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.