two point xhosa

Apparently ttpo# got a shout out all the way over in South Africa earlier in the month at the Higher Education as a Social Space Conference. Many thanks to Angela Brew for mentioning us favourably in her keynote speech.

Thanks to Physio 2.0 for the above photo.

Added Slidecast to the ttpo# LTEA Presentation

theatre two point oh # @ LTEA 2008

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: of university)

Evaluation via Skype

Having now graduated from University, both Laura and I have been busy moving down the M1 to our new abodes in London... but still with the final evaluation of ttpo# to complete. Now that the dust has settled we're entering the final stages of the project and have been putting together the final evaluation report and case study - drawing upon a focus group with participants held in June and a reflective interview of Laura and me from August. It was probably apt that the latter was conducted by Jamie over Skype, using the excellent plugin Callgraph to record the conversation for transcription.


Although I can't say it was a conscious choice to take some time out before completing the project, it has been good to get some perspective and to be able to take a fresh look at what has (and hasn't) been achieved. Some of the things said by participants have been really insightful - interestingly many of them seemed to think that with a normal academic module (or with a "normal" theatre play) you get told what to do a lot more. Other comments were slightly more... philosophical... ("it was led by dreams").

What was good was that for most of the transcript the group doesn't mention either Laura or my name - we hope that this indicates that they really did feel ownership over the project, and didn't think of this as being somehow "ours". This said, there was one slightly worrying reference to us as "mummy and daddy".

I was particularly glad to see that most thought that, despite being incredibly time-intensive, it had not adversely impacted on their studies or exams. In fact some felt the opposite, and it certainly seems this way given some of the excellent results many of the graduates received. Most seem keen to want to continue their involvement with theatre, and there seems to be a consensus that it was a very worthwhile experience.

As a final note for this post, I'm also finally getting round to converting all the hours of video recordings to avi - ready to edit into the DVD we promised! We should also be able to upload the video to these here pages, so at this rate we may be finished by Christmas...

Presenting ttpo#

Today Laura and I presented at the LTEA* Conference 2008: Inquiry in a Networked World. You can check out the slideshow of our paper at slidecast.

Theatre in (Higher) Education

With one foot in ttpo# and the other as CILASS Student Ambassador for French I went along to the Languages of the Wider Word CETL in London a couple of weeks ago for a day conference on Drama in Language Learning. Check out my post on the CILASS Student Blog for more info.

Evaluation, Evaluation, Evaluation...

The production is now entering its final stages: the performances are all done, the budgets are completed and everyone involved has been hard at work with essays, exams, and finally a chance to let their hair down.

However, now that we've all got a little bit of time to breathe, now that we have a bit of perspective on the project, it's time to start evaluating the whole process; as well as producing a case study and a final report, we have already run a focus group with many of our participants, and myself and Laura will be disseminating information about the project at several conferences, starting tomorrow with the Drama and Language Learning Day at the Languages of the Wider World CETL at SOAS/UCL.

We're also attending the Student Network Conference on Monday and Tuesday in Plynouth, and then presenting at the Learning Through Enquiry Alliance Conference 2008 at the end of the month back in Sheffield.

I'll also be posting more about the production and uploading podcasts and video over the next few weeks, now that I finally have my life back!

Two down, Two to go...

Well we're half way through the performances and have received some positive feedback. Things have been rather busy as you can imagine, so for now I'll just leave you with a seven minute interview on yesterday's Howard Pressman show on BBC Radio Sheffield - fast forward 2h45m in to check it out...

Surveillance Trailer

Many thanks to the genius that is Ben Marshall.

The Posters Have Landed...

IC Squared

Both today and yesterday I met up with Laura, Rob NJ and Matt to talk about the direction of the script - we were attempting to define the core plotlines and to concretise (yes, it is a word Laura!) what we have already created. Today we were joined by Jenny - we hadn't intentionally excluded anyone, it just so happened that as a sub-grouping we had bumped into each other in the IC* and decided to have these two informal meetings. It has to be said that the smaller group size probably did allow us to accomplish a little more than we would have done in a larger (albeit better organised) meeting.

