Stories Workshop

At the end of one of our sessions our clients began sharing some personal stories about how they got into crime and their families. We decided to develop some of the stories into pieces of theatre. Many of them weren't comfortable with sharing their stories so they will help to tell others. We began working on one of the stories which was the tale of a boys brother being killed in a fight, which ended with him getting shot. It is easy to get him to talk about the story but getting him to focus in enough to create some interesting work is difficult.

We decided to tell the stories with 5 of us sitting on chairs. We all represented characters in the story. We had the boy, his girlfriend, his brother, his brothers girlfriend, his mum and the guy who shot him. I thought this was a good idea because the story was powerful not, i felt it could take away from the story if we were to act it out. We created movement and sounds to enhance the stories and re create the conversations he had with people that day. Rosie will also be writing a piece on fate and choices, which will link it to the message of the story. 

Workshop 3

In this workshop we ran a spoken word and music session. In our spoken word piece we showed videos and discussed them.

Showing this video sparked some really great discussions with the groups. I think they started to see spoken word as a way of expressing their views as oppossed to a poetic art form that they are alienated from. Some of them began to share their own personal stories of their experiences of education.

The music workshop was also extremely successful. They created two new songs which involved bars written by the clients from the turn around centre and lyrics from brit kids. These songs are really powerful and we are hoping to develop them further so we can then perform them live on 12th July as a part of our performance. What would also be really great would be to get some recording time in the studio at school so they can have a CD of their work to take away. What I think would be a great thing to do would be to make copies of the CD's and sell them at school and donate the money to the turn-around centre.

Plan For Workshop 3

SPOKEN WORD/MUSIC WORKSHOP

Circle up, start by doing a few speaking activities.

MAKING A STORY 
-go around the circle and each person has to add a word. For example, I would start with 'one' and the next person may say 'day' and we go around the circle until we have created a short story.
-this allows people to be inventive with words and also see what words work nicely with each other. It also can be quite humorous so it will be a nice way to get everyone feeling comfortable with each other again. 
-do the activity just a few times until everyone feels like its time to move on.

Another possible speaking activity: 
-two people go in the middle of the circle (more can be added as the game goes on)
-the people in the circle have to have a conversation but each line has to be a question. 
-for example I may say 'how are you today?' And someone would then have to reply with a question but staying in the context. So they could say 'why do you always ask me that?' And that could be followed with 'are you being rude to me?' Etc. 
-this really warms up the brain and get people thinking really hard about how they say things. 
(15 minutes maximum)

FREE WRITING 
-for the next activity, we will try a free writing task. This will allows everyone to write there own pieces which can then be adapted into monologues, poems, lyrics etc. 
-ask everyone to write down the following 
-a place
-a feeling
-a colour 
-an item of clothing
-a name 
(Maybe have in mind the theme we talked about in Mondays session when writing these things down)
-when they have all these things, they will then have 2 minutes to write about anything they want BUT they have to include all of the 5 words they came up with in the first section. This is so they feel they have some stimulus and are not just writing from nothing. They will only have 2 minutes to do this. 
-if at any point in the free writing task the clients have to stop and think, they must write 'I am writing, I am writing' continuously on the paper. The aim is that your pen never leaves the paper and its a constant flow of words. 
-the writing doesn't have to make sense and it can be as crazy as you want because in the end, the writing means something to you and only you. 
(15 minutes for whole section including explanation)

NONE DOMINANT HAND

-for the next task we will do the same thing, expect you have to write this time with no stimulus and your also using your none dominant hand. 
-this allows us to use the part of our brain we don't really access a lot and it also helps us to slow down with our writing as we find it naturally more difficult. 
-we will then compare which technique we preferred and the material we have created in both tasks. 
-following this, we can then begin to merge the two pieces of writing together which will hopefully become a paragraph of material we can use.

