Workshop Two... Awesome!!!

Just thought i'd quickly post about last week's workshop (meant to write about it sooner but been soooo busy with media) before I took my 3rd one tomorrow... It went so well!!!!

The objectives I set were:

• Remind ourselves of last week and everyones names
• Develop concept of 'play'
• Introduce Improvisation
• Express our creativity through action
• Develop imagination both consciously and subconsciously
• Develop awareness and observation
• Learn to reflect and evaluate work

I split the session into two, games and then improvisation exercises. I set more active games this week as we looked a lot at observation and awareness the week before so wanted to get everyone moving a bit more. I had two members of the group missing for different circumstances, however I did have an extra member join. As well as having the pleasure of a new member, she fit in really easily and was really eager to join in which was great.

We started with simple games like "what are you doing?" and "name check", then moved onto slightly more improvisational work such as "the puruvian ball game" (where you pretend you have ball in your hand, pass it on and then try to find your ball after a few exchanges, and a status game, (where you picked a card from a deck and whatever that card was, you were that status in relation to where that number is in line (ace being the lowest, king the highest). This went really well and the group started to look at how the body can speak so much volume in comparison to speech. One particular lady was really good at showing a low status, by backing away from the group, body language etc.

We then started looking at group exercises and making short pieces to present. I had 4 bowls full of lines of paper with text on. For the first exercise of the second part of the workshop, each group (decided by themselves) picked a line out of the bowl which said something like "Door salesman trying to sell to an elderly man", and they had to act out this situation. Instead of putting them on the spot i thought it would be best to give them time to think about it and practice. This went really well and everyone took to acting and improvising like a duck to water! One woman was laughing so hard she said her sides hurt and had to start the piece again several times! She said she hadn't laughed like that for years, and that laughter was the best medicine.. Definitely the best bit of feedback received so far.. Made me feel so good about it all!!!

Then we used the same 'tombola' method but each person in the group chose a character (e.g. musician), a prop (e.g. a wonky chair) and a location (e.g. a petrol garage) and with these had to also make a sketch. Some found it easier than others, as some couldn't get passed making it longer than a couple of lines long and some were stuck for ideas.

The last exercise we worked on was 'first or last line' which was yet again the same method but one person chose the first line of the piece and the other chose the last. Similarly, some took to the task straight away, where others couldn't really get their head around what was asked of them. We didn't have a lot of time by this exercise so i rushed into presentation and told them we would so this exercise again next week. However, they all tried really hard and put in so much effort!

Overall, everyone said they really enjoyed this week and was looking forward to doing similar techniques again. Certain things I will keep in mind for this week are:

• Body awareness - a lot of work was rigid and not a lot of moving, I have planned for a lot more movement and non dialogue this week so hopefully this will help body and audience awareness too.
• Time keeping - its really easy to get carried away with the exercise at hand and not realise that we had gone over. I will make sure that we move on after the first hour to make sure we have plenty of time for the things that people most enjoyed.

Overall it was a great week and has really made me look forward to this week. I am all prepared and hopefully it will go equally if not better than the last!!

Bloggin'ell... My Monthly Essay!

Great news! I have a drama group! Within two weeks we had eight people calling the centre saying they were interested in the workshops, and it was likely that we would get a few more. However, as the numbers mounted up, the more diverse the group became. When I got the final names of the group, the age range was phenomenal… 18 to 77!!! And if that wasn’t diverse enough, there were 3 men and 8 women! This certainly came as a surprise, for some reason I was only expecting women and for them to be only of a certain age. I have no idea why I thought that, I suppose it was just presumption. Presumption is the mother of all what now??!!! Nevertheless, this didn’t scare me. I was determined to make this an enjoyable and enriching experience for all to enjoy, regardless of age, gender or experience! I had already advertised an initial meeting to meet the group and see what they were all like etc, so now it was time to prepare!

 

I felt like I needed to speak to Mark and pass my ideas with him before I met with my group. I had read most of the research that I had already brought together, however I was struggling to find good games and exercises to do with the group. Also I wasn’t sure how to structure the six weeks... I was thinking of breaking up the two-hour sessions: one hour of games then onto one hour of monologue development. This way it allows the group to get relaxed every week before we move onto to slightly heavier concepts. When I went to see Mark he seemed pleased with what I had achieved and mentioned a few books and exercises that may of help. One book he stressed that would be a great help was ‘Games for Actors and Non Actors’ by Augusto Boal. We had read about this practitioner within drama before (I remember reading about Theatre of the Oppressed in 1^st year). He explained there was a wide range of games within the book that are great for non-actors as well as professionals. He also gave me a few good exercises that may be good for monologue development later on in the workshops. When explaining about the worry I had about structure, he thought it would be worth while to actually split the six weeks into two, then have 3 weeks of fun and games, moving onto 3 weeks of monologue development. What I thought was best was to read up on the games and exercises available, meet the group and then work out what would be best for the class.

