For our first week back on IB Theatre, I and my fellow seniors began our process for the solo project. The first step of the process was choosing a theorist. My two choices were Kate Mitchell and Jerzy Grotowski. For Mitchell, I was fascinated by her incorporation of multimedia in her work. And as for Grotowski, I liked how he preached intimacy in theatre and the relation between the audience and the performer. In the end, I chose Kate Mitchell because I was interested in using multimedia in my own piece, and I enjoyed her spotlight on marginalized women.
So kate Mitchell was born in 1964 in Berkshire. Her experience in theatre began in 1986 as a production assistant at the King's Head Theatre. She was an assistant director at Paines Plough a year later and moved to the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1988 with the same job. From there she worked at other companies such as the Royal Court Theatre and National Theatre. An interesting fact I found was that despite working for the Royal Shakespeare Company, she wasn't quite fond of Shakespeare himself. Though she appreciated his stories, she thought they were outdated for today's society. Particularly she believed his plays were too long for the attention of today's audiences, along with being incomprehensible to the casual viewer. Hence this is where her theory of theatre comes in.
Mitchell was sometimes known as a vandal of theatre, someone who reshaped stories to create a new narrative. She was inspired by Stanisvalinky's method for creating a character, as she stressed realism in her work. Her use of multimedia derives from her idea of showing another aspect of the character. With projections, she could portray the inner thoughts of a character and not just what was conveyed within the script. In this case, the use of multimedia is almost as important as the actor. Mitchell works with detail and care, not only to the story but also to the audience. As she once stated: "As a director, you have a role that is very simple: to say whether it’s clear or not. That is the job: to watch in detail and make sure it is precise for the audience, second by second"