twomindstheatre-blog

[twomindstheatre-blog]

Two Minds Theatre company, in the flesh. 

[twomindstheatre-blog]

Antonin Artaud was obviously a huge inspiration to us in this project. We focus heavily on the theatre of cruelty to create a shared scary experience for the group so that they wouldn’t have to re live old emotions or past events and we could stay away from anything too personal. Despite not dropping live crabs onto our audience we did use his practice of theatre as it plays on disturbing the senses an stimulating fear which is exactly what we wanted to accomplish. 

[twomindstheatre-blog]

It's the standing alone that gets me, the isolation I hate it.

Jack Shennan on the immersive section of our project.

[twomindstheatre-blog]

This is the immersive phase in action, this particular clip shows us taking the participant from the table and standing them upright and then leaving them alone for one minute. This plays on the fact that there is safety in numbers and how everyone feels more vulnerable when they think they’re are alone. 

[twomindstheatre-blog]

This is the set up of the room during our immersive phase of our project. Participants are blindfolded and walked to a table. Facilitators wait underneath to start scratching nails, banging, jolting the table, touching, blowing and flicking water. Participants tables are also wheeled and picked up and after 5 minutes on facilitator holds the hands of the participant while another facilitator lifts one end of the table to slide the participants back to the floor. They are then taken to the next room.

[twomindstheatre-blog]

Punch drunk are a drama group from the UK who also work intentionally and they deeply inspired our final idea. Punch Drunk's work is always highly immersive, site specific and they use promenade theatre meaning that the audience are free to roam anywhere they would like. After discovering Punch Drunk through Anna Bosworth I started my research. The company is quite secretive however I did gain information through pictures and articles. In a recent show The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable the audience are aloud to roam freely in a huge old 60′s film studio. Our group moved away from our site specific ideas and instead of giving the audience more control of their own way we moved towards creating a shared scary experience that the facilitators control. However our Punch Drunk research shows us the extent in which we would like to immerse our own audience into the drama. 

[twomindstheatre-blog]

The first person action film ‘Hardcore Henry’ that provided us with inspiration fro our ‘choose your own adventure’ task. 

[twomindstheatre-blog]

This is the start of our official ‘choose your own adventure’. It’s very rough as we filmed it in day however the concept is there. Our final product will follow the same story line however without the excessive wind noises. The adventure always ends in an attack to show that sometimes in life things just happen and they’re out of your control.  

[twomindstheatre-blog]

This was the first attempt at a ‘choose your own’ adventure which we focused around a university open day. This was because our target audience were students around this age of applying for university. This adventure includes a few option which all have different consequences. We didn’t get the chance to further develop this mini project however it was the learning block that led us to our final choose your own adventure. We took inspiration from a few things we have seen including first person music videos such as the Weekend - false alarm and also ‘Hardcore Henry’ a first person action film.

[twomindstheatre-blog]

I just sort of accepted it. Like, okay whatever they’re going to do to me they’re going to do to me. I have no control. I got to a point where I wasn’t too afraid, I guess

Reece Welsh commenting on our Immersive section of our project.

[twomindstheatre-blog]

Yes! Course It's good, If we weren't afraid of things we would be psychopaths.

Reece Welsh (Classmate) on whether fear is good? 

[twomindstheatre-blog]

Initial Ideas

At the start of the process we decided that we wanted to focus on fear however we experimented with lots of different thoughts and ideas before we arrived at our final idea. First of all we discussed a site specific performance in which the participants would walk from site to site where they would watch examples of how fear of self presentation effects you in your normal day. The audience would then reflect on the drama they have just watched and identify the fear, ponder how it inhibits the character and then how they could possibly overcome this fear. The other site specific examples of fear would not link to the first one. We discussed that while the audience walk to the next site they put in their headphones and begin to listen to either a continuation of the narrative they have just seen or reflective questions on the narrative. This was so the audience were constantly immersed in the drama and also it forces the audience to start thinking about the drama they have just witnessed. 

Further down the line, once we had conducted the interviews, we were really taken by the story of one of our interviewee’s. We used this story in our final idea because it’s a good narrative although originally we wanted to deliver this story in a Verbatim style performance. This was because the way the story was delivered was very real. The pauses, the stuttering and the emotion in the voice were all powerfully real. Therefore we wanted to take the story exactly as we heard it to make our audience feel how we felt listening to it from the victims mouth. Unfortunately we only toyed with this idea and our work went in a different direction.  

[twomindstheatre-blog]

From the get go my group were encapsulated by the concept of fear. However fear is a very broad concept also every one has different ideas and views on the subject. This led us to conduct interviews individually with a range of ages to gather different perspectives and different experiences with fear. For instance I interviewed fellow classmates and other young people, whereas other group members interviewed parents and children to gain as many views on fear as we could. Above are the questions we used for the interview, they were asked in no particular order. We used open questions to encourage long answers and after hearing the interviews ideas started to flow. One interviewee told me about a time where he was attacked on the walk home from school. We used this story in our ‘Create your own adventure’. 

[twomindstheatre-blog]

Introduction

At the University of Northampton, as part of our 2nd year Professional Practice module, as a class we were introduced to C&T a theatre company from Worcester who specialise in Theatre in Education. Our task was to in small groups, using a theme create a performance using technology. C&T's role in our task was to introduce us to new technological ideas and techniques which we adopted and used to create our performance. Anna Bosworth and Inès Dalal represented C&T and both facilitated our learning showing us dramatic techniques using technology some of which was slightly familiar and some techniques were completely foreign.