 

Moving on from this meeting, I decided to get my head stuck into the books that I had got and perhaps look on the internet to see whether people have posted things they had done for drama workshops before. Previous to finding out I would have males in the group, I bought two ‘Monologues for Female Actors’ books, to give me some stimuli to work upon and use as maybe base texts within the workshops. Reading these, there was a nice range of different extracts, and I hope to use these in the future of the workshops. After reading the majority of the Boal book, I gathered a range of games I could use for the workshops, and then chose a few I could use for the first one.

 

The initial meeting went really well, and everyone who came to participate was great. A few were quite anxious as to what we would be doing over the next few weeks, so I took this time to introduce myself and the other members of the group, asking them what drama experience they had, if any, and any questions they had. Most of them had never done drama before, and a few of them had touched upon a few small productions years ago. Obviously from where these workshops were being held, a few members had low mobility and found it difficult to move around the space, so this was something I had to take into consideration. I asked the group how they would prefer the workshops to be structured, and they all agrees that they would like to have games and exercises every week, so this is what I would do.

Jumping forward a few weeks, and I am in the seminar room preparing for my first workshop. After a LOT of planning and juggling around the structure of the workshop, I had decided to split the 1^st week into 3 sections; introductory games, observation exercises and touch upon emotion memory. I wrote out on a flip chart the objectives of the workshop, followed by what we were going to do and the middle of a mind map to work from later on in the workshop.

 The objectives I set were split into two parts:

• For everyone to know everyone else’s names
  
• To feel relaxed within the space
  
• Introduce and exercise the concept of “play”
  
• Have fun!
  

 And then…

• To introduce the idea of awareness, the self and it’s surroundings
  
• Awakening the senses and dormant behaviour
  
• Reconnecting with memory – introducing emotion memory
  
• Perception of ourselves

 The workshop overall went very well, the games I used were simple, yet got everyone moving, talking and laughing! The observation exercises got everyone thinking and opening their eyes to things they may not have noticed before. The memory exercise seemed to go down very well. I had asked them all to take note of what they were doing the day before the 1^st workshop at the initial meeting, then by asking lots of detailed questions, asked them what they did the day before. From there I got everyone to get into groups of 3 and in 2-3 minutes, tell the others in details what they had done. I walked around the space to see what they were saying and they were going into lots of detail! After everyone had told their stories, everyone got back into a circle and I asked individuals to tell another’s persons story. After a few people had done this, I then asked them to tell the story as if it was the most exciting day of their lives, then the most sad, the most scary etc. This gave us an opportunity to start playing with acting but still keeping it really casual. Before we knew it the two hours were up!

 The group was a lot more relaxed than I thought they would be, and were very eager to start the session. As I had planned so much for us to do, we weren’t stuck for games and exercises. Everyone got involved and (I hope) enjoyed themselves!!! I think the flip chart helped everyone understand why we were doing certain things, and I asked people to tell me what the importance of certain exercises were, and putting them on the mind maps. For the first week, I think it went pretty well!!

 I took note of things to take into consideration for next week, (which is tomorrow!):

• Introduce some form of acting, I found most members of the group were ready to look at this type of thing
  
• I have an 18 year old lad in the group and I feel he may get a little bored with some of the activities I am setting. There are a few people who find it difficult to move around the in space, however I am going to try and expand the exercises with more depth, and this may be through more acting.
  
• I am getting a little worried I am not going to have enough exciting and appropiate games and exercises for the whole 6 weeks, but as I said before, this may be made easier by doing more in depth acting exercises.
  
• One major concern that I have to be really careful of is that the sessions don’t turn into Drama Therapy. Its really easy for the conversations to turn to people’s illnesses and what they are currently going through, and I am trying to avoid the group becoming a support group. There are ways the group can help people interacting, socialising and having fun, however as I am not a professional therapist, this is potentially dangerous territory. Nevertheless, as soon as the group may start to talk to about these things, I am diverting the attention to the exercise at hand!
  

