Workshop 3: Interrogations

Workshop 3: Running workshop 4 myself I decided to look at Detective's interrogations for the conflict or wrong and right and our punishment system. We quickly created characters:

• Lucy Campbell, a girl aged 17, on her way home from her sister's after a visit whilst at university, mysteriously goes missing,
• Her sister Sarah Campbell, 23 years old never had a very good relationship with her sister and has just given birth to her first child Ava,
• Sarah's husband Daryn who often helps Lucy with her university dissertations and gives her lift from university to home.

When we had created these characters, we set up a scene around a table and asked appropriate questions such as "when did you last see your sister" to try and prompt improvised responses. Although we enjoyed running this scene it was boring to watch as an audience and it helped us to understand the importance of staging to involve and interest the audience more. Furthermore it helped us to understand the importance of understanding a case and researching appropriate articles/books etc. to build our knowledge to make it more gripping and interesting.

Workshop 2: Verbatim and family life

Workshop 2: Ran by Katie, started with us watching a interview about a daughter not being allowed to see a boy because her father was strict and rather protective, we were asked to pick out 3 movements from the video (verbatim) and mimic them till we felt they were perfected, we then again split into groups of two and asked questions about the father and tried to involve the movements from the interview to create a realistic portrayal of the character we had watched.

After creating a more in depth character we decided to bring it further to life and use forum theatre to create 3 different scenes, intervening when we thought necessary to improve or experiment with a new idea, we first did the awkward "meet the parents for the first time" we played the boyfriend as different characters, respectful and hardworking, a college drop out, and a nervous shy character. We then moved on to the car scene on the way home from meeting the boyfriend the first time, the interrogation of who, where what etc. we again experimented with the characters, the mother being controlling, the father being care free, the teenager being stubborn or naïve after experimenting we had 2 scenes that fitted well together with a sense of comedy and family conflict either between mother and father or daughter and father. This was interesting to do as we saw that conflict didn't need to be dark or sad and that conflict could be expressed in a comical fashion that could add some relief to our piece.

Workshop 1: Newspapers and the media

Workshop 1: Ran by Rory, he started with a warm up getting us to start in a small circle and saying controversial topics to try and get opinions differentiating within the group, for example, abortion on the NHS, the adoption of critically ill children and the bombing of ISIS, this helped us get our brains thinking about how their was a differentiation between 4 people let alone countries and how topics have to be handled sensitivity as it can untimely result in wars etc. He then gave us two different news articles, one from Social Worker and one from The Times, we analysed the content and how the two news websites worded and presented things differently, it was interesting to see the biased opinions pushed upon the audience in the social worker compared to the reporter, fact and figure style of The Times. After spending 15 minutes talking about the language, the proposed views and our opinions on them we moved on to split into two groups one taking Social Worker and the other taking the news report from The Times.

Me and Abbie had Social Worker, we did slight research and worked out that Social Worker are always filmed talking on the streets, "socially immersed" in what ever event is going on and are very biased in their opinions. We went through the extract and picked the best points e.g "going to war will kill innocent civilians, accidents happen" and we then tried to report in the style of two Social Worker reporters to show their style and way of work compared to the very strict, "behind a desk" factual portray of The Times.

"Immersion"

Simple to say, devising in a group of opinionated females, and Rory, with a difference in nearly every situation isn't the easiest thing to achieve. After using several stimuli, we settled on a favourite "The Trail" by a theatre company using immersive theatre, the idea of involving the audience to any level immediately fascinated us all, and became the first thing we agreed on. We played around with improvisation trying to create characters from the idea of missing girl "Lucy Campbell" stemming from the idea of morally objective crimes, something for our audience to feel in conflict about, who was or wasn't guilty? But, again due to a difference of opinions everything we created was put to the "back of the draw" due to a difference of opinions. However keeping the idea of immersive theatre was something the whole group were passionate about and hence the group name "Immersion" was born.

"Immersion - deep mental involvement in something. Our aim is to smash the complacency out of the audience. We wish to force our audience to care about the content of our performance. We hope that they remain alert to our message long after the performance has finished."

 

Which as a group is exactly what we want our audience to feel, we went back to the idea of the trials and after doing research on the conditions of trials, what judges say, and the process of how defenders, witness and the accused are treated we had a wide understanding on the topic, we tried t create a scene but nothing amazing was born and again we put it to the "back of the draw" and focused on Frantic Assembly's attitude to working, "always forward never back" and continued with experimentation. After much debating about a wide range of topics we decided that until half term we are going to each create a workshop, either relevant to our previous ideas or maybe just a current event that interested us to try and create scenes and ideas that we can later stitch together. Whether this will work or not is yet to be determined but Immersion are going to give it a go.