this: https://youtu.be/Ph0oV9xAlMQ

I think that in both of the videos, the rehearsal and the performance, there were small movements from the cast onstage, things like them cracking their fingers, pulling down on their shirts or playing with their hair, and I think that we really need to get across to the cast that we can't have any natural movements because we want the bigger, planned movements to have the biggest impact and if the cast keep doing small movements then it will take away the emphasis on the large moves. I think that we could have been slightly more clearer at the start that this is what we meant because we did explain that they would be sitting/standing still for the majority of the play with only a few movements that attract the audience's attention back because this is what Etchells wanted. I think that next week, we really need to put emphasis on the movements that they are making and make them realise what they are actually doing and how distracting it could actually be.

Week 5: Director's Challenge

Wednesday

This week, we decide the people that we wanted in our cast. We got majority of the people that we had originally wanted in our heads and then a few extra people but we still got our ideal number of people, 6, and the ratio of older students to younger students was also what we wanted, one year 10 and 5 year 12s. We wanted this amount of lower BTECs to create a bigger juxtaposition between them and the one year 10 that we wanted their appearances to have an effect on the audience. We even wanted to extend that contrast by putting Maisie, our year 10, in a onezie to emphaise her age and give the audience something to  attract their attention to at the start.

As soon as we started our rehearsal with our cast, we gave out the scripts and their parts so that we could start work on the script straight away and use the amount of time we have to our advantage. We also gave them, our ideas about their costume and asked them whether it would reflect what they actually wore and some of them, we had to change slightly as we wanted them to be themselves onstage and if we gave them a costume that didn't reflect them then it wouldn't link with what we wanted our play to be. We gave them a small exercise which was to write down the first 3 words that someone would say if they met them. We then explore the reasons why they said those things and then told them that we purposefully put them as their letter because of the traits that we found in them and told them the characteristics that we thought we saw through the subject of the lines they would be talking about.

We then introduced them to the style of forced entertainment and told them that we wanted that whole point of the play was to see how far we could push and audience until they lost concentration. Obviously the cast were asking questions like: so are we just going to be stood there? And why would you do this? We answered these questions in the only way that we could. Yes you're going to be stood for quite a lot of the piece but we are going to be adding in movements, big and small, to attract the audience's attention back to the piece and we told them that it reflected the activity that we did in the carousel: it's a social experiment.

We then gave them the freedom of where they wanted to come onto the stage, where they wanted to sit on the stage and the order that they came on. When we were planning it, we originally thought that this would be too much freedom for them but we decided to add in some of our ideas, like who we wanted to come on first and our lighting ideas which guided them into the kind of idea that we wanted. We said that we would like Peter to come on first as he is very authorial and so we gave him the part of A because he knows how to hold himself onstage and we thought that he could set a good atmosphere on his entrance. We also added in that we wanted him to walk on in the dark with a torch and through the audience and then he added in that maybe he could move around the chair and turn on some of the lights on stage. And everybody pitched in ideas about coming from different areas and we wanted them to come on in their own way to reflect themselves. We then moved onto interesting ways that we could experiment with the audience's concentration right away and we introduced the idea of the timings of the entrances and all of us, including the cast, decided that Peter should be onstage by himself for a while and then everyone else should come on within about 5 seconds of each other except for Hannah, who is the last person to come onstage. Me and Alexis suggested that Hannah could wait for longer before she came on as this could be our first stage of seeing how long the audience can maintain their focus. We the spent the rest of the time experimenting with the lines and positioning with the rest of the cast.

Experimenting with the entrances and first lines: https://youtu.be/zCnvHUMU5UU

Week 5: TIE (Storms)

Adding Banter

We started by reviewing the start that we created last week and we went through each bit carefully and made sure that we hadn't missed anything. We also tried to make sure that the energy was high for the transformation of us into boys so that we could get the jokey atmosphere which we think will allow the audience to know that we are open to them talking to us and to show that we are able to be a listening ear to them further in the performance if they need us to be. We always have the idea of what the client wants in the back of our minds and we were saying that our opening could be seen as being inconsiderate as we are making fun and stereotyping boys and the company Storms is reflecting a very personal topic surrounding suicide. But on the other hand, we have all done research that shows that boys/men are more likely to open up and talk about their feelings if there is a more relaxed and jokey atmosphere. I think that this is what we are trying to achieve with our start as we are setting the scene/atmosphere so the audience are on our side and then as we address the idea of suicide we are then going to see if the boys will understand the ways that they communicate or, opposingly, the ways that they do not communicate.