So, for tomorrow, the idea is to use what we did last time and go into more depth, as well as introducing other new ideas too. They enjoyed the memory exercises so I am going to do more on emotion memory and observation. Plenty more games will be played, and I want to expand their playfulness a little more!! So lots of make pretend! Then I will focus on monologues to give them a structure of what a monologue could be like, then perhaps set a task for the following week. We shall see how it goes!! Going to do a little more reading this afternoon and get myself all prepared for tomorrow afternoon!

Hello Mr. Blog, my name is Hannah... Remember me?

Okay okay, so I know I gave it the Charlie Big Spuds in my last blog about 1000 years ago about how I was going to keep up and start regularly writing on here, and I haven't. And to be honest, I don't completely know why. One reason would be the same as before, once you don't write it for one week, you put it off for ages. But I think another reason is I've been making my project more solid and my blog more substantial before I told everyone about what I have done. I know this can be as airy fairy as you want to be, but I think I would rather see it as a write up of what I have been doing rather than a sketchbook of ideas.

So, moving on, this is what I have been up to.

I have decided to work within The Mulberry Centre, a cancer support centre at West Mid Hospital, that offers complimentary support and therapies to people affected by cancer. I originally came across the centre when looking for voluntary work over a year ago, and started doing 'meeting and greeting' there once a week. From there, I then started doing Fundraising (I didn't feel I was doing a lot, and felt I could do a lot more to help out) and still do this now. I had said in a previous blog entry that I needed to talk to the trustees first to see if it would be a possibility to work with them in my community theatre piece. Since then I spoken to a bunch of staff and volunteers, including Rodney, the chair Trustee; Joan, the fundraising facilitator; and Sally, one of the senior Counsellors.

Rodney was one of the first people I approached, being one of the most influential members of staff. He has seen Cancer Tales and has been to a medical conference at St. Mary's in which this was shown too. He loved the idea of doing something with this play within the centre, and perhaps saw the play being performed. At first, I was thinking that we could make our own version of Cancer Tales, using stories from the centre. This was an idea short lived, it took Nell Dunn years to compile her work and time was simply not on my side. Furthermore, the possibility of getting stories from people at the centre was at a slim chance anyway. From here, I went to see Trevor Walker about the using this play and performing it either at the centre or somewhere wide scale. But he instantly told me that Nell wouldn't want amateur actors performing the play, and even if we found professionals to perform it, the cost of the rights wouldn't be justified for my project. However, he did mention that it would probably be okay just to use the text just as a stimulus for any work that we did do.

Going back to the storyboard, keeping what Trevor said in mind, I decided to focus on using Cancer Tales as more of a stimuli rather than a performance. I wasn't really keen on doing wide-scale performance anyway, from what I have seen and been apart of at the Centre, the small and relaxed events are always a success. I saw my project as a simple idea with a big impact, rather than trying to wow people as a one-man band. This then brought me to the idea of holding workshops instead. People are much more likely to get involved with something that doesn't expect too much off them, and I think asking people to perform in a big show would deter people from getting involved.

I arranged a meeting with Sally to discuss working in the centre and get some advice for the work that I was thinking of doing and how to communicate better with this community. I started by telling her what my plans were and what I was thinking of holding; a 6-week workshop looking at Cancer Tales, eventually leading up to an evening which draws everything to a close with a chance for people to show some of the work we had made. She thought this was a good idea, but as we were talking about making rules and keeping a 'safe' environment, it was becoming apparent that perhaps using Cancer Tales within the workshops was not such a good idea. 

I was asking a lot of questions about handling a situation if someone got upset or something hit home, and it seemed by using this play, it would be very difficult to avoid. I then asked if perhaps she would like to get involved, both as a member of the group and a means of support if anything were to happen. She was happy to do so but then realised it would create complications if people wanted to be counseled by her at the Centre. 

It then became clear what I had to do. Change the play. However good it would have been to use this play and have people handle it, the reality was it would be very hard for people who are very possibly in one of the situations within the play to study or indeed perform it. I love the idea of using Stanislavski's 'Emotion Memory', and to ask people to do this would have been wrong.

We then moved on to talk about who I would invite to join in these workshops. I was really for the idea of mixing volunteers, staff and users, however Sally explained the difficulty of post-workshop relationships that might occur. So, we eventually decided that only volunteers who didn't have direct contact with the users of the Centre would be asked to participate.

Other things that Sally advised me were keeping confidentiality within the workshops, and suggesting that members of the group 'always allow your inner wisdom to override anything I ask from you'. This way, people may feel more free to express themselves without a full force of dictation. However, one difficulty with keeping this confidentiality is writing these blogs. Obviously I would like to write everything what happens in the workshops, including people's work and feedback, but this isn't possible if I'm going to maintain that confidentiality. This is something I will have to talk to Mark about!

