Adapting the sliding scale
This week, we started by making a slight change as we are noticing that we are mainly saying that boys don't communicate at all so, we wanted to add a positive side to the piece by saying that things like non-verbal communication, like in the morning after scene, is still a positive way of communicating even if it doesn't involved words. The morning after John's argument with his dad was the pinpoint of our negative connotations to non-verbal communication as we were originally saying that John wasn't communicating verbally with his father and therefore it was his fault for not expressing his true feelings to his dad but, we wanted to change this to show that communicating in any form is better than not communicating at all and even in small gestures, there are still feelings behind them.
After this, we decided to adapt our sliding scale and expand on the options that John has. In the previous week, we had defined the key points on the sliding scale but we narrowed those down to three major points: break-up with her, do nothing and beg for her forgiveness. We did this in order for the audience to explore the ranges in between the options when we go and facilitate the scale. We said that when John is walking down the scale, we would pause when someone in the audience raised their hands at one of the 3 main points and we would ask them for the reason why. Asking the audience follow up questions allows us to understand how much they are understanding and it also allows us to help them understand the messages that we are trying to convey in order for our main point to be backed up at the end. We would keep going until John was at the end, and the narrator, depending on the audience's choice, would identify the point that most people voted for. Making the audience vote for which outcome they think should happen engages them with the piece and, also allows us to see whether they have picked up on the key points that we have been hinting at throughout to help in the build up to the main point.We made it so that, no matter what the majority of votes was, it would always lead to the same lines of this was because John tried to communicate but Holly didn't listen to him.
We began extending this into John arguing that he did explain his feelings, or tried, to Holly as this reflects the reaction that many boys would have when asked whether they tried to explain how they felt. We added in a replay of all the scenes between John and Holly to accentuate the times that John did try and communicate how he felt. We thought that, from our previous workshop, we could add in or move our piece towards the Forum Theatre direction so that the audience could take control of one character and see how John reacts to different approaches from different people or how he responds to different acknowledgements of his feelings. We then discussed that we wanted to move away from the girlfriend as we wanted the whole audience to feel like they could connect with John's situation but not everyone has a girlfriend or even had one so we wanted to involved the whole audience and so we moved onto the idea of John communicating with his friends as, we hoped that everyone in the audience had at least one friend that they could talk to. We devised a scene that would be set before John is drunk on top of the mini cooper and it would show the build up to John getting drunk and included a big group of John's friends to highlight the fact that you don't necessarily need to tell everyone in your friendship group. We gave John some lines about wanting to get drunk so that he could forget what was going on and majority of the group cheered and thought of it as just another excuse to get drunk but one friend was concerned about John and why he was acting this way and so when we were going to leave to "go to the park" that specific friend pulled him aside and asked him what was wrong. This section was then going to be our Forum Theatre part as we thought that the audience could control the conversation that was about to happen and see how there are different ways that you can ask about how someone is feeling and there are different ways of telling someone how you feel.
The friend noticing the difference in John's mindset also links with the wise talkers element of SToRMS which was about noticing other people's emotions and how to talk and respond to their feelings/behaviour.
After this, we decided to adapt our sliding scale and expand on the options that John has. In the previous week, we had defined the key points on the sliding scale but we narrowed those down to three major points: break-up with her, do nothing and beg for her forgiveness. We did this in order for the audience to explore the ranges in between the options when we go and facilitate the scale. We said that when John is walking down the scale, we would pause when someone in the audience raised their hands at one of the 3 main points and we would ask them for the reason why. Asking the audience follow up questions allows us to understand how much they are understanding and it also allows us to help them understand the messages that we are trying to convey in order for our main point to be backed up at the end. We would keep going until John was at the end, and the narrator, depending on the audience's choice, would identify the point that most people voted for. Making the audience vote for which outcome they think should happen engages them with the piece and, also allows us to see whether they have picked up on the key points that we have been hinting at throughout to help in the build up to the main point.We made it so that, no matter what the majority of votes was, it would always lead to the same lines of this was because John tried to communicate but Holly didn't listen to him.
We began extending this into John arguing that he did explain his feelings, or tried, to Holly as this reflects the reaction that many boys would have when asked whether they tried to explain how they felt. We added in a replay of all the scenes between John and Holly to accentuate the times that John did try and communicate how he felt. We thought that, from our previous workshop, we could add in or move our piece towards the Forum Theatre direction so that the audience could take control of one character and see how John reacts to different approaches from different people or how he responds to different acknowledgements of his feelings. We then discussed that we wanted to move away from the girlfriend as we wanted the whole audience to feel like they could connect with John's situation but not everyone has a girlfriend or even had one so we wanted to involved the whole audience and so we moved onto the idea of John communicating with his friends as, we hoped that everyone in the audience had at least one friend that they could talk to. We devised a scene that would be set before John is drunk on top of the mini cooper and it would show the build up to John getting drunk and included a big group of John's friends to highlight the fact that you don't necessarily need to tell everyone in your friendship group. We gave John some lines about wanting to get drunk so that he could forget what was going on and majority of the group cheered and thought of it as just another excuse to get drunk but one friend was concerned about John and why he was acting this way and so when we were going to leave to "go to the park" that specific friend pulled him aside and asked him what was wrong. This section was then going to be our Forum Theatre part as we thought that the audience could control the conversation that was about to happen and see how there are different ways that you can ask about how someone is feeling and there are different ways of telling someone how you feel.
The friend noticing the difference in John's mindset also links with the wise talkers element of SToRMS which was about noticing other people's emotions and how to talk and respond to their feelings/behaviour.
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