2 ROUTES

-leading on from this we can take 2 routes. We can decide to make our pieces of writing into spoken word or monologue pieces or make them into lyrics and add instruments. 
-we can split the people who want to do each, equally with the Brit kids and devise together.

MUSICALLY

-we will have a few instruments dotted around the room which people can choose or not choose to use in there piece. 
-Rosie will lead a short vocal warmup and a brief insight into techniques we use when singing. 
-Harry and Matthew can then demonstrate that for those who may not want to use instruments or be accompanied by them, we can use our voice and body as an instrument too. 
-they will then lead a short beat boxing taster for anyone who would be interested. 
-we can then split into groups and with the material we have all separately created, choose to merge that together with the parts we like from each, or work individually to create music on our own. 
(45 minutes for whole)

SPOKEN WORD/MONOLOGUE

-for people who don't want to work musically, they can choose to adapt there pieces into spoken word or monologue. 
-it might be nice for a theatre student or someone who is comfortable working with monologues to lead this and work on the different ways they can portray and deliver there piece or writing. 
-they can really take time to experiment with this and maybe get into groups and make a short play, merging all of the free writing stories together.

We can then have a 15 minute sharing of work and some feedback.

Workshop

This session we worked on the opening drama section of our piece. We started by getting into pairs. We would then would create three shapes or movements for our partner to embody. These were meant to represent three life goals. Both partners did this for each other. We then developed on from this to make more a motif with three movements. We worked on transitions between the movements so they flowed well. We then all took a place in the room and performed the movement to the song ' I need' by Maverick Sabre.

We then worked on some choreography to go at the beginning. It began with me and Josh from turnaround walking to the centre of the stage and beginning an exercise where you focus on your partners hand and follow it with your eyes. This works really well and I have used this exercise and a trust exercise with people before in my drama lessons. My partner struggled at points to take it seriously but he really tried and hopefully by the performance it will look good. Matthew and Anya then created some short movement choreography. This looks really good and will be a nice opening to our piece.

The plan is to develop these movements to be filmed. The video will then be played in the background of our performance. So later on we re worked the movements so they were smaller and filmed them in various places around the school. This was a fun experience taking the client group all over the school and doing something a little bit different. One of the clients has been reluctant to take part in the workshops so we had him filming the movements and the entire process instead so he can  feel involved. I think this is an important part of our job in this project, keeping everyone involved and listening to peoples ideas. As time is going on the lines between the turn around people and brit people are fading which is really nice. It's starting to feel like we are all just friends who want to make some work together.

This is the song we will be performing to 'I  need'

Our teacher Matthew and Sarah spoke to the music department about using the studios and they said yes. This was great news and got everyone really excited. The man from the studio came in to speak to us and take the people involved in the songs around the studio to discuss backing tracks and what needed to be done. Next week they will go in and record the songs.

Workshop 2

We began this session by doing a few warm up exercises. There were more new people and some people had not returned so we re introduced ourselves as well. We started off with a game called atoms. This is where everyone walks around the space and the leader calls out a number and you get into groups of that size. Once in those groups you are instructed to make a certain shape or object using your bodies for example, a washing machine. This game forces the groups to mix, possibly with people they may no know or feel comfortable with. It then  makes you work with them. I think this exercise worked well for this group because its very fast moving. You quickly pick people, make an object and move on. It didn't allow for people to build up a wall of who they didn't or did want to work with or of the kind of work they wanted to do, everyone just  got on with it. It seemed to me like everyone was working well as a team and enjoying this game. 

We then played a game called Shark. This is where everyone puts a piece of A3 paper down on the floor and at the beginning stands on it. One person is selected to be the shark. Everyone begins moving around the space and when the Shark shouts 'Shark' you have to run to your nearest piece of paper before the shark catches you. As the game progresses the shark removes pieces of paper and makes them smaller so you have to try and balance with more than one person on a piece of paper. We chose one of the boys from the turn around centre  to be the Shark. I think this helped as a way of making it feel like we were all on the same level, not just us running games for them to do. This is helpful because at the end of the project we want to have created work together not made them create something they didn't feel was theirs. This game was fun and built the energy in the group. I could feel people getting more comfortable again and allowing themselves to join in and enjoy themselves. 