Since these meetings, I have been busy both researching and marketing my workshops. Caroline, the Macmillan Information Officer, lent me several books from the Centre's extensive library including 'Talking to Cancer Patients and their Relatives' and 'Communicating in Cancer Care', along with a few Macmillan Support Handbooks, 'How to talk to someone with Cancer' and 'The Cancer Guide'. I don't believe it is crucial to do heaps of research of this kind but it was good to get an idea into what they are going through and how my workshops could benefit them. One chapter of one of the guides was 'How to be a good listener'. This was mainly about how to encourage someone to talk to you about their illness, which isn't exactly what I would want, but there were some good points that could be used in general, especially within a drama workshop. These included 'Getting the setting right', which explained the importance of being comfortable and relaxed, signaling that you are there to spend some time with them and are eager to hear what they are about to say, 'Encourage the person to talk', 'Use silence and non-verbal communication', 'Don't change the subject' and 'Don't give advice too early'. If these points can encourage someone to talk about something as difficult as cancer, they must be helpful to keep in mind when listening within a theatrical space.

Along with these books, I have also invested in 'The Applied Theatre Reader', to help me in the drama and planning side of the project. I have some experience with teaching children within Theatre for Young People and Theatre in Education, however I have little experience with working with adults. The only thing close I have done is held a Makeover stand at a Pamper Evening at The Mulberry a few months ago, showing women how to apply makeup and giving little personal tips I had that might help them. I am hoping the reader has things like this within it, and if not I'm sure there is something in the library that can give me a hand.

Meanwhile, I have successfully created a poster that has been put up in the centre in various places, as well as a handy A5 sized one for people to take home. As well as this, I have sent out nearly 200 letters (yes, 200! it was going to be 700!!) to the users of the centre explaining what I am doing and asking if they would like to get involved. You can see the poster here! I am holding an initial meeting next friday to explain a little about the workshops and what people can expect out of the following 6 weeks. I will then make sure the time slot I have booked for the workshops is okay with everyone (1-3 every Tuesday) and get people signed up. I have also emailed all the non-direct volunteers to see if they would also like to get involved and attached the handout to them too.

So, within the next few weeks, I have a lot of work to do! I want to keep the workshops very basic, so anyone who has never done drama before can get involved, and the more confident everyone gets, the more I would like to encourage learning monologues to perform at the evening toward the end of the project. The main areas I would like to concentrate on would be Dialogue, Spatial and Audience Awareness, and so I think I will be looking for text that are solely or heavily monologues.. Any suggestions would be awesome!

Wow, I have gone on for some time!! Thats what I've been up to anyway, lots achieved but lots more to do.. My biggest hope is that people are interested. The staff seem to think it will be popular so I've just got to keep my fingers crossed and plan some damn good workshops!

Thanks for reading this if you took the time! Any thoughts and feelings on what I'm doing or suggestions of what i can do would be much appreciated, its great working on your own but any advice would be awesome!

Community - Is it such a good thing?

As I said, I've been lying in bed dying (okay, slight exaggeration, I had a virus) all week, and without even the energy to turn over and find the remote, I found myself watching anything that came on the channel that I was on. And to be honest, it wasn't a bad move, (it wasn't a move at all actually ;)) as I found some really interesting things about the idea of community from right where I was.

Now everyone knows daytime television isn't the greatest of entertainment, but there is some pretty decent things to watch. Things like GMTV, This Morning etc are both factual and entertaining, but what they exceed at is grasping very different and controversial topics that highlight certain communities around Britain. This actually brings their regular and wide community of viewers together, learning and sharing stories. Then, at times like these, they choose a deserving charity and raise money with the help of the viewers, e.g. this year This Morning built a Day Centre for the local pensioners for Christmas. Very heartwarming Television. 

This type of community is a bit different to the communities we have been discussing in class, as this isn't a community that know each other, talk to each other and share mugs of sugar. This community come together between 10:30 and 12:30 every morning to watch their much loved presenters and feel good or perhaps forget about the fact that they are not at 9 to 5 jobs just for that day or for everyday of the year. Because for them two hours, they are part of a community of viewers who enjoy good entertainment, gaining information about recent topics and enter lots and lots and lots and lots of money competitions. All in the comfort of their own home. Or in their bed, like me.

Just a random different view on community there!

