And finally...

Ta-da!

Well, after a few days of what has felt like non-stop work, we have finally completed our project proposal. Having changed our project idea just prior to reading week, most of that week was spent reading and researching our new idea, not to mention arranging interviews and such! And so the last week has been a little hectic, arranging to meet as a group when we weren't hard at work on other assignments for other modules, working to earn money to fund our degrees, fulfilling our obligations to our university societies oh and those other things that we humans do all the time, you know, eating, sleeping and breathing!

Something that was reassuring about the last couple of weeks was that we've realised as a team, Paco, Kathryn and I work extremely well together. When we are sure of what we are required to do, we get on with it and get it done. We have a certain chemistry that enables us to do the work and have fun whilst doing it. While we have been involved in practical theatre work together in the past and done very well, that wasn't a good enough indication that we would excel at writing a substantial written work as a group, as it is a whole different ball game. But the group dynamic worked well which is encouraging as we move on to the next stage of the project.

Interviews with Practitioners

As part of our research over the past week, we have been interviewing theatre in education companies and practitioners to gain a better knowledge of what methods / techniques are currently employed and what forms of performance are the current trend.

Our first interview with "Big Wheel Theatre Company" was conducted over the phone, as they are based in London. We were able to get permission to record the interview and have made notes from what was said. We gained a lot of very useful information from this, such as ideas on how to devise performances, methods of collecting feedback and so on.

We also arranged to interview "Quantum Theatre" and "Chain Reaction Theatre" but on the occasions that we phoned, they were unavailable due to unexpected circumstances. We have arranged therefore to interview them again in the near future.

Our former theatre lecturer, Annabel Chalk is a theatre in education practitioner and we organised an interview recently to discuss her perspective on T.I.E. It was an interesting re-exploration of work from previous years and we were offered an extra insight into the work that Annabel has done and still does in the field. Annabel is a very spiritual person who adopts aspects and symbols from various religious doctrines such as the Mandala from Tibetan Buddhism and incorporates them into her workshops.

On the evening of Tuesday the 16th of November, as our group was working on the project proposal in the foyer of JP Hall, by a complete coincidence, a theatre in education company "Cwmni'r Fran Wen" (based in Menai Bridge) was setting up next door for a one-off public performance of their agit-prop(esque) performance "Right". Unfortunately, the performance was a Welsh language version, the English language version tour having just ended! The majority of our group are non-Welsh speakers and I was the only one that would have understood the dialogue. Also, we were very much engrossed in our work and felt we needed to press on. Fortunately, a DVD of the English version exists and we will be contacting them in the near future to get an interview. 

More on the progress of our Proposal soon!

A Change of Direction

Ah well, the best laid schemes of mice and men.. and so on!

Since the last post, the meetings have continued but our original idea has not progressed much further than what has already been said and therefore there hasn't been much to write about, other than us as a group trying in vain to advance and coming up with nothing (hence the distinct lack of blog entries!). We decided that our idea was a little too indefinite in nature, especially after the feedback we gained from our presentation to the rest of the group in week 5. Bringing our idea out into the open again made us realise that it needed a rethink. The use of Multimedia in Theatre was too broad a subject to cover, our definition of multimedia wasn't clear, time constraints due to other work and individual commitments outside university, the point of the study wasn't concrete enough, in short, the list of cons outweighed the pros considerably.

And so we have instead decided that our subject area will be Theatre in Education and that we will be exploring its effectiveness as a tool for educating people of all ages. 
We hope to prove that Applied Theatre in Education can support social and academic learning through devising and performing a set of 20 minute pieces each in different styles and with different levels of interaction. The methodology of our dissertation will be based on qualitative rather than quantitative data. We hope to be able to perform to high school students or sixth form / collage students and gain feedback from them on how effective they felt the performances were. Due to ethical and legal restrictions, it may not be possible to perform to people under the age of 18. If this is the case, we will perform more advanced pieces to first year University students over the age of 18.
So that's it for now, next blog post coming very soon!