We constructed a timeline of the main plot using index cards*, and created a kind of family tree of (principal) characters. We're going to have to cast fairly soon, as the play will open in five weeks (well, five weeks yesterday in fact), and we're now aiming to finish the script within a week. At the same time we took the opportunity to pilfer some food from some kind of conference in Colab 1 - apparently it's to do with a magazine that coincidentally features an article called something along the lines of "Video Recording Theatre for Education", which could be quite interesting...

Anyway, as previously mentioned there will be nine of us heading down to stay at mine tomorrow in order to get up bright and early and visit the V&A "Collaborators" exhibition, a word which has unfortunately become rather negative in my mind of late as I'm still "hard at work" on an essay on Sartre and Vichy France. This has however focussed my mind onto ideas of memory, particularly collective memory, and potentially how subjective memory is challenged by the increase in data collection and video recording in our society. Can't get away from relating everything to this bloody play! :)

Dancing with the Camera

It's practically the end of the Easter Holidays, and not a single post during all this "time off" when I should have had lots of time to tell you about NSDF, the Surveillance Studies Network Seminar Series, and our plans to visit the V&A's Collaborators: UK Design for Performance exhibition. Of course it's only now that I have an essay in for Monday that I've decided to get blogging (ttpo#'s very own Matt Kendrick has written 25 pages of script instead of his), but for this post I'll just limit it to the SSN Seminar as it has just happened and I've actually got a chance to remember most of it.

Before I start writing about today's events, I should probably give a bit of background. I haven't yet mentioned Professor Clive Norris, who is head of Sociology at Sheffield and uncoincidentally a founder member of the Surveillance Studies Network. I contacted him in January to ask to meet him and discuss the project, which we did the following week. We had a really interesting discussion in which he brought me up to speed with the emerging field of surveillance studies and suggested that we might perform a work in progress of the piece at the conference going on this week. In the end we realised that this was going to be too tight a time-scale, but he ended up inviting me to the first installment of the aforementioned seminar series which I duly attended today.

Feeling slightly like an impostor (I'm an undergraduate of French Studies, almost everyone else in the room was a published academic in the field), it was soon apparent just how useful the experience would be - the first speaker was John McGrath, Artistic Director at Manchester's Contact Theatre and author of Loving Big Brother: Performance, Privacy and Surveillance Space, who began by talking about a show by New York theatre company The Builders Assocation and their piece Super Vision. Checking out the trailer and the production photos, as a show it looks absolutely amazing, and its interesting to note that like our show (so far), the plot consists of three intertwining stories. Various online reviews do seem to indicate that the show had nothing particularly new to say about internet privacy or data security and that the piece is overwhelmed by its use of media, but boy is it pretty!

John talked about surveillance space (a notion he developed in the aforementioned book) and hyperexposure, and talked about the essential disconnect of surveillance, in particular talking about sound - any voice recording is always more suggesting of what is missing and is open to (mis)reading by the listener. He also talked about the way we send contradictory profiles into the datasphere, the idea that most of us these days have multiple data selves rather than us having a fixed "self" - your Facebook self probably has much cooler taste in music than you do, for example.

In the discussion after his talk I asked him (in a rather awkward manner - was in dire need of a coffee) about the experience of the actor in plays such as Super Vision - his answer was that acting on stage using cameras/projector screens requires great discipline, much like that of a dancer. The way in which the performer needs to position themself to be seen both live and as a projected image requires an awareness of space and well-rehearsed physical movement. This was valuable stuff, as the ttpo# lot haven't yet had to act with a script, let alone a camera pointing in their face.

