Zoe’s Blog of Joy

Game - Zip, Boing, Pow

At the beginning of the lesson, students who are in Jo’s other drama education class taught us a variation of the Zip, Boing, Pow game. In addition to these three actions (zip to the left, boing back in the other direction and Pow across the circle), we also added “Freak Out” where everyone freaks out and then finds another place in the circle - and then the Zipper continues the zip. Also we added an action which (physically and vocally) makes the circle smaller and then we continue the game quietly and in small movements - and then the circle can be made larger again by reversing the action and sound. The next action, is to ask a question instead of powing and the person must answer quickly (not necessarily truthfully e.g. Q- where do you live - A - Mars). The next is to play the game with a certain emotion (e.g. happy, sad, anxious, in love etc).

I had the opportunity to play this game with my youth theatre group and it was excellent. Usually I find variations of this game (Zip, Zap, Boing/Zip, Zap, Bang) can get confusing and students don’t pick it up. I think by challenging them in this way (and I didn’t make anyone go out to keep it going) they really took it on and made it work. I managed to get up to the level of making the circle smaller and larger, which I thought was a good achievement for a group of 13-16 year olds. I’m looking forward to playing it again and building it up - maybe getting them to make suggestions, so they sort of own the game and become experts at it.

Forum Theatre

Before starting our new topic, we finished our work with Forum Theatre. We broke into groups and set about developing a scene around the issue of sexual harassment. I was in a group of four girls (including myself). We threw up a few different ideas, but we decided on something we thought would be realistic but not typical. Our scenario involved a group of girls sexually harassing their young male teacher. We wondered at first if this would be considered sexual harassment, but we realised that if the genders were reversed – a group of guys harassing a female teacher – it would be considered sexual harassment, so the same rules should apply to male teachers.

Jo decided to use our scene as a starting point for doing a forum theatre exercise. Various other students made suggestions to the Protagonist – the teacher –about how to stop this example of oppression from happening. When one of the other students stepped into the role of the protagonist (sorry, I’ve forgotten her name), the dynamics really changed. She was strong, and her tactics were good. In order to stay true to the role, I could not continue with the harassment, for fear that there would be consequences, or shame. It was an interesting and unexpected result. I’d really love to use this in drama, and perhaps in English. You could look at issues in the media this way, or issues and conflicts in fiction texts.

Drama and Multi-literacies
Drama and Literature

Next in the lesson, we looked at Children’s story books as a way of exploring drama.
Jo read us a story about a boy whose elderly friend is loosing her memory. One of the possible drama activities we thought you could do in response to the book could be to explore emotional memory (using objects like those from the book to do tell stories).

Jo brought in a few other childrens books. One was about Eddison’s dolls (I can’t remember the name – Animatron, or something robotic-like). It follows the story of a boy who is working in the factory in which Eddison’s speaking and walking dolls are being made. It explores issues such as industrialization, and the dehumanizing effects of the production line, and the Frankenstein-ish desire to play God. It is an interesting, dark, disturbing book – kind of Dickensian. You could do some interesting movement stuff (machines/sameness) or look at how you create mood in theatre, and also explore the issues and themes through role play.

As a group, we looked at “The Great Bear”, which is about a dancing bear in a circus. It is almost a dreamtime narrative, as it shows the bear escaping from stone-throwing and taunting peasants by going up into the sky and becoming “The Bear” constellation. I was interested in the potential for exploring drama through “The Great Bear”. The story ends by showing visually, rather than telling through words, what happens to the great bear. I think you could explore, through the text, the use of silence in theatre, and non-naturalism. And, linking with Jennifer Simmon’s ideas, you could use the images to explore different interpretations of the ending.