Our second community drama workshop

Welcome back to our blog about The Room: Community Drama. We were extremely excited to have more people joining our sessions that day and this is what we did!

Activites:

1. We like to have routines in our session and make people more and more familiar to them. One of those routines is a question ‘How are you today?’ That we ask before each session to get a feeling of how people feel about semselves that day. It is progibited though to use common answers as ‘fine’, ‘good’, etc. it has to be anything else instead. Creativity comes to a rescue and after few times, people start saying things like ‘I feel like spagetty that was cooked and left on the olate and hasn’t been eaten since yesterday’. Wow! Who knows what that means but that certainly hives us more idea then a simple ‘fine’ and a participant is invited to use their imagination and creativity! Our group loved it.

2. Then we continued introducing more ‘classical’ drama activites such as walking around the room and filling in emoty spaces, noticing others and going with the rhythm of the group. Then, facilitator says ‘stop’ and the whole troup has to freeze at the same moment. Same with ‘walk’, they start all al the same time. Then we say ‘jump’ an then ‘clap’. If the group strugles to do that at the same time, challange them!:)

3. time, we start ‘playing’. Any time weclap. You will see jow they get excited and want to do it ‘right’, developing a sence of a group and gaininga lot of attention to what is going on. Great warm up and lotsof fun!

4. We continued here with Boal’s game, when participants split into pair and have to count together from one to three non stop, everytime saying a different number. Then they substitute 1 for somehting else (movement and sound), then 2, then 3. Brain melts in this game!:) but that’s what we want here, a group to be ready for the main part of the workshop.

5. Sound orchestra: we learned this from an English teacher who said it’s very good for non-Enshlish speakers to work on their sound pronunciation. So, a group becomes an orchestra, each participant with their own sound. The orchestra has a conductor who will direct it. You can invent anything here: depending on the movement of the conductor each ‘instrument’ will make a different sound of a different length and quality. Make few people be conductors but not for too long - we found this too static and switched to movement later.

6. Originally we planned somehting else here, but the day was called and somehow we could see that people were taking the most out of movements so we decided to continue as a movement workshop and do some ‘dancing’ without naming it. The activity is called ‘copy paste’. Participants walk around the room and Bruno Mars plays on the background. We like Bruno Mars, chose somehting YOU like! When the music stops the group freezes and facilitator picks someone in the group who has to be copied (complitely, like looking in the mirror). The person who was copied will develop a repetitive movement from there and everyone will have to repeat it same way. They they walk again. Do the same with 4-5 participants. Now, tell them they have to create a ‘choreography’ and connect those movements. They chose music and work in teacm together and them present it. It worked for us perfectly especially some girls from Africa were soooo eager to move! It might be completely different in any other group, so be aware.

7. As we promised the group to do more on language learning we did an exercise of learning to give ‘orders to each other. We devided the group into two teams and one of them had to volunteer. The v9lunteer was shown a picture of two people (those were our volunteers) in specific position next to each other. Volunteer had to tell the other two people in their group where they had to stand and how in order to recreate the picture. They had to use imperative speach and learn some polite structures that they didn’t know before. We talked about new vocabulary then, they said it was very helpful and also fun,;)

1. As an ending we made a game which we love, it’s great as a started and as an ending. You can also create new movements with it. Facilitator offers two movements and everyone else has to always answer to any of them with the other movement. It can be anything! Then participants can also make up their own combinations and the most important - share leadership in a circle, this will be a key for everyone’s engagement! If you would like us to post a video of this game, comment below!:)