Other talkers were no less interesting - Gareth Palmer had some very interesting things to say about reality/lifestyle television and its ambition to transform. In our devising sessions we have developed a scene examining (female) body-image, and it was interesting to hear him highlight the body as subject of the (male) gaze, as this is something we have been discussing in our workshops. Mike Nellis talked about electronic tagging, discussing public and tabloid opinion, prohibition v. inhibition, and the evolution of the idea from a 1960s patent through a Spiderman cartoon to the present day. Hille Koskela talked particularly about the "hijacking" of surveillance through webcams and cameraphones, beginning with a Youtube video of two security guards beating a man in East Helsinki. The resulting discussion gave all participants lots to think about - the authorship of the video, the failure of the camera operator to intervene and the ethics of recording someone without them knowing.

I've got a feeling this post is getting a little dry so I'll leave it there, but next time I'll be talking about NSDF, our Dragon's Den-style pitch to Head of Theatre Development at the Arts Council, and possibly a little bit about the V&A exhibition, but I should probably get back to some Henri Rousso and his "organisation de l'oubli"...

End of Term Report

Being, as we are, a University project, ttpo# now faces two weeks without workshops, and given how we have been struggling to link together the different improvised scenes today's workshop given by Justin Audibert couldn't have come at a better time. Justin is currently assistant directing up at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds where he has most recently been working on the well-received The Grouch. He came in tonight for the second of our professional-led workshops (thanks to funding from CILASS), and after a jumping, clapping warmup that would be the envy of even the most energetic gospel choir, he truly kick-started the proverbial loom, encouraging the group to improvise a string of five scenes: if you'll excuse further metaphoricalising, he's shown us how to water and fertilise the seeds we've sown.

I also found myself pushed to explore the full technological limits of our rehearsal space, linking up a DV cam to the lecturn PC. This meant we could not only record most of the rest of the proceedings (video coming soon...), but project live video onto the wall as well.

As I have previously mentioned we are at the end of the spring term and now half-way through the second semester. Time is therefore not on our side, and of the seven weeks we have left, only five of them will see us physically meeting up as a group.

We'll therefore be switching to collaborative online software, namely Google Docs, and concentrate on using our Facebook Groups to develop our ideas and plan the roadmap to performance.

If I was to give the collective a grade for the term, I'd say we've just about pulled a last minute 2.1 out of the bag, but we have a lot of work ahead of us if we're going to realise our ambitions for this project.

Some of us are off to the National Student Drama Festival (NSDF) next week, so will be posting from the glamorous beaches of Scarborough to a screen near you before you know it...

Who are the watchers?

I've now put together a preview poster (see right) - we're probably going to use this as the basis for a collaborative design for the final publicity campaign, and maybe use the camera stencil for some t-shirts for those involved.

Some people have commented that on first glance it looks like a gun (but that this is a not necessarily a bad thing), while others say it a looks lot like a Hard-Fi album cover - I say it just looks like one of the standard posters warning people that they are on CCTV. I don't know how much these notices blend into the background these days; despite being bright yellow it is only been since I've been involved with this project that I've started noticing them again - their ubiquity has more or less meant that our brains ignore them.

After a couple of workshops it now seems that at least part of the focus of the piece will be on an operator working in a CCTV control room. We have this idea of him facing the audience, sat at a workstation on a raised section of the theatre (known as the baptistry - the theatre we'll be using is a converted church) with what he sees projected onto a screen suspended above his head. But who exactly are these anonymous people who sit watching us?

Red Road (2006) portrays quite normal, down to earth people, far from any 'type' we might imagine: a busybody or voyeur. I imagine there must be some kind of vetting procedure, obviously including a CRB check, but the skills requirements suggested by this Local Government Careers website only the following:

- excellent eyesight,
- strong powers of concentration,
- to be able to react quickly and calmly in an emergency,
- good communication skills,
- to be discreet - confidentiality is very important, they must never discuss what they see on their monitors with outsiders,
- to be able to work without supervision.

