Over the last few months, the team have been working with a drama group at St Julie’s Catholic High School to develop a new script following on from the ‘Send Me A Selfie’ film. The group at St Julie’s came each week with enthusiasm, excitement, and thoughtfulness which allowed us to explore and expand the story. From learning about Augusto Boal’s methods of making forum theatre, to exploring how the characters might react to lots of different situations, we’ve packed a lot into a short time. The project ended this week with a parental engagement workshop, which allowed students to show their parents what they had been working on, and to get them involved in forum theatre.
All of the participants took on their characters and embodied them, thinking hard about body language, examining the characters emotions, and in some cases fleshing out the characters back stories through monologues and additional dialogue. This really helped them to understand the characters and know how they would react when the different scenarios were thrown at them during the forum theatre section.
The parents came to the workshop with enthusiasm, they threw themselves into the opening games, and were insightful and engaged when we began the forum theatre. On the second run of the performance, where the audience were invited to ‘Stop, Freeze’ the action and offer suggestions, we didn’t get past Meg’s first monologue before the ideas were flowing. The parents wanted to see Meg angrier at Chris for asking for the picture in the first place. The student playing Meg took this on board and this opened the discussion up to what Meg would do if she was feeling distressed about it.
The suggestion came from one of the parents that Meg should go and speak to her Mum about the picture, and although shy at first, eventually one of the Mum’s got up to try out the scenario. Her approach to helping Meg was wonderful, she took suggestions from the audience and offered Meg reassurance and tried to find a solution that would work. The suggestion came that they could try speaking to the school about the issue to see if teachers could help to sort it out. We then had the wonderful Miss Douglas from the Performing Arts department step in and play out the scenario of what would happen if Meg went to the school to resolve the situation.
As we know though, not every parent would be so understanding and in forum theatre it’s important to think of scenarios that could go differently. In the story, Chris’ dad meets the police with aggression and anger, so this would completely change the way the situation was dealt with. We tried out what might happen if Chris and his Dad went into the school as well, also with the presence of a police officer, and quickly the communication broke down. With Chris’ dad passing the blame, and Chris himself trying to push responsibility onto his friends rather than his own actions. We talked with the parents about how children learn from their reactions, for example if Chris’ dad is passing blame, Chris will do the same thing. We also explored how Chris is treated differently in the situation because he is a boy, despite the fact he is just as vulnerable as Meg and is still a child.
The parents were so engaged and offered so many suggestions throughout the workshop. Afterwards, they told us that they felt it had given them new tools to speak to their children, and an understanding of how to approach difficult topics. One parent said that forum theatre was such a novel way of talking about the issues, that the lessons from it will stick with her. The creativity and opportunity to try out different scenarios allows all the participants to think about their roles and how they can offer practical help when faced with a problem. The parental workshop was a huge success, and it was great that the children could show off all of their hard work from the past few months. Their energy and commitment were invaluable to the development of our script, and will go on to aid future workshops.
