The past two and a half weeks have been spent creating and directing a newly devised piece of participatory theatre for the Play House (a Birmingham based Theatre in Education Company). I have been working with Vikash Patel, Gemma Stevens, Charlie Whitehouse and designer Emma Thompson a great creative team.
We have developed a story about Dil and Selina a couple of teenagers from the fictitious Bluewater town in the centre of England. The story explores the pitfalls of negotiating relationships and being true to yourself particularly within the world of social media/ technology, peer pressure and alcohol.
The programme will tour Redditch Middle and High Schools for 4 weeks from next Tuesday.
It was a lovely day, with the children fully engaging with the fiction and where we used ritual to context build (standing to speak to me, bowing and sitting upright). This was the third time I had worked with this group of children (2 classes of 30 – split into 3 groups of 20 for this activity) and it was noticable that even those who had found the earlier sessions more difficult to engage fully with were able to sustain the fiction.