Week 9: TIE (Storms)

Expanding and Forum Theatre

We ran through the whole piece so far and we made a list of things that need to be added in:

• When Hannah is John Doe, we need her to reference the characters that are onstage in her first dramatic aside so that the audience don't get confused about which characters the different people are playing. For example, we need her to say this is my family, my mum, my dad and my brother.
• We need to add in a more fluid way of going into the John Doe case study as it seems to go from quite a jokey manner to quite a serious one too quickly so we gave the narrator's an extra few lines that established the idea of a case study and how it allows us to see these reactions in a real life situation.
• After the case study we also need another fluid transition that allows us to interact with the audience through some of the devices that are used by Forum Theare. For this we wanted the narrators to acknowledge the fact that we aren't men so we don't actually know what it's like to be one and reference the fact that everyone in the audience is male and  so we can find out from them.

We thought that the scene we could explore with the input of the audience could be the morning after John has come home drunk and been caught by his dad. We could make it quite stunted, with a lot of pauses for potential thought as both men are going through a rough period of time and also if we make these pauses clear enough, it would indicate to the audience that that would be a good part for them to start thinking about the thoughts that are going through the two characters heads. We then had a discussion about where these reference points could be in the scene and so we ran the scene and people shouted pause when we think there could be a moment and explained why it was a good place for the audience's input.

Part 1 - https://youtu.be/g8eTysKLn1g
Part 2 - https://youtu.be/MfRVLm5A-ck

These are some of the points that we picked out during the video.

In the actual performance, we would run the scene through once and then facilitate the asking of the audience. We would then go into the audience and ask what the characters were thinking - taking them through the thought track step by step and mention the different points as it would help them think of what to say. After, we would regroup and show the scene again but we would pause the scene and mention what people in the audience had said making sure that we defined who said it and include them in the piece.

Because we wanted this part to reflect Forum Theatre we did a small hour long workshop in the style. We were introduced to two characters through teacher in role and we were going to choose one of the characters and their situation to make better with help from us, the audience. We then took part in a small role play, where we made the set for a NHS waiting room and we were asked to stand in a place that reflected a person going through dialysis or someone who’s family member was going through dialysis. We then did another role play for the second character as well. Thought out the whole workshop we were picking up on how our teacher was talking to us and what things we could use in our piece. Some things we found were:

1. Pausing when the audience gets lost.
2. Repeating scenes so that they can ask the audience whether the scene is going the way they want it to.
3. Simplistic characters and storylines
4. Positive reinforcements of ideas at the people onstage things like, mentioning their acting boosts their confidence and also increase the chance of them joining in.

We could use all of these aspects in our piece as it would increase the amount of interaction we get from the audience which will, in turn, benefit their understanding of our piece and the message that we are trying to convey.