Race Against Time - Theatre Studies Portfolio.

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Theatre Studies Portfolio

By

Charlotte Osner – Clark


Initial Inspirations

From the start we decided to produce our piece in the style of Antonin Artaud, the French practitioner who wanted to change the way theatre was perceived and the way productions were put on, for example, he wanted to make an audience feel what was going on around them rather than think about it. We decided this as we had been studying artuad’s theories as part of the AS course and had already incorporated them in a piece devised by us entitled ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. We chose this as we thought an Artaudian piece would be more interesting to watch and perform than a naturalistic piece. We also wanted to incorporate some ideas from the Shared Experience Theatre Company, for example, exploring the issues of racism and stereotyping, and using some of their rehearsal techniques, such as a belief line.

     We considered adapting a fairytale as we had practice with this from doing a short piece in the style of Artaud. Adapting a fairytale seemed to give is a lot of opportunity regarding the audience and their perceptions of fairytales, however, we discovered that fairytales didn’t have enough in the way of a storyline or enough characters for it to be long enough, meaning that the story was too short once it had been adapted and we didn’t have enough ideas to make it longer. We didn’t want to start limiting ourselves at this stage so we discarded this idea and looked elsewhere.

Research

We started to look towards current affairs for inspiration, once we had discarded the idea of adapting a fairytale, and we focused on one of the main stories at the time, the situation in Zimbabwe with the president, Robert Mugabe and the white farmer. This led got us talking about the issue of racism, which we all felt held a lot of potential with regard to theatre. As we thought more about exploring the theme of racism, we started coming up with many ideas as to how it could be portrayed on stage.

     We started brainstorming ideas for a very basic plot and eventually decided on a ‘past, present, future’ type piece, meaning there would be an act set in the past, an act set in the present and an act set in the future to show that racism occurs throughout the world and throughout time. The ‘past’, we decided, was to be based loosely on the situation in the southern states of America in the 1950’s and 60’s, i.e. the practice of integrating very racist, segregated areas and the overpowering of the black people by the white people because this showed a strong sense of racism and could be explored, theatrically, quite easily. The ‘present’ was to be based loosely on the present situation in Zimbabwe, with the black people overpowering/in charge of the white people in order to show that oppression due to race doesn’t just work one way and to show a parallel to the southern American situation. The ‘future’ was to be set in Britain and the storyline would have to be completely made up but would have the core idea that the black and white people would be completely separate communities and would inhabit separate parts of the country, almost making two countries, by choice, not by law to present a theory on how the world might turn out if nothing is done about racism.

     Once these ideas had been set down, we each went away and researched a particular topic to do with racism and our piece, whether that be newspaper articles, history notes or web based research. I researched the situation in the southern states of America in the 1950’s and 60’s, and I found quite a few interesting facts: in 1957, a recently integrated white school, Little Rock High School, was scheduled to have nine black students attending, however, the white students already there would bully them by calling them names and throwing things, such as rocks, at them. We wanted to incorporate this into our piece in the ‘past’ act to show that black people were considered as a lower race, like animals, to the white people and that the white people could get away with the bullying because the racist attitudes went right through to the police and the government of the states. This racist attitude was also shown through the story of Rosa Parks, a black lady who sat on a seat in the middle of a bus and when asked to move by a white person, she refused, which was, in fact, breaking the law i.e. she should sit at the back of the bus and if a white person needed to sit down she would have to get up, if she didn’t she could be arrested. This just reiterates the fact that black people were considered as lesser beings to white people in the southern states of America in the 1950’s to 60’s and this, I thought, would be a very poignant message to get across for the ‘past’ act as it explores the different ways in which racist ‘attacks’ could be made and, therefore, how, theatrically, different attack could be portrayed on stage.

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     The ‘present’ situation in Zimbabwe was researched by looking at newspaper articles and by searching the web. From this research we decided to include the fact that the black people were now in charge and the white people were being ‘terrorised’ by them. We wanted to include a white farmer being evicted by black people under the orders of a very racist, black leader. We also wanted to show the aftermath, i.e. that the black people that took over form the evicted white farmers had no idea how to work on a farm or what to do and ...

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