February 8, 2017

As it got closer to the Theatre Company module, I realised the excitement I had for it. An excitement I had never really had before, especially when it came to theatre and this course. I struggled to put my finger on why this was.

After several meetings with my fellow company members, it dawned on me: the excitement was due to the fact that this group of people, which included me, had been given an amazing opportunity. An opportunity in which we could tackle any issue, present our unheard opinion on anything within this world or simply laugh at something that needed to be laughed at. The whole point is that we had been given an amazing opportunity and we needed to use it.

However, this realisation quickly turned the excitement into panic. This opportunity had two sides to it: the amazing chance to create our own, personal work but the other side to that, was what did we all believe in, as a theatre company. This lead to countless discussions on what we cared about and wanted to create content on, which, may I add, varied from raising awareness of illnesses to drag. This is where a personal admiration of my theatre company came from, and developed a notion that I desperately wanted to be seen in our material: the fact that this was a group of amazingly unique people, each with their own hates and loves, that had found themselves in Studio X on a cold Tuesday morning in January, trying to create a show.

Totally not posing so to seem like I was doing work. (Nixon, 2017)

From that point on, we all aimed to find a common thread throughout all of our interests, in which we could all connect and come together to create this show. This ideology has been there from the start, as shown by the fact that one of our first name ideas for the company, was Common Thread Theatre Company. Due to a theatre company already existing under this name, we had to [reluctantly] move on and I’m glad we did. Because if we had stayed with Common Thread, we wouldn’t have discovered a deeper meaning to this ideology of us being a group of people, brought together to create content.

This was where Fragment came into play. The concept that there are countless people, who feel dejected from society and rarely get their story told. That these people play second fiddle to the ‘bigger’ stories within the news, the ones of politicians and wars often seen on our screens. The concept that the human race has become the most fragmented it has ever been, with tensions and judgement at breaking point. This created the name of our theatre company, the manifesto and the saying that we aimed to follow throughout our creative process, We speak to: Someone. Anyone. Everyone.

Works Cited

Nixon, E. (2017) Fragment Theatre Company’s Gallery.

When initially meeting and discussing the aims and principles of our theatre company, we discovered that we wanted to avoid some overpowering issues often seen in the news that seem to be surrounding us in recent times, such as political conflicts. Subsequently, we began looking at sections or ‘fragments’ of people’s everyday life and how this is an interesting theme that is often overlooked in theatre, ultimately naming our company.

After discussing ideas regarding fragments of everyday life, one common theme that recurred seemed to be the idea of escapism. Escapism proved to be something that each member of our theatre company could easily relate to, and once discussing this further we realised escapism wasn’t as simple as just that, it could be used and often abused through many different ways. When discussing our manifesto, we came up with the idea that our company would speak to ‘Someone. Anyone. Everyone’, as we wanted to target individuals and their personal ways of escaping. In co-operation with the Arts Council England, one of their 5 main aims is to make work that would be available for everyone, in which we aim to achieve in our show.

Escapism is defined as: ‘the avoidance of reality by absorption of the mind in entertainment or in an imaginative situation, activity, etc.’ (Dictionary, 2017).

There was something particularly interesting about this idea of ‘the avoidance of reality’, and how this was such a common occurrence within not only everyone within our company, but many people in day to day life as well.

As escapism proved to be something ‘normal’ we started to discover the different ways that people escape and how some can become unhealthy and even dangerous. We discussed ways that either ourselves or people we knew used to escape from everyday life. Some as serious as physically abusing their own body through eating and exercise and some as simple as listening to music. This sparked many new ideas for our show and how we could explore this idea of escapism within a theatre production.

Though we had a key theme of escapism, we also began to look at how our ideas regarding escapism appeared to be disjointed and did not always link to each other in a very cohesive manner. Furthermore we realized this actually added to the feel of our company, and how it would be interesting to explore this idea of a ‘fragmented’ structure within a show, as this not only added emphasis to the escapism theme but also creates an interesting structure of exploring many issues throughout one show.

Brainstorming initial ideas

(Chattaway, 2017)

Works Cited:

Dictionary (2017) Dictionary.com. [online] Available from http://www.dictionary.com/browse/escapism [Accessed on 3rd March 2017].

Chattaway, A. (2017)

Day: February 8, 2017

‘Ah we can dance if we want to, we can leave your friends behind’ (Men Without Hats, 1982)

Where to Start?