Things about real life communities also pop up all the time on TV, and as you can imagine, it is found mainly in the news. But without dwelling on them, I found I noticed a few things on other factual programmes that looked deeper into crimes and police work. 

For example, I watched a documentary about the murder of Jamie Bulger and when the boy's murderers of the little boy were being taken to court, there were riots and people trying to break the doors down to get to them. The police commented, "There is a strong community within Liverpool which is great for support for Jamie's family, but not good in times like this." Seems like the word community brings so many positive connotations, sometimes dismissing that there are just as many negative. 

Similarly, with police programmes focusing on football hooligans, they are a big community supporting one team, but there will always be an apposing team's fan club to fight with. 

We can all think of 'bad' groups or gangs of people, but aren't these people just passionate about their communities that they are within? Or do they use these sort of instances as an excuse for their actions?

Ahh you big big scary blog.. I've written you!!

Before I start I must apologise for any gibberish that I may write this week, I've been stuck in bed all week with only Jeremy Kyle and the Loose Women to keep my company. I cannot therefore excuse any foul language, rubbish debates or the odd talking-to-myself moment.

I think I've finally got the idea into my head that this blog isn't going to instantly write itself every week. After my essay of a blog in the first couple of weeks, I let myself get a bit comfortable and thought it'd be okay to forget about for a week or so. 

Fast forward however many weeks and there I was dwelling on the fact that I hadn't written anything in a while but still couldn't get my head round why I still wasn't writing anything. Then we had a pep talk with Mark and Molly last week and Mark spelled it out for me.. I was scared. For this light enjoyable exercise has turned into this big bulging dissertation of work (in my head) and for some reason I have literally run for the hills.

I think I was too busy seeing the blog as a polished bit of work rather than a 'scrapbook of ideas' for the semester to come. I do have my fears and weaknesses within this subject, but as usual have some form of fear towards telling people so, hoping they don't notice. But it may be getting to a time now where I should be speaking about these things, as well as any random stuff that comes in and out of daily life too, community or no community.. anything to get me writing!!

My worries are involved in random parts of the course, I worry initially that i just don't know enough within Drama as I haven't very involved within the practical side of things at university, (although at school I was the total opposite), and therefore I don't want this to have a knock-on effect to what I do at the Mulberry Centre. The worst thing I feel I could do is not do them and the performance justice mainly because of an amateur production. I feel out of touch to put it simply. Any words of advice from anyone would be much appreciated! Even any suggestions as to productions to watch in on etc would be a help.

Speaking of help, I think its about time we all got talking within this blogging community and make it just that. Perhaps just a few comments could make us all a bit more confident to keep on typing.

Exciting Stuff

A have an idea. It’s general and seemingly ambiguous, but it’s an idea.

This week we focused on 'Verbatim Theatre'. I hadn't actually heard of this form of theatre before, so was quite intrigued when told its meaning. Translating into something that is 'to the letter', verbatim constructs language within a play to behave, capturing speech, rhythm and ticks. My first thought was the usual 'it'll never work', believing that it is quite morally wrong to take someone’s own words for entertainment purposes. After all, isn't that what theatre is, entertainment?

Discussing this further, we found that many of us had never worked within this type of theatre before, and therefore we quite sceptical as to how successful it could be. A big issue I originally had with it was to do with the ownership of a story. If you take a person's story and recreate it for the stage, whose story is it then? When faced with this question, Mark gave us a great idea to avoid this problem. Get them to direct it. However, does this make it acceptable to present real life content in such a raw state?

We followed this discussion with an exercise that saw us copying someone's actions and that person watching what 'they' do. An easy job, some might say, but it actually proved quite difficult. I was paired up with Char, and knowing Char for quite some time, I was pretty certain of what she was going to do. The tricky thing was getting her action and words in exactly the right order, in exactly the way that she does them. Parody can usually get you far when impersonating someone, but not this time. Trying to remember all what Char was doing was actually a bit mind-boggling.

Then when asked to perform, feeling pretty confident, we went outside the room and the first task was to enter the room in the right order. I hadn't taken any notice what order Char had come in. Which then lead to becoming dazed and confused as to what came next. Regaining my professional stance, I managed to remember what else Char had done, possibly not in exactly the right order but close enough. Afterwards we spoke about the exercise and it seemed that everyone quite enjoyed either watching or performing. I feel the most important thing came out of it was the recognition of how complex we actually are and how difficult it can be to mimick someone to a tee.

