It's always nice to be proved right...
Today I write the blog while a session is happening which is weird…but Daniel Walker from Performing Earth is taking the gold company session so I get to watch my youth theatre work with someone else…I thought I’d use this to my advantage and write a live blog…
So we’ve done some walking around stuff and now we’re playing King of the Jungle…or Animal Kingdom…a game might I add than Jonny volunteered for treacherous little so and so…
This moves onto acting techniques…specifically physicality and the importance of understanding your own before you can think about that of your character…so each member of the gold company is confronted with a number of interpretive snapshots of their walk which turns out to be more of a surprise to some than others…
After the break Daniel introduces the concept of, “Performance Playground” something he has picked up in his international work in South Korea. With this the Gold Company are first asked to get rid of their need to plan, intellectualise and most importantly their awareness that they are being watched. At the heart of the play is the importance /joy/challenge of utter spontaneity…they are also asked to do nothing…something that is always more problematic than one would think…Finally there is some work on consistently knowing what your character is thinking…as ever I’m impressed with the bravery of the group…the openness and the responsivity…the fact that people will always try…even when they’re packing nothing…it’s testament to the culture we’ve developed…
In the spirit of ensuring that none of my blogs are simply descriptive…this would be my wider theme for the week…funders/bureaucrats and some people who should know better are constantly telling me that activities for young people should be run on a project by project basis…this morning proved yet again that this is rubbish…because of the week in week out commitment by all of us everyone got the most they possibly could out of the stand alone session we had today. They were braver because of it…they laughed more because of it…they learnt more because of it and they were discerning enough to be able to evaluate its usefulness to them out of it because of it…justifying my whole philosophy very nicely thank you…
Oh and Helen/Henry is a brilliant person/tortoise…
So we’ve done some walking around stuff and now we’re playing King of the Jungle…or Animal Kingdom…a game might I add than Jonny volunteered for treacherous little so and so…
This moves onto acting techniques…specifically physicality and the importance of understanding your own before you can think about that of your character…so each member of the gold company is confronted with a number of interpretive snapshots of their walk which turns out to be more of a surprise to some than others…
After the break Daniel introduces the concept of, “Performance Playground” something he has picked up in his international work in South Korea. With this the Gold Company are first asked to get rid of their need to plan, intellectualise and most importantly their awareness that they are being watched. At the heart of the play is the importance /joy/challenge of utter spontaneity…they are also asked to do nothing…something that is always more problematic than one would think…Finally there is some work on consistently knowing what your character is thinking…as ever I’m impressed with the bravery of the group…the openness and the responsivity…the fact that people will always try…even when they’re packing nothing…it’s testament to the culture we’ve developed…
In the spirit of ensuring that none of my blogs are simply descriptive…this would be my wider theme for the week…funders/bureaucrats and some people who should know better are constantly telling me that activities for young people should be run on a project by project basis…this morning proved yet again that this is rubbish…because of the week in week out commitment by all of us everyone got the most they possibly could out of the stand alone session we had today. They were braver because of it…they laughed more because of it…they learnt more because of it and they were discerning enough to be able to evaluate its usefulness to them out of it because of it…justifying my whole philosophy very nicely thank you…
Oh and Helen/Henry is a brilliant person/tortoise…
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