We then moved onto a discussion about the percentage of a performance that is dedicated to the audience and what percentage is dedicated to your fellow actors on stage.
For a real performance, we said that 85% of your acting would be to the people on stage and 15% would be to the audience because if it were a realistic play, you would want to be immersed in the lines and the story line and you want your audience to believe that you are feeling the way that you say you are. The 15% that goes towards the audience includes things like: not turning your back, keeping your volume high, facing a certain way so the audience can see your facial expressions or to hid the mechanisms of a lift.
Whereas when you're doing Theatre In Education the percentages change a little: 40% performance to the people onstage and 60% to the audience. This is due to the piece being for educational purposes so we need to acknowledge the audience to check if they are interested and understand what we are trying to portray.

We then wanted to add a little bit more onto the piece and so we decided to explore the things that boys focus on and we made scenes about the two emotions that we know are men’s focal emotions: Anger and Erotic. We made two scenes referring to each of them and incorporated in them into the scene after the chair stacking.

to expand on the word “banter” as this is what modern teenagers refer to their way of communicating and so we thought of subjects that boys might fine hard to speak about and so would create banter about as their way of communicating we decided that we would do: parents divorcing, failing exams and being broken up with. We referenced these along with the lines from our presenter “Noun - Banter, Verb - to banter and adjective - banterous.” With each different word group, a different scene was created. First of all was “Exam Banter” (https://youtu.be/_-DADSdvNS0) then it was mine and Hannah’s scene about "Divorce Banter" (https://youtu.be/eqE0w_OObcM) and then lastly "Breakup Banter" (https://youtu.be/mJ2vDaIn5OU)

I think that one of the best parts about our scene is the speed of the lines and especially the dialogue at the start when the boy refers to his problems as “nothing” and the other boy doesn’t delve any deeper in the subject instead he moves it onto something more comical as we found that men have a different way of dealing with conversation and have different aims. At this point, we thought that the boys wanted to avoid talking about their feelings and so they would avoid the subject causing them to move onto the next emotion that they naturally go to which is talking about girls/ something of an erotic nature, hence the “fit birds” I think that we need to work on the staging a little more so that when I ge the idea of her dad “banging a fit bird” then I can make it more obvious to the audience and get them involved.

Week 4: Director's Challenge

Before Wednesday's lesson, me and Alexis, my fellow director, had a discussion about the activity that we were going to do for our carousel. We wanted something that we introduce our play but not give too much away because we want the people who will be in our actual cast to be immersed in our play once the actual rehearsals start. We also wanted to have something that would sparks some people's imaginations and see who would be interested in doing our play.

In the back of the script there is a social experiment that Tim Etchells did with a group of 6 people, where he had a line of 6 chairs in the middle of the room and timed 1 minute and the cast were allowed to move around the space and do whatever they wanted and then in the last 10 seconds, Etchell's would count down and the cast had those 10 seconds to decide whether they wanted to stand in front of a chair or sit on a chair. He found that if half the people in the room stood up then the rest of the group would feel the instinctive to stand up as well but he also noticed that majority of the times he did it only 2 people stood up which meant that everybody else was sat down. If the people thought that they needed to stand up, then they were more concerned about those around them and what they were doing instead of concentrating on what they were doing and their own presence on stage. To add to this, we thought that we would write down missions on pieces of paper and give them out, adding more each round and this would also add to be another distract for the people and those who knew that someone had a mission were paying attention and trying to look for them but those who didn't know were the ones who were focused on themselves. We thought that this could link to some other practitioners like Stanislavski and his units and objectives as we could tell who was concentrating on their task and we could see who had a plan of what they were going to do to achieve that. We thought that we could even incorporate that idea of missions into our performance.

We then compared Brecht and Etchells as there are some things that are similar between these two practitioners and we wanted to make sure that we defined the differences between them. Brecht had characters but didn't want the audience to connect with them (also know as the "V" effect) whereas Etchells doesn't have any characters at all so there is no chance that the audience could relate/connect with a character onstage. They both, however, have characteristics that are shown so that the people onstage are recognisable as people.

This led me to researching one of Forced Entertainments newer pieces called "The Last Adventures" which is a collaboration with a Lebanese sound artists called Tarek Atoui. It mixes text, movement and images with electronic sound. "There is a rough, playful and unfinished feel to the aesthetic." This was a quote that Etchells said about his piece and this was something that we wanted to highlight in our play and I think that that should be the focal point of our play, the fact that nothing actually happens physically its centered around what happens mentally and the thought process that the audience goes through.