In my notes, I have actually written, 'Do I like this yet?' in between this section and the next, which shows I was still unsure about verbatim theatre. However, I was definatley open to suggestions as how it could be used and what it could achieve.

Mark then went onto talk about different plays that use verbatim theatre. Among them was a play called 'Cancer Tales', a moving story of five different women and they're journey through cancer. This immediately caught my attention as I have been volunteering at, 'The Mulberry Centre', a cancer support centre, for nearly a year and have recently been trying to think of way I could incorporate my work within uni and my work within the centre. Then Mark mentioned that Trevor Walker actually directed this play. Wanting to probe this idea further, I went to speak to both Mark and Trevor after the workshop, which sparked a big idea for a final production; to work with the community of the centre to create a production similar to Cancer Tales.

It was obvious that before even beginning to think of ideas I had to do two things; read Cancer Tales and talk to the centre. I have read the play and agree that is so moving and unique. And the thing that surprised me was that the reason I loved the play so much was that it was verbatim theatre. Using the women's stories in this raw state really grasps the emotions and reality of their experiences, and potentially can help both medical professionals and fellow cancer sufferers through both diagnosis, treatment and beyond.

The play itself has no punctuation, allowing the script to be unprocessed, unrestricted and free; ironically apposed to what the character (if you can call them that) actually are. The stories are unique to them yet intertwined, both as a collective community of people and a constructed piece of performance. This play brings strength, love and will to overcome into the foreground and is an inspiration to both those who have been in their position and those who concentrate on the medical side of the disease. Seeing and hearing what they go through presents how professionals handle their patients and how difficult it can be for carers and relatives as well as the patients themselves.

Moving forward from this I have visited the staff at The Mulberry Centre, and some trustees and volunteers actually went to see the play at The Royal Society of Medicine and loved it. I haven’t been able to talk to these just yet but I will be!

The other staff think that this sort of work could be great for several reasons:

- Bringing people together, and learning about oneself through the observation of others
- Acceptance - a sense of belonging and being valued
- Having ownership and a degree of control of a personal finished 'product'
- The feeling that views and opinions are being listened to
- Sharing experiences and a sense of Altruism - one can be of value to others
- Universality - one is not unique to one's problems

Hearing these positive views has made me confident that this work can bring so much to this community. However, there are lots of ethics within working with this community and these will be discussed with the trustees and directors of the Centre. This is obviously not a solid ground just yet but knowing that it is a possibility is a great thing to hear.

I have such passion for this community and to work with them would be amazing. I have a long way to go with this process, and am very excited to do so! Learning of Verbatim and Forum Theatre has shown me that theatre is so much more than entertainment. It can take you places the media never could and can above all be such an educational experience.

Getting to Grips: Part 1

I have been a bit behind with my blog entries the last couple of weeks and I can honestly say I have got myself a bit worked up.. not just with community theatre but 3rd year in general. But after much deliberating with myself that I WILL get through it and I WILL do the best I can, I have managed to get to grips with the course and began to think about what I would like to do next semester.

I am going to write this blog about last week's workshop and then continue tomorrow about this week and what amazing progress I have made!! (If i do say so myself!)

Last week we spoke about 'Cardboard Citizens' and what forum theatre can achieve within performance. As I didn't see the play, I was intrigued to hear what people thought about it. There seems to be mixed feelings about the performance and forum theatre in general. It was clear that everyone could tell they were 'amateur' actors and were open in telling the audience they were or had been affected by homelessness. The debate that led from this touched upon the idea of causing offence. Because they had been affected by homelessness, it seemed to give them the right to create a performance around it. Does this then mean that you have to have experience of something before you can create a performance around it, in order not to cause offence to those who have? 

The idea of forum theatre allows the play to be both open and flexible, allowing the audience to make the changes they feel necessary. Therefore, the issue of causing offence surely has to be by-passed. A way forum theatre can monitor this is how well it is structured. If the outlines of the play are clear and defined, whichever way the story goes, the actors can handle the adjustments and the audience are still grounded to what is happening.

Toward the end of this session, Mark brought up a great point, and I can't actually remember how it came up or what it related to!! However, reading back on my notes I still want to add it here, as I remember strongly agreeing!!

There are two kinds of people:

• people who judge you for every action
• people who see what you intend to do

Whatever, it related to, I thought it was so true!!

I have little experience with forum theatre and from what I have seen it is great within workshops for team building, character development and improvisation. Without seeing a performance using this technique it is hard to judge whether it would be good to use within a performance of my own, but would like to try out plenty of techniques like these before making a decision.