Week 12: TIE (Storms)

Facilitation and Powerpoint

From the previous week, we noticed that in the first scene in the case study, the breakfast scene, didn't have any dramatic asides in it to accentuate how both the males in the scene were feeling at that point and so we made sure that we added in 2 asides, one for John and one for his dad, so that the audience would see what it was like to be on either side of the conversation and the two opinions about it.

We then moved onto the facilitation of John with Holly in the drunk scene where he is on top of the car and we wanted to use that to allow the audience to realise the barriers that are stopping John communicating in a way that Holly would understand and therefore be able to help. We used this as another chance to interact with the audience and so, as a cast, we came up with the 4 main barriers that we thought are the main reasons for John and his miscommunication with Holly:

• Peer-pressure- because at the start of the scene, John is with his friends and they are all drinking and so he is being peer-pressured into following what everybody else is doing.
• Alcohol- Mainly due to the fact that he is drunk and alcohol effects your ability to make decisions and also increases your chance of risk-taking. We have also had a conversation with a mental health ambassador in our own school and he said that when a mental health issue arises in someone they tend to isolate themselves and they do this through risk taking, so drinking alcohol, and we wanted to show that in our piece so that we are showing all the options that someone could take to hide their own feelings and also what could be signs, that we can pick up on, of someone with a mental health problem.
• Aggression - due to the alcohol, John becomes quite aggressive both verbally and physically as he tries to intimate Holly and this leads to him trying to communicate in a way that actually frightens Holly slightly and means that her attention has shifted from "what could make him be this way" to "is he going to hurt me in any way?" and this means that the miscommunication is both John's fault and Holly's.
• Swearing - As a consequence from all the above factors, John begins to swear at Holly and this means that this is adding to the miscommunication.

We were then going to ask the audience to rank them in the order from 1-4, with 1 being the biggest barrier and 4 being the smallest. We would go out in the audience and help them to explain their reasoning behind their answers and see whether they are picking up on the main reasons for each barrier. We would then ask them to show on their fingers which number they ranked each one and then we would remove the barrier that the majority of the audience thought was the main one. Doing this allows us to strip back all of the barriers that John had built up between himself and Holly and we are trying to show that John did try and communicate but not in the right way. We wanted to show the juxtaposition between what John thought he said and what he actually said in order for the audience to understand the difference and it also shows ways that you can communicate in a way that allows others to help you.

A small project that we did at the end was to make a powerpoint that will go up behind us whilst we are acting, with key points that we are making on the board and also questions that we want them to be asking throughout the piece. Having this behind us allows us to continue acting whilst the audience are gaining information from it and we are wanting the main points for each section of the piece to be on each slide so that the audience really understand what we are trying to say. When we go out into the audience to help them, the questions that are on the slide can be used as starting points for discussion and we can follow them up with secondary questions to further the audience's understanding of John and the piece as a whole.