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PROCESS

 


School poster

In this section we document the participatory theatre process of Generation X.

We have divided that process into stages. Let's get started provides ideas for managing the research process necessary for participatory theatre, Moving Things On documents the strategies used to convert the research into a performance which reflects the realities of the lives of people in a particular community.

 

Let's Get Started

It is important for you to begin without preconceived ideas. Participants need to feel ownership of the process.

The activities you use should enable participants to feel safe to express their own concerns and to reveal the realities of their lives. We used a range of techniques with both groups involved in Generation X some of which are described below. Fuller details of starter activities can be found in the manual.

 

Overview

Let's Get Started with Healthy Wealthy and Wise

In this project we began with the pensioners, over 50 of whom were involved at different times in group activities.

Life size puppets of a pensioner and a teenage girl and boy were used to stimulate discussion about older people's experiences of young people living on Ely estate.

The River of Life activity helped locate the project in the context of participants' own life experiences (River of Life).

The previous project had used poetry writing as a creative research activity with both the older and younger participants.

Whatever you choose, starter activities need to establish relationships between you and the participants and help create the safe environment essential for success in participatory work.

Let's Get Started with Glyn Derw pupils

We also used puppets in our starter activities in school. We took the puppets into school assemblies and drama lessons with years 9 and 10. Follow-up drama workshop sessions used 'still pictures' and improvisations which revealed the children's attitudes to old people and their ideas about how old people in Ely might feel. The pupils had the opportunity to manipulate Frank the puppet and speak through him.

 

Moving Things On

Devising a play with an intergenerational group

In the second phase participants begin to work in a more focused way using drama techniques to help them create scenes based on their own life experiences. The intention is to create a play to be performed to the wider community.

We began by bringing the groups of older and younger people together. The young people performed an improvised sketch set around the local chip shop. This stimulated discussion between the two groups which revealed common fears of the gangs in Ely.

Four older people opted to participate in the play. Through improvisations, using issues that had arisen in the starter activities with both generations, a play was devised. The process of working together was challenging with this particular group of young people many of whom had learning or concentration difficulties. However, even the most difficult members of the group eventually developed a bond with and respect for the older people who were amazingly patient and understanding throughout.

 

Performance

The final phase should involve a performance and discussion involving the audiences for the play.

 

The Process in Action

Building relationships

In our project we worked with a community group and a local comprehensive school. It is vital that you negotiate with key people to organise times and places to meet, and ensure everyone involved knows what is happening and is happy with the arrangements.

We negotiated directly with the Head Teacher of Glyn Derw High School to discuss the new project and how it would fit into the school timetable. The possibility of placing the project into the PSE, English and Drama curriculum was looked at. It was decided to keep the project as a voluntary out of school activity with some selected classes participating during lesson time in the starter phase.

The head teacher showed us a room that had recently been fitted out with carpet and was to be a dedicated Drama room. We were hoping to be able to use this space as our base for the project. In practice though it was impossible for our part time project to justify taking up space permanently in a busy school. The room was needed for examinations so the project suffered from being itinerant during some of the process. Sometimes we worked in the building where the Healthy Wealthy and Wise project is based. This challenged the young people's prejudices when they saw groups of older people involved in activities such as Yoga, Line Dancing, Arts and Craftwork .

Having established our ground rules the work of the project began with Starter Activities. We had already decided to make use of life-size puppets. It is very important to decide in advance if your starter activities will need props and ensure these are ready in plenty of time!

 

Preparations and puppet making

     
Mono Jono
Side view of dual head
Sharon

 

Mono Jono and Sharon are one puppet with a "Janus" head. This dual character puppet is also life sized with the same hand and arm set up as Frank. An operators arm in the back of the puppet travels through the inside of the neck and into the dual head. A swivel device allows the head to be turned through 180 degrees. This puppet was most useful in work with the older generation.

 


Frank

We constructed a life sized puppet of an old man who became known as Frank. A teenager puppet was also made but with a male and female ÒJanus Ò head wearing contemporary clothes. This dual puppet became known as Mono Jono and Sharon.

The puppet heads and hands were made first in clay, cast in two piece plaster moulds and then cast as a positive in latex. The flexibility of the latex allowed for mobile faces and talking lips. SWT have the necessary skills for this level of technical puppetry. However, this is not essential to the effectiveness of the process, a simpler papier mache or foam puppet head may also be used as long as it is a fairly lifelike representation rather than a 'sock' or 'muppet' type of puppet. Frank has moving arms and legs. One hand is rubber and a slit in his sleeve allows the operator's hand to be slipped in. His slippered feet are looped on to the operators feet so he can stand, walk or sit ( on the operator's lap). Frank's moving, half bald, rubber head has a slot cut in the back of it so the operator can slip their hand in and lip sync. his lips from the inside whilst voicing him from the back. Frank was seen by the young people as looking "just like my Grampy" and this is important if the work is to be taken seriously.

