A Picture Paints A Thousand Words

Terry O’Connor, member of the Sheffield theatre company, Forced Entertainment, came in to talk to us about different ways we could build up performances. Since Forced Entertainment’s style is similar to the expressionistic and post-dramatic genre, the

performances they make often don’t revolve around plays or dialogue. In this session, we focussed on using photography as a stimulus.

Terry O'Conner in Tabletop Shakespeare

Terry advised us that if the photo depicts a moment in which nothing dramatic is happening, instead they all give the impression of being ‘in-between’ or even ‘after the event’ moments, this is a greater source of inspiration for expressionistic performance artists. Costume, stance and use of space should all be considered very carefully by the performer. Previous photography projects, such as ‘Hotel Photographs’, ‘Cardboard Signs’, ‘Frozen Palaces’, ‘Nightwalks’ and ‘Spin’, by Forced Entertainment depicted this.

As a whole, we focussed on using ‘Cardboard Signs’ as our main inspiration. We created unconventional titles, such as ‘The Homeless Cowboy’, ‘The Undercover Spy’ or ‘The Retired Queen’ – to name a few that my partner and I came up with. Then, having chosen one each (‘The Homeless Cowboy’ for my partner, and ‘The Retired Queen’ for me), we each found a prop that would

represent this nicely in a picture. It was important we planned poses, and considered our use of space while taking the picture.

This exercise showed me a new way of being able to generate ideas, as the pictures raised just enough questions to be able to infer a story without explicitly dictating what that story should be and allowed me to imaginatively create a world surrounding the characters, and why they ended up in those situations.

The second and final performance technique we used from Forced Entertainment was less of an act and more about being yourself. We spent 90 seconds recording what we looked like when thinking about either ‘the past’ or ‘the future'. Afterwards, we wrote down our thought process during those 90 seconds, including any time we were distracted. If we had more time, we could have recorded these thoughts as a voice over and tried to match them up to when we would actually be thinking them in the video.

As a viewer, this was an interesting exercise as I was interested in what other people had been thinking about, whether it was similar to me or different etc. As an actor, the exercise itself felt quite uncomfortable, but the fact that my thoughts were restrained (mostly!) to a specific topic allowed me to come up with significant themes and ideas surrounding it, and I could see how this could easily lead to a group of us coming together to discuss our thoughts and how a performance could be made using these ideas.

Overall, hearing about and experiencing the different ways a post-dramatic theatre company, like Forced Entertainment, create theatre, considering they don’t rely on a script was very eye-opening for me. I can also see how these techniques could be useful in any devising process, whether with a script or not, because the range of creative ideas that stem from these methods are surprisingly vast.