Rachael tells us about her experience of delivering virtual forum theatre workshops for primary schools:-
“We have been creating virtual drama based activities for schools over the past month and have started teaching pupils online. My sessions are all about ‘Resilience online’ and how to decipher good from bad within social media and online gaming.
We are on week 4 of a 6 week project and the schools are really enjoying it. I teach live on Zoom and give the classes small tasks to complete and feed back to me within the session.
Part of my practice is ‘forum theatre’ - a way of freezing scripted drama and reframing it to fit the ideas of the audience. We have started to experiment with this on the online platform and It works really well. The pupils are able to freeze the action by using the ‘reaction buttons’ on the platform - they will click the ‘raise hand’ button when they have an idea of how to change the outcome of the drama and then we will freeze and switch that pupil into the action and re-frame the drama hoping to realise a better outcome for the characters we are playing.
At the moment, across the live sessions we are working with three schools reaching about 80 pupils across Liverpool, which in terms of outreach in the middle of a pandemic is fantastic. We look forward to continuing with this work and finding new and exciting ways to deliver our resources within an online environment”.
Rachael Mutch is Ariel's Project Officer, delivering our Lottery Funded project. Read more this project and contact Rachael here.
