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I love that song lyric, its from 'When you wish upon a star' :)
I am really living my dream right now, of becoming a drama teacher and facilitator.. its a lot of work, its exhausting but i know i'm where i want to be.... although I still have a process of learning and facilitating to go...
Hope you're all well.
El xx
Hi everyone! So much is happening in my life right now and I'm fulfilling all my dreams of being in a drama and theatre environment again, and learning to teach drama.
I am at Central School of Speech and Drama in London and I started this October. Ive met amazing, passionate people from all over the world who love theatre and want to be immersed in it. They want to do workshops to grow as practitioners, go to theatre shows to improve their knowledge :). Its great.
I have a lovely supervisor and I've met some fab people already. My placement has started at a company called Artburst who run theatre workshops for children, building confidence and self esteem. Im so excited. I am also working with Time2Shine productions, on a play for children. I hope that I get what I want out of the placements and that they are as exciting as I hope! That they teach me how I can learn and grow as a drama teacher and maker of theatre.
I started work at Art burst, a little company that runs integrated arts workshops for children. It runs very interesting projects with under 5s, those with speech and language difficulties, they make a 'play in a day' where the children create their own costumes and props, run workshops at the Museum of Childhood. A very fascinating company.
I observed a little workshop with the under 5s today, 'Artburst Minis'. It was so sweet! There were four children with their mums, and the workshop was based on a farm theme. The children played parachute games, learnt about colour, sang farm songs, painted mouse masks, coloured in pictures of mice and painted pictures of haystacks, danced, read a story about a farm and wore puppets of the animals and just had lots of fun! They had snack time at the end. It was so nice to see how engaged the children were with all the different media, and how some grew in confidence when at the beginning of the session they felt a little shy. It was sweet to see the children reaching out to each other and becoming friends, and I think the mums enjoyed it too!
This week was really great at university! On Thursday, came in to watch a performance of 'Three Blind Mice', a forum theatre piece by Cardboard Citizens. Cardboard Citizens are a theatre company whose actors have all experienced homelessness, and they create pieces for homeless hostels and the general public. The aim is to provoke change in its audience, using Augusto Boal's method of forum theatre, where the spectator is turned into the spect-ACTOR. The audience forums an issue in order to find the best resolution to the problem and get them thinking about changes in their own lives.
Three Blind Mice contained three basic stories. The first was of an abusive friendship, the second a young black man out of prison trying to rebuild his life and avoiding temptation, and the third a woman with significant mental health issues. Our audience chose to forum the second story, to find resolution to the mans problems. I loved seeing how the theatre company performed and used forum in their work. It was great to see the function of the Joker, and how they interacted with the audience.
On Friday, I had a session on Boal. I have already studied his practise on my BA, however it was great to play games to open up the body and make it expressive and receptive to noise and sensation, bringing up our energy and making us feel vulnerable/oppressed. Boals Theatre of the Oppressed is about making social change for those who are oppressed. We therefore workshopped some image theatre, using still tableaus of our own oppression and trying to find an end image, the resolution and a transitional image. Our tableau was of a woman protecting two other women from threatening, aggressive men. The audience interpreted the two women as children being protected by a mother which was an interesting take. I was one of the children.
I had to leave at that point, however the class went on to do some Forum Theatre, I believe of the still tableaus created.
Has been a great week and I look forward to next weeks placement and study!
Love to you all xxxxxxx
