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