Saturday 22 September 2018

Forced Entertainment and Meta Theatre

For the majority of this lesson, we looked further at Forced Entertainment's methods for devising. We were told to go around the school and find words/phrases that could be used in a piece of theatre fitting Forced Entertainment's style. After doing this for around 15 mins, we came back to the class and discussed the texts that we had found and to give them a title such as An Empty Text which could represent an empty room, as suggested by Forced Entertainment in Tim Etchell's book Certain Fragments (which we are basing most of the work of Forced Entertainment on). The following images are the words/phrases that we Izzy, Joel, and I used in the piece that we developed:

A text to tell a story - Izzy's book. 

A fictional text found by Joel. 

A geographical text found on the humanities corridor.

A vandalised text found on a ladder outside the common room.

An instructive text found outside the library

A harsh text found on the maths corridor.

The video below shows our final performance using these words and phrases:



The video below shows an analysis of the above piece: 



I do think that the piece would need to be developed much further in order for it to be viewed by an outside audience, but given the time constraints and stimulus we found, the performance is good as it shows humour and does have a political message. However, I do think that it needed to be in a style that is much more similar to that of Forced Entertainment's pieces such as Speak Bitterness where the actors are stating things where it is undefined as fact or fiction. This piece didn't have that element but other pieces did and were much more like the play that the previous Y13s did for Director's Challenge last year -  Status Update.

Meta Theatre

Meta Theatre is a type of theatre that knows it is a piece of theatre and therefore all the characters are aware of this. This is mostly done in sitcoms, such as Miranda, and in children's TV, such as Dora the Explorer. Not only does it allow the audience to feel more comfortable, but it also allows for better interaction and for children to stay watching the TV as they are being directly spoken to and have the opportunity to answer questions. It can also be seen in pantomimes, and in some musicals - especially those that poke fun at the theatre itself. It can be seen in the play Antigone, the analysis of which can be found below:



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