Wednesday 26 October 2016

PRIMARY 7 - Stuck in the Mud

By Charlotte Hulme

Tonight’s workshop was a mixture of laughter and emotion as we revealed some of our memories to the group about our personal experiences of primary school. Equipped with paper and colouring pens, we set out to draw or write about an experience we had at primary school whereby we were told off by a teacher for doing something ‘naughty’!


It was harder for some to think of an example for this, which was humorous in itself. After some creativity and thought we came together again and each shared our story. From knocking egg plants off structures whilst playing chase, to throwing stones over the school fence to singing too loudly to Christina Aguilera’s ‘Genie in a Bottle’, the memories being shared differed in their entireties. Despite being humorous, it was clear for some that these recollections of being told off evoked a plethora of emotion, with some feeling as though the teacher was unjust in his/her ways of punishment. I found it particularly interesting that I could draw on a memory straight away because it was something that I have never forgotten, albeit minor in the grand scheme of things, it was interesting to see that things that happen to us a young age remain with us for a long time, into adulthood.


We then split into three groups and one person laid on a big piece of paper and we drew around them. This stencil of a body then represented that of a teacher and we had to label contrasting parts of the body in order to depict the traits a teacher should have. Ideas included ‘patient’, ‘adaptive’, ‘creative’, ‘fair’, ‘calm’ and more, also writing why we thought the teacher should have these attributes! Using this as a stimulus, we took three of our words and made them into freeze frames and the remaining groups had to guess what we were trying to illustrate.



We then took it a step further and did a short improvisation, still in our groups, of a situation whereby a teacher uses two of their attributes in order to resolve a situation or apply their authority. For example, our group played stuck in the mud, one of us got hurt during this and so the teacher had to adapt the game so that we could all join in. This thus illustrated how a teacher should be adaptable and caring.




To end the session, we got into pairs and whilst one person spoke about their memory of being told off in primary school, the other had to act out what the other person was saying. We then swapped roles. I think this is where the poignancy of the stories came out, especially as I was acting out my pair’s story. It enabled us to explore the emotions that the other person must’ve felt at that time.

Despite it being hard to draw on memories from when we were so young, the session allowed us to explore and develop ideas about feelings during primary school and the contrasting emotions we all experience whilst becoming who we are. It was another productive and fun session.

PRIMARY 6 - Teachers


By Charlotte Hulme

For the purpose of introduction, my name is Charlotte Hulme and I have just embarked on the challenge that is final year of university at Brunel in West London. I am doing my degree in English Literature and Theatre and, consequently, I am doing my theatre placement here at London Bubble! So, from now I will be writing blog posts after our intergenerational workshops that run on Thursday evenings, in order to document the work that we do and the creative process!


During the workshop this evening we worked in different ways, using contrasting aspects of school life as the stimuli.


First of all, we split into groups of about four or five and each of the groups had a statistic that they had obtained during the week and brought to the session and this statistic was relative to primary school. In my group, we had the statistic that in China, 21 million children under the age of 10 years old use the web!


Consequently, we had to develop a way to show our audience this by incorporating the theme of ‘primary’. We struggled as a group at first to represent such a vast number without using words! However, we decided to represent this by all being on our phones, bar one participant, who did hop scotch in the middle. We then persisted to walk with our phones so close to our faces that we bumped into her over and over again. The girl doing the hopscotch then read the statistic aloud in a sombre, dissatisfied voice, as if to signify that she was in the minority.


Other statistics incorporated primary school aspects such as popular names, average heights and more. All of these represented in contrasting ways made for a comical yet informative start to the session.


Moving on, we split into groups again. Someone read aloud a script which described a teacher going to work and what she did in the classroom. From this, six specific gestures had to be created, to represent the key parts in the text. These gestures were to represent a teacher who is 1. Upbeat, 2. In control, 3. Make Things Clear, 4. Keeping on top of any challenges, 5. Bouncy Energy, 6. Stern.


The reader would then keep re-reading the text and we had to do our gestures over and over again, each time working on the precision of them. For example, we would keep repeating the same gesture continuously until the speaker started to read again; we would do our gestures every time the reader stopped, and we would freeze in our ending gesture position every time the reader started to read. This conciseness led to the actions becoming well rehearsed and fluid, especially after repeating them several times and working with contrasting speeds; fast, slow and so on.

We then incorporated the journey to school into this practice. The start of the piece of text described the teacher making his/her way to school. We had to make our way to school so that people whose name with ‘A’, for example, would arrive faster than those whose names began letters further down the alphabet. This, in turn, added the believable aspect into the work, as in everyday life we would all, perhaps, take a different route or journey in order to arrive at the same location.

It was a great session where we worked together as a group to explore, more deeply, the ways in which teachers do, themselves, incorporate gestures and (hopefully) enthusiasm, sometimes quite flamboyantly, in order to get a message across to their class full of students. The group consensus was that this practice worked far better without music or verbiage because it put more of an emphasis on the movements, drawing attention to our body language.