References:

Allen, John, 1979. Drama in Schools: its Theory and Practice. London: Heinmann.

Jackson, Tony. ed., 1993. Learning Through Theatre: New Perspectives on Theatre in Education. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge.

Redington, Christine, 1983. Can Theatre Teach?: An Historical and Evaluative Analysis of Theatre in Education. Oxford: Pegamon Press Ltd.

Title TBC

Well, the reason my post title is so ambiguous this week, is because as a group we haven't yet decided completely on what the question / title of our group project will be. We know that we would like to concentrate on the use of new media in theatre, and that we would like to create a performance piece together as we are theatre students and that is our area of interest / main area of study!

So we find ourselves with a small amount of difficulty in choosing our question, much like trying to find the ultimate question to the ultimate answer of life, the universe and everything!
A preliminary version of the question was suggested as:
"The use of new media as a focal point in a live theatre performance". 
This was commented upon by Andy (one of our project supervisors) as a good start, but we all got the feeling it was not quite good enough.

Another thing we discussed this week was our roles within the group. We all have to be assessed individually and as such, all need a specific area of research to be graded on. As we are doing a creative piece, we have decided that Paco's area of research will be Directors and Directing, Kathryn will be looking into the New Media side of things while I shall be concentrating on Writers and Writing.

Since then, I have discovered my love for creative writing, through writing ideas for stories and scripts. I have also done a little research into play writes, novelists (with the possibility of adaptation in mind) and writers of more recent forms of media, (film, television, etc).

More when there is more to talk about!

A Meeting of Minds

Previous discussions with my group had been very interesting, but fleeting, with very little decision making, definite plans of action or indeed any particular direction of research. Well, at last we are on track after having been given some idea of what we have been tasked with!

In our first proper meeting, we decided to list the pros of choosing to do either a theatre based project or a film based project. As theatre is our speciality, we were quite keen to pursue a line of research that at least included theatre, but maybe not exclusively. We discussed the pros of film and making a film over a theatre production, being able to shoot and edit at our own pace, where as a live performance is a one shot deal and requires weeks of planning and rehearsal. Regardless of whether we choose to do one or the other, we realised that a DVD / tape would have to be sent to an external examiner; we also concluded that either would be a good edition to our project portfolio and to our individual portfolios. 

We hit upon a very interesting point in the discussion, of combining new media and theatre. Many theatre companies have used new media in their productions, varying from simple television screens with pre-recorded or live video, to projections onto the backdrop and giant LCD screens. Amongst these companies are DV8 (better known for their physical theatre), Forkbeard Fantasy (multi-media company) and Forced Entertainment Theatre, the latter challenges traditional and pre-conceptions of theatre. So intrigued were we by their work, that as part of our research we have already booked tickets to see Forced Entertainment in Manchester on November the 19th, after which we will attend a talk with the company.

We read an article on the use of new media in theatre which mainly focused on images / video projected onto the stage using different methods and how these methods have changed over time, due to new emerging technologies.

Other topics we discussed were Dadaism and Grotowski's alternative theatre. We discussed the possibility of a video blog, a behind the scenes insight into the project and its progress, even updating a classic play for modern times e.g. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, or Educating Rita by Willy Russell.

Although we as a group aren't definite on the exact topic of our project, we are at least a step closer, and are fairly certain it will pertain to the use of new media in theatre.

References:

Davies-Webb.H, 2010. Chapter 5 New Media and the Theatre. [online] Performing Arts Technical Training. Available at: <http://www.performing-arts.org.uk/pdfs/Ch5.pdf> [Accessed 02 October 2010] 
Forced Entertainment, 2010. Website. [online] Available at: <http://www.forcedentertainment.com/> [Accessed 02 October 2010]
Forkbeard Fantasy, n.d., Website. [online] Available at: [http://www.forkbeardfantasy.co.uk/> [Accessed 02 October 2010]