Unit 7 - Theatre in education

Thursday 21^st September

Today we were spending most of the session collecting idea for the project and what the theme of the piece could be.

To start the session the first-year students carried out an improvisation as if they were children in a school playground. This helped them to get into character and to start thinking about how the target audience of this performance act on a day to day basis. Here is a video of them carrying out this task:

For the next part of the session, we went into the props cupboard to see if we could use any of the props during the performance. I also thought that the props may give me some inspiration as to what the theme could be. We brought out many of the big props from the cupboard and a few smaller ones too. Here is a picture of the props that we found:

In the props cupboard we also found some hand puppets which we thought could work nicely within the performance. Here is a picture of the masks:

As a group, we then came up with a possible idea for the piece. We had the idea of a character walking along a street and whilst walking, they come into contact with certain situations which could be educational to the children. Situations could relate to water safety, stranger danger, water safety, healthy eating, etc.

After coming up with this idea, we decided to have a go at improvising around one of the possible themes. This would enable us to get a feel of the theme. We carried out an improve task based on water safety where Angel played the role of the lifeguard, Molly as a child and me as the parent of the child. The first time we carried out this improvisation it didn’t go very well as the scene was not going anywhere and didn’t show any sense of danger. However, the second time that we carried out this task was a lot better as we discussed a scenario before we tried it again. Here is a video of us carrying out the activity:

When I am planning this performance once we have decided on the theme, I need to consider the attention span of the children which we will be performing to. Young children don’t have a very long attention span and therefore the performance can’t be too long and it n needs to be entertaining and engaging.

Over the next week I need to consider what themes I think would work for a performance for young children and carry out some more research into these topics.