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.
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