Spatial Awareness

In this module we have been looking at the different practices from Forced Entertainment; our group decided to look at narrative. We were set with the task of leading a session on narrative. We set off first of by researching how Forced Entertainment looked at narrative. We began by doing some warm ups; we got the class in a circle and began with a role down the spine to get everyone bodies warmed up followed by some vocal exercises while required the class to sing a set of lyrics in different tones, from high to low. The reason we thought it was a good idea was because we know it takes a while for people to get into their own awareness space and focus.

The first workshop we put together we wanted to explore the narrative by constantly changing it. We did this by having three volunteers improvise a situation, and then we welcomed any members of the group watching to come and join the improvisation by adding something different to the narrative.  The first situation we gave our volunteers was waiting outside an office for a job interview. At first it took a while for things to warm up, no one was really keen on adding to what the three volunteers had already started.  Tim Etchells from Forced Entertainment said ‘What interests me very much is the way that an incomplete narrative is always filled in or imaginatively completed by an audience.’ This is what we were trying to do; we wanted the audience to have the power of the narrative.

This workshop didn’t work the way we hoped it would, we had the intention of building up a collective understanding of narrative within the class. When we started the game it seemed that people weren’t invested in the narratives given to them, was that our fault for maybe not explaining it properly to them? Did we not prepare them enough to get them focused? Or was it simply a waiting game? We should have allowed this game to play out more; it would have been interesting to see what would have been produced. Perhaps the class would have really gotten into it the longer we left it.

Our second workshop game involved using Forced Entertainments ideas on play and things becoming objects by improvisation, making things the hypothesis of play. Within Forced Entertainment’s theatre things take shape as narrative. We told the class to collect an object either costume or prop that calls out to them, either trigger a memory or a connection and to bring those ideas into the rehearsal space. We thought that was particularly important because of what we wanted them to do with the things; we wanted the relation between things and actions to be a source of manipulations in the narrative. We picked one volunteer at the time to come up with their object and tell us about it. We were looking for different stories personal, funny or tragic.

The workshop began to come to life when we allowed the class to come up and join the other person’s narrative, with their own object. This was because a thing as a potential to be anything, and therefore actors can turn it into an object once they give it narrative.  Playing takes places because of things, due to the fact that the focus is to experiment with them, making it an object and therefore the focus of the narrative.  This narrative however is constantly changing, every time a new actor entered the scene with a new thing once it was played with the narrative moves focus. We were highly influenced by Forced Entertainment’s ideas on narrative, and the idea of manipulating the narrative with things becoming objects. After a while other members of the class started to come up with their thing and turning it into an object and adding to the narrative in place. This wasn’t something that we had asked the group to do but we didn’t stop them as we thought it may add a new dynamic to what we were doing, and it also helped the play develop.

Lastly we wanted to mix things up, and give people the power to narrate others on stage. Originally we wanted three volunteers to be the actors and one volunteers to narrate them a story line. It worked well at first but things got really interesting when we gave the narrator a microphone. Forced Entertainment like to work with microphones so we thought why not implemented into this workshop. We ended up having narrators that sounded like popular TV personals like David Attenborough or the voice over in the popular show ‘Big Brother House’ this changed the way the narrator told his story, we then decided it would be interesting if the actors were left to their own devises and improvise a situation and have the narrator narrate what they were doing. The involvement of the microphone was an interesting addition; it seemed that the narrator feel more like a performer. Every time the narrator changed we got a member of the audience to choose which style they would speak in. we wanted to see how the class would react to the narrator changing the way in which they speak. I.e. if the narrator spoke like a sports commentator, he has just set the location in the narrative for the actors in the performing space. After we were confident that we had shown the class what we had made up for them we changed the dynamics of the game. We allowed the actors to make up their own narrative and got the narrator to simply narrate their actions.

At first this process was all over the place, the performers were speaking over one another and there was a lot of confusion, because the narrator was constantly changing. This was probably due to the fact that the dynamic had changed; instead of having three people following one person’s narrative we had one person trying to follow three peoples rapidly changing narrative. After observing this we decided to take one of the actors out and give the two remaining actors two different objectives that would directly conflict with each other. I.e. actor one would have to stack all of the chairs in the room and actor two would have to take all the chairs down. The narrator would then have to narrate what was going on. It was interesting to see how each member of the audience saw one thing but some people had come to different conclusions.

Our research wasn’t as extensive as it could have been; we were mostly influenced by Forced Entertainment; we cultivated our workshop from both the inspiration we received from their work and our own ideas. We agreed that an effective way of us leading this session would be to incorporate play. We both enjoyed leading the workshop on Narrative and agree that they are a useful method for learning, although our research was good it could have been more in depth and more thorough.