Christmas!

Was just thinking about how a community forms at Christmas, certainly in my family anyway. For one day a year this community meets, eats and opens presents together, has a sing along or a very long game of pictionary, and then splits up at the end of the day, all to their separate homes. It's funny, because although we only meet for one day a year, we still have the same (ish) routine. Meet, eat, presents, general chitter chatter, pictures and games. This community that thrives on one day, it never changes, it's never awkward or boring but it's there, it happens, and then it disperses as quick as it started?

What is everyone elses opinion on this, is it the same in your families? Or do you think I am chatting a load of rubbish?

What is a utopia? aren't there many problems with it? I think I have a problem with something being a utopia, perhaps I find the idea of something being perfect slightly uncomfortable, slightly creepy even. I believe you could, say in relation to creating multi-sensory environments, that you are trying to create a utopia for very young children, or children with complex disabilities, but how can you avoid the fact that one or more child might not like balloons, or any kind of sound? Thus how do you create a utopia because everyone has very different ideas of what their utopia is, therefore can such a thing exist? Could perhaps utopia be something that isn't perfect? Something that doesn't work quite the way it's supposed to, but personally to you, its utopia? So how do you go about creating a utopia for a community? What can you do to make something perfect for a large group of people? In some ways I don't think it possible, if I were to go into a community and give them something and expect them to have no problems with it I think I would be somewhat naieve, however perhaps if I were to consult the people I was working with and taking into account the ideas and skill of other people, then perhaps a utopia would be possible.

The big one!

I am very exited about our meeting today in community theatre and can't wait to get started. I think that the possibilities are endless in creating theatre with people from all sorts of back grounds and abilities, especially after watching exodus last week, it makes me think that anything can happen! I like the idea of integrating children with learning difficulties with 'average' children children, creating multi-sensory environments and completely different worlds and wacky characters and things to touch and to play with! I liked what Danielle was saying about dreams and nightmares and teaching children and their parents to deal with it and begin to think about more positive things that might be lurking in the closet.

I am exited at the prospect of being on a creative team and working collaboratively to create a piece of work that could be amazing! I think perhaps people should look at lots of different childrens (or adults) theatre company's to start getting some ideas about what we could do! Oily Cart is a good one for examples on multi sensory theatre for young children and children with multiple disabilities, you can find some of their stuff on youtube! Maybe look at things that the unicorn theatre puts on on polka theatre too! Maybe we could do something with puppets and shadows and things! I am very excited!

Exodus

A film that we watched in class that was done with the people of Margate, Kent. The actors were all from that community and it was filmed in Margate. If I hadn't known that it was essentially a community play I would have thought it was a film with professional actors in it. I thought it was incredible what people in a community can do when they come together and are encouranged. When walking through Twickenham looking at the people go past I thought anyone could do it, there is nothing stopping people from being creative if thy get the right encouragement. We look for shows put on by amazing traditional shakespeare actors when in actual fact there could be some brilliant actors walking past us in the street, we just don't know it, and neither do they.

Community Plays

• A community participating in the telling of a story
• A Play that would have a strong narrative
• A pantomime or Nativity
• Could perhaps refelcts on key issues rife in that particular community
• Unification, demonstrates ideas in a safe environment
• Conflict resolution
• Diversity
• The re-imagining of place

The above is what we discussed in class about what a community play is. I believe that the above is mostly true, it's about participation, involvment and unifying a community, brings people together. You can involve different age groups, gender, ability and race. I believe that in putting on a community play that it is important to play something that is relevant in that particular community, perhaps it being about that certain community itself, or the place or an individual that they all relate to and also work through together in order to solve something.

I don't think however, when I was growing up that there were community plays, or if there were, I certainly wasn't involved. I never heard that the whole of Pinewood Park, or Guillemont Fields took part in a show together, nothing like that ever happened. No one really knew their neighbours that well, we knew names and recognised faces but that was about it. There were the kids I knew on my street but I know that our parents weren't friends, they didn't know each other. It makes me think that communities like this, ones that are on middle-ground, that aren't too poor, or aren't too rich are in some points the ones who need some kind of unification, some sense of communicating with the people who are, geographically, the closest to us. When I think about growing up I think that we could have done with that sense of community being brought to us. We needed something that would all bring us together for a certain length of time, even if it wasn't a play but an activity, or a party, just somewhere that we could have this sense of unification. And then perhaps after this happened people would go on with this new sense of community and carry on talking to the people they worked togehter with. I think people need to identify with each other, people don't realise that there could be someone around the corner who was the most similar person to them and could actually turn out to be a friend, but it seems that people didn't take the time to get to know each other or even try to meet each other.

And I suppose there might be problems with creating a community play as you might think you are being completely inclusive when actually, you might turn out to be somewhat exclusive when you didn't expect it. Personally I think I would go out into the community and find out exaclty what they like, dislike, enjoy, hate and perhaps find out if there would be certain abilities or disabilities I could also cater for.

Reminiscene in Practice

Today we just did some very interesting work. Mary, A seventy-four year old and Fiona, a 59 year old came in to talk to us about their lives.

The opening question asked by Hannah was what they were doing when they were our age. This was a good ice breaker and a somewhat unintrusive question which allowed the two women to become comfortable talking to a big group. After then they were very happy to talk about the second world war and its repocussions, childhood sweethearts, fashion, music and holidays.

After this we then set about chosing the stories that we wanted to dramatise. My group was particulary interested in telling the story about Mary's first love when she was fourteen years old. She told it incredibly well, building up this romantic story and then bringing right back down when she said that she couldn't stand him. At first I was worried about having to tell this story as I really wanted to make sure that the information that she had given us wasn't mis-represented or taken too far out of context. Luckily though we produced a two minuete sketch that contained everything that she said and therefore she was happy with how we had interpreted her story.

Mary and Fiona seemed very happy with all that classes work and said interestingly that it wasn't the stories we were telling, it was their lives, it was fact and real for them and evoked their memories of that particular event very well. I therefore feel that this session was incredibly successful and the participants were kept comfortable and felt that they could talk with ease thus not hiding information of feeling they couldn't talk about certain things. I also think that If you stick with the exact details of the stories and keep its themes then it will be successful and won't offend the teller themselves as they still need to have some kind of ownership over the story, we can't take it completely out of context because they might feel that we have taken their story away from them.

Reminiscence continued

'In performance memory is a political act'

Can a memory be the most reliable thing? I know that some memories that I have would not be completely true, they might be fused with other memories, placed blurred, faces unrecognisable. Some memories might be told to me, something that I might not remember could be told to me that I then begin to believe in.

In relation to the stage a memory could be a political act because it is all to do with our choices, what we want to tell people, a one sided view that doesn't give the audience a chance to see the other point of view. The telling of someones story that might not all be true, facts slightly off, events exaggerated. But then again, isn't that the beauty of a story? You can only tell something how you remember it and no other way, if you tried to factualise it, the story would lose authenticity and you would lose connection to it, especially if you were the teller of the story.