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.