Entry One

Task: Devise a short piece of ‘total theatre’ (i.e. drama which consciously attempts to
involve other art forms) based on the theme of ‘Politics of Identity’.

Inspiration

We read up on the required texts beforehand, keeping in mind that we needed to either adapt or come up with a piece of our own, drawing inspiration from these texts. However, we didn't gain much inspiration from these texts for we felt that it was very difficult to adapt these plays, let along try to put up a form of "total theatre".

Creative Process

At first, we decided to adapt our piece from Macbeth. However, it was later changed to Ibsen's "A Doll's House" as we felt that the our directorial vision could be better presented with the emulation of this play.

Directorial Vision: "We are all connected; one person's actions influences another."

Performance Traditions

The two skills that we are going to do for our piece are Movement and Multimedia. We will be Contemporary dance as our movement style, with Multimedia being the only support as there will be no reading of lines. In order to achieve this, we decided to follow an Expressionistic style.

Expressionist Theatre - Theatre with expressionistic goals in mind. As opposed to having the primary aim of creating theatre to educate (like Brecht), to entertain (like Commedia Dell'arte), or to be realistic (like Stanislavski); expressionistic theatre's main aim is to express emotion.

Expressionistic theatre is different from realism - actors will behave how most people wouldn't in real life, their physical and vocal qualities exaggerating their emotions; set designs will be exaggerated to emphasise the tone of the setting. The artist is not concerned with reality as it appears but with its inner nature and with the emotions aroused by the subject. To achieve these ends, the subject is frequently caricatured, exaggerated, distorted, or otherwise altered in order to stress the emotional experience in its most intense and concentrated form.

Therefore, in accordance to our DV, we are planning to show the relationship of how everyone is connected, through the literal use of strings as well. Furthermore, we are basing our play on a web-like structure for the characters that we have come up with.

This relationship web will help us to show clearly how each character is interlinked, as well as the butterfly effect of each person's actions.

Turning Points

• We changed our style from Human Puppetry-esque actions to Contemporary Dance because that allowed for more movement and expression.
• Macbeth was intended to be a potential play to emulate, but that changed to Ibsen's A Doll's House.
• Our DV was changed once, and the new DV allowed us more room to work with.
• Our original relationship structure was more of a linear one at first. However, it was then changed to a more web-like one (see above) to bring out more fully the different connections between the characters that affect each other.