We then played a Caterpillar game. We got into groups and got chairs and the aim was to get from one side of the room to other standing on the chairs the whole time. This game required team work and focus. Seeing as there was one less chair to people you would have to balance on a chair with another group member at some points. This was another way of building trust between group members and allowing yourself to be comfortable being physically close to other people, which is often difficult. The game was difficult at times and people lost balance and fell off chairs and towards the end we even had some cheating. However, it was all light hearted and good fun, and nobody was too upset with anyone. All the games we have been doing are about enjoying ourselves, getting comfortable with each other and getting to know one another not about winning. 

We wanted to begin some drama work with the group. We thought a good way to get them comfortable with this element of performance would be to do some improvisation games. We started by getting everyone to write down a location and an opening line on two separate pieces of paper. We then got into pairs and someone chose a location and an opening line at random and we would take two minutes in pairs to improvise a scene using those as a stimulus. We then quickly went around every group and shared a snippet of what we came up with. Some members of our client group were more enthusiastic and seemed more confident in improvising. It felt as though a lot of the partners were powered more by the brit students and some of the turn around members seems uncomfortable with it. However, many of them seemed to have a natural ability in performing and improvising and that was really great to see. As well as that some of them who weren't naturally comfortable with it did try their best and I felt were starting to realize performing it front of each other isn't as scary as it seems. 

After this we began work on scripts. We had chosen a few sections from plays we thought they might be interested in working in. We were asked whether we would like to perform or to direct. Many of the client group opted to direct. After we began working with them I felt like this came from a lack of confidence or interest in performing as opposed to wanting to direct. We worked on a script from Mad About The Boy. In the end our director performed with us. This felt like we were making progress as before he did not want to perform but in the end he tried it and did really well. It was also interesting to see brit students from non-acting based strands having a go at performing as well. I think that helped to bridge the gap between the turn around group and us by showing that we aren't all confident and skilled at all aspects of performing but you can still try. I think this could also encourage them to think about things they are good at or passionate about and maybe exploring and developing that in our sessions. 

Turn Up and Turn Around

The community client group we will be working with this term are some youth offenders who are part of the Croydon turnaround centre  The centre is designed to be a place where people, parents and teenagers can come to get advice, access new opportunities and for parents help their child move away and stay away from deviant and criminal behavior.

It offers them a chance to gain access to social workers, youth workers, police officers,  education welfare, and health advisers. It is available for anyone in Croydon between the ages of 14-21. The unique part of this organisation is that it offers a drop in centre, where anyone without previous ties to turn around can come in when they need advice during the drop in hours. This means their information and facilities are more easily accessible.

http://www.caysh.org/what-we-do/diz/

First meeting

Today we had our first workshop with the people from the turn around centre. We decided not to go straight into creating work with them but to play some games and get to know each other a bit better. I think before we met them many of us has stereotypes in our mind of what these 'youth offenders' would be like and what their interests would be. When we started the games however, they all contributed in some way and we all seemed to get along. I could tell that some of them would need some more time to get comfortable in this environment and to be able to take it seriously, but mostly they seemed really enthusiastic. I think this helped some of us to feel more excited about the project and to let go of some of those stereotypes we may have had.

After the games session we showed them around the school to all the main points they would need and to show them the facilities we have access to. They seemed to really warm to our school environment  and were interested in all the different things we had going on.

After the tour we discussed what kind of work we would like to create. One of them told us about how he had lots of film ideas that he would like to explore and another said they would like to write and record some music. I think this was surprising for us to see they had so much passion about it and had so many things they wanted to do. I got the sense that most of them were interested in creating a film as opposed to a live performance, but I think it be great if we could find a way of combining both. Overall I think it was a really positive session and I look forward to creating work with them.