Other quotes that Etchells said:

"Props and costume are home made" - we can highlight this by the cast wearing their own clothes in our piece and it would also help accentuate the fact that they are being themselves on stage.
"The work made is always a kind of conversation or neogtiation."  - Like the people onstage are having a conversation between them but they are speaking to each other through the audience making them have the same thought pattern as the people onstage, making them more connected together.
"We don't walk onto the stage and say anything can happen! We like to put on a set of fixed points and framework in place. But within those parameters there is no desire to control or consolidate every moment - there's a freedom for the performers, to respond to each other, to follow instincts and to listen to each other. Keeping this level of fluidity and space for invention seems really important." - A key quote from Etchells in my opinion as it points out the basic ideas behind his work and if we take this into consideration then we will be following the true idea of what Etchells wanted this piece to be like.
"The desire is to make a space in which the audience has a lot of pleasurable work to do in imagining and making connections and making their own stories" - This is what we want to see when we're doing the carousel exercise. We, as the audience, want to be making stories just by looking at the people being themselves onstage.

Wednesday

We decided to use some of our Wednesday lesson to have a go at everyone's carousel ideas before we get multiple groups of people of varying degrees of drama experience, to see how we worked with the stimulus' and our ideas.

The list of missions that we used were:

-Make eye contact with every person in the group
-Move every chair as much as you can
- Sit on every chair
- Make a paper airplane
- Steal the paper airplane
- Call Chipp or Starbuck if they come in the room
-Cough every time someone sits down
-Try and untie someone else's shoe laces
- Try and touch everybody's shoulder with your nose.

An improvement that we got was to not introduce too much at the start about the idea behind it as it might alter how the younger years approach the idea of the missions and we want to see how they would naturally react to the introduction of the missions and if their focus shifts. So we changed it so that we explained the activity at the end and explained the style of our play at the end to try and see whether they understood it a bit more.


Time Lapse of our activity.

https://youtu.be/hLTaMkVMI_Y

We found that the older students understood the experiment much more than the younger ones which was what we expected as it was very hard for the younger ones to grasp that they were being influenced by the other people around them and not really focusing on themselves whereas the older students were and some of them were even concentrating to much and created a character for themselves which we reiterated was interesting to see but not what we would want in our play.

After this we went over our plan for next week so that we could change anything if we needed.

We decided that setting estimate times would help us keep on track and get each week completed and not have anything that would take longer than needed.

Week 4: TIE (Storms)

Putting the opening together

After developing our research about how men communicate over the weekend, we started by formulating a list of the main points that we found and we came up with:

• Men convert one feeling to another because they are considered feminine feelings
• Men find it hard to think and feel at the same time.
• Men feel pressured to take charge and not show insecurities
• Men view purposes of conversation differently.
• Men externalise their feelings - showing emotion through aggression.
• Men feel like they can only express their feelings through anger.

We then linked our list to suicide and our TIE intention which is to highlight the ways that men communicate or don't communicate and what that could lead to.

Expressing their emotions through anger - If this method doesn't work, for women the next step would be to find help but for men, they would be embarrassed that they were unable to find an outlet that allows them to express their feelings and so would turn to suicide. Our main question then became what if it's that men don't even recognise what they feel because the stereotypical feelings that they know they can/think they are only allowed to talk about are aggression and erotic. But if you are only talking about things that make you recognise those emotions then how can they know what they are feeling. They might presume that they can't/don't have any other feelings than those. When they can't think rationally about something would they think that the only way out is suicide? Would they think that their emotions are broken and they have this "sense" that they can't identify which keeps building and building until it becomes so overwhelming that they don't want to keep living with a "sense" that they can't register?

Approaching conversations differently - Men don't want to approach a conversation that doesn't have an end point. If men can't find a path that will allow them to find an answer then they won't have a conversation which increases the "sense" and draws the idea of suicide nearer.

We then decided to put all that we had learnt about how men communicate into a short starting point for our opening of TIE and we thought that the best way to start our pieces was to have quite a comedic sense so that it would allow the audience to open up more if we start off with a more relaxed atmosphere. 

First messy run through of our idea for the opening of TIE:

https://youtu.be/pS4rKiE8Y2U

Taking into consideration that this is our first run through of a possible opening, I think that it went quite well and we are already highlighting some of features that are expected of a man and I like the idea of us over-exaggerating them to show that we are acknowledging their feelings and the way that they act but also saying that when you look at it from an outside point of view then you see how it looks.
Obviously I think that we need to make sure that the lines are fluid and also I think that the speed that we are walking and putting the chairs on the stack needs to be quicker in order for the impact of Charlotte "trapping" her fingers to be bigger so that the audience stay engaged with piece. And I also think that the contrast between our first reaction to Charlotte (shocked - the natural reaction) and the reaction after Caitlin says that men can be "insensitive to other people's distress." (Jokey, making fun of Charlotte etc.) really shows how their reaction look to women in particular.