I was interested in seeing what these people might be like, so searched for a group on Facebook this morning. Sure enough, I found CCTV Operator's club; with about 18 members it can hardly be described as fully representative, especially considering the skewed demographics of social networks, but there were only three women to the fifteen male members. What I noticed this morning was that among the related groups section (which lists the top 5 groups members have in common) was that as well as I WORK IN THE BULLRING (presumably one of the main nodes of the group invited their colleagues at the Birmingham shopping centre), was a group called Bloody Women! - mysteriously now deleted. Unfortunately I didn't take a screenshot this morning so you'll have to accept this on trust, but I may well have a cache saved on my home computer to upload.

UPDATE: seems to have reappeared to you'll be able to see for yourself...

The group was not quite as misogynistic as you might imagine; it seemed to be several young men talking about how they always seem to end up in the "friend zone", although the description did mention oestrogen and madness in the same sentence.

Is there a certain motivation among young men who are "unlucky in love" towards this job? As a woman, would it worry you if a large number of CCTV operators were men? There has been a lot written on the relationship of gender to surveillance, and given this finding perhaps this is an area we should explore.

The Audition Workshops

I'm writing from the lectern in CILASS 7 where we are currently holding the first of our two "audition" workshops - having had difficulties persuading students to overcome any fears they have about being involved in our project, we felt we needed to use the word "audition" as a way of encouraging new people to get involved. We weren't looking to eliminate people, just see how different people fit in to the group dynamic. You can see some of the stuff we got up to in the video below...



Many thanks to Dan Balla for being the guest leader for the first workshop - and giving us a lot of ideas for the second, including "Autocue Improv"... more on this later!

Workshop Auditions

This Wednesday we will be holding workshop auditions for the performers for Surveillance, which if you missed it is the title of the final piece we will be performing.

It needs to be stressed that with this project the journey is far more important than the destination, and that being involved with ttpo# will be an opportunity to be part of a pioneering student-led IBL project, after our successful grant application that will allow us to bring in professional experience and take our work to conferences, festivals and across the world-wide web.

We're looking for a mix of creatively-minded undergraduate students of all levels of experience with theatre to work on researching and devising a show exploring the implications of increased surveillance at all levels of modern society, focussing in particular on the effects on both the watcher and the watched. As an official project of CILASS, (Centre for Inquiry-based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences), we will be blending professional-led workshops with devising sessions, discussion forums, video shoots, hands-on technical training, and a collaborative online organisational system; this will be a huge opportunity for anyone interested in theatre, sociology, collaborative research, and improving their research and information skills.

We will be running two sessions (open only to members of the University) on Wednesday 20th February 2008: 2pm-4pm and 5pm to 7pm (14:00-16:00 & 17:00-19:00). Anyone interested in joining the project need only attend one session. There is a chance we may be oversubscribed, or that you may not be able to make either session. If this is the case, either contact us by email/text/phone, or let us know in the comments and we'll get in contact ASAP.

Please wear comfortable clothing (and clean socks!), and make sure you bring your U-card to access the building.

So, to sum up...

Location: CILASS 7 (Level One of the Information Commons)
Day: Wednesday 20th February 2008
Session One: 2pm - 4pm
Session Two: 5pm - 7pm

Facebook Event Page

theatre two point oh # presents: "Surveillance"

A belated Happy New Year and welcome to any new visitors to the site. We've got plenty of news to update you about, which we'll try and do in dribs and drabs over the next few days.

The ttpo# team is now coming together, having brought on board a brand new stage manager, Sarah, who will be gracing these pages with her thoughts as soon as her assessments are out the way (should be next week)

We've also submitted a funding application to CILASS at the University of Sheffield with a view to becoming a fully integrated CILASS project - we'll let you know the results of this as soon as we know in a couple of weeks' time, and more about what this entails in the next few days.

It also seems that we've now committed to a title for the play, simply "Surveillance". It came to the point where publicity/marketing-wise we had too many deadlines approaching, and it doesn't restrict us too much with where we want to go with the play. For those of you that are new to these pages, we're going to be investigating the implications of increased surveillance in our society, whether through closed-circuit television, DNA databasing, RFID chips, or any other technological development, so hopefully this title works for you!