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)