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.