The Golden Travellers!

There has been some progress in the big community project and we are now beginning to run workshops in primary and secondary schools. Crane Park Community school wants it to be about Egyptions as they are learning about it in class so last week we took an Egyption Myth and ran a workshop about it. We were very well recieved by the school and the children responded to the workshop material very well. I played the Pharoh throughout the workshop and was constantly in role which kept the children engaged all the way through as they kept reacting to me when I walked over to each of the three groups. It was a good device to have as it brought the story to life and children really believed in what they were doing and it allowed their imagination to be further extended as they believed the tasks they were doing was for the benefit of the Pharaoh.

We are also doing a workshop at a primary school which is aiding their Book week which therefore will give myself, Rosie, Hardeep and Maria to chance to see what sort of stories the children like to tell or be told which will hopefully help us begin to devise a structure for the story of the final project. It's exciting because we are beginning to get an idea of what children like, what devices in stories children find effective and the sort of characters that they will respond well to.

The venue is also looking very promising as it has statues and temple like buildings which we could incorporate into the story. Perhaps the house could be a Kings Palace and the Bridge could become some sort of challenge to cross and the temple could be a magicians cave. It's a very inspiring place and definatley the sort of venue we could unleash all sorts of possibilities.

Story workshop

In the last community theatre meeting myself, Hardeep and Rosie led a workshop about story telling. We did sentence bu sentence storytelling around in a circle but this wasn't that successful as the story failed to make sense as everyone wanted to tell a story and not aid the creation in a collaborative sense. Therefore in the story that was created, nothing really happened that made a cohesive story. However in the last exercise we did creativity was much more interesting. We did helicopter story telling so everyone got to tell a story and got to act and chose their peers to be the other characters in the story. There were many stories that were very interesting and structurally very clear, therefore we could start looking at their stories and perhaps use them as a starting point for the final product. This activity would also be useful to take into a workshop setting in a school as we can begin to get a sense of the kinds of stories the children want to tell.