Friday 24 April 2009

Credited Drama Group workshop

Credited Drama Group: Oval House Theatre, 22nd April

In this programme the students are here to work towards a grade, bronze or silver, which is equal to a gsce. The group is quite large, about 16 students, all with different abilities. For example, for their exams, some wish to act, some to write a script and some are interested in musical theatre. We started the session by first introducing myself and Monsay followed by several name games, including the Zombie Wall! This was obviously tricky at first as i had to try and remember 16 new names, many of whom were black so i was very unfamiliar with them. I find it hard remembering names to start with, let alone about 13 of them being African names. But i managed to learn about half of them, which helped in the Zombie name game!

After their 15 minute break filled with biscuits and juice, we split the class into three groups and presented them with a scenario each that they had to show in mime. The scenarios were: an order gone wrong, the train inspector and a lucky break. The groups had five minutes to devise the scene all in mime. About four minutes into devising someone asked 'are we allowed to talk in it?'!! After each performance was shown everyone in the class has to give feedback, including myself and Monsay. We were both quite worried about our responses about their work as we both struggle with words and we knew we would be expected to say something quite intelligent and insightful. I enjoyed watching the performances, they were very entertaining and some of them had great ideas. I was impressed with some of the standard, especially as mime is so hard to do.

I felt quite nervous in this group, as there were a lot of students and i wasn't sure where to place myself in the room. I wasn't sure weather to be their friend or step back and be a facilitator. The games did help to break the ice and i got to know some of them pretty quickly. For our workshop that we will run next week, we have decided to follow on from what happened in this session, looking at mime, but introducing speeds, levels and different dynamics.

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