 


Frank being operated by a young person

Sessions including Frank were the most popular. We found that using a life-sized puppet as an intermediary was a very efficient and paradoxically a direct way of getting data, emotional responses, received stances and thoughtful comments on older people from this age group. In open sessions many of this age group, given the opportunity to perform to their peers, will opt immediately for what they hope will be a shocking and often sexually challenging presentation. However, this tendency soon subsided while performing with the old man puppet.

We found the puppets very useful in the research process, freeing participants to express extreme attitudes to the 'other' generation without damaging the potential positive relationship which the project was aiming to build. The puppets did eventually find a place in the final production.

Clearly to use puppets in this way requires considerable skill and expertise. However, other strategies are also effective as the examples below demonstrate and do not require special expertise.


Starter Activities

 

Frank and teenager puppet at Healthy Wealthy and Wise

Frank and the teenager puppet were used to stimulate discussion in the Healthy Wealthy and Wise Centre. The puppets generated strong emotional responses from the group who had no problem communicating directly with the puppet characters. Attitudes and issues highlighted in this session were:

Problems

Solutions

 

River of Life ( democracy in action )

The river of life exercise was introduced the next week to the Healthy Wealthy and Wise group. A 3.4 metre length of card with a line representing a river drawn on it was stretched across a table. It represented the journey a life takes from birth to 80 years plus. The question of whether one or two bridges needed to be crossed in a lifetime was discussed by the group. They decided that two were needed, breaking the exercise into three phases:

Birth to bridge one - participants wrote about being a child and how they perceived adults.

This section included words such as powerful, kind, dependable, adults knew the answer to everything, looked up to them, protective, strict, would not dare to challenge their authority, trusted them, respect, fear.

Bridge one to two - when they became an adult responsible for children participants wrote about how they perceived young people.

Here the emphasis was on responsibility, hard work, providing clothes and food, too busy to reflect, anxiety about the children's future, responsibility for aged parents, enjoying having sexual relationships as opposed to thinking about it all the time as adolescents,

Bridge three onwards - in old age, becoming a pensioner, participants wrote about their own feelings and their attitude to young people.

Participants wrote about enjoying the freedom from work, time spent with grandchildren, ability to follow hobbies, travel with friends. They didn't enjoy aches and pains, fear of illness, feelings of disempowerment as they become frailer, feeling more dependent financially and so on.

Some people wrote poems on the river, perhaps influenced by the 1997 project.

This exercise was a rich resource which fed directly into the process, particularly a sequence with masks in the final play.

  
Video Clip

River of Life



Selection of words from the river of life

In small groups the participants discussed and agreed on the most important issue for them. They then chose a spokesperson to represent their view as these issues were explored by the whole group and listed in order of importance.


The results of the vote are discussed

This democratic selection process prioritised the most important issues for older people as follows:

  • Fear of young people and the disrespect young people show to older people and property
  • Access to health care
  • Pensions levels as opposed to politicians pay rises
  • Bus services
  • Inadequate rubbish collection and litter

 

Frank and teenager puppet in Assemblies

Frank the puppet and Sharon and Jono made their first appearance at a year 10 Assembly in the school where they engaged the audience and introduced themselves and the project. They asked for students to get involved in the project. Frank went to assemblies with two year groups and a small amount of feedback was gained during this short initial interchange. Many of the students had been present in the school two years previously and had seen the performance produced by the last project.

Workshops in the school

Participation was erratic and it took a long time for a core group to form at lunch times and after school. Slowly it settled down to a more regular group.

Many skills, games and inclusive improvisations were deployed, for example,

 

Improvisations

The pupils were keen to take part in improvisations. The game/chat show format was explored because of the interest in and attitudes to celebrity and fame displayed by the pupils. Personas that they took on in improvisations were those of top class sports and pop stars. The chat show format had its own problems as 'The Jerry Springer Show' was the dominant example. This easily became an excuse to brawl, which of course is the intention of the original model. The potential for bullying sometimes threatened to hijack any useful learning. This provides an example of the importance of understanding the context in which the group you are working with come from.

 

Masks

In a couple of sessions masks were used so the participants could take on personas other than themselves . Emotions expressed through subtle body movements were experimented with while masked. We saw a range of emotions expressed with the liberty and freedom that the anonymity of the mask as an intermediary provides. The sessions were very popular, attracting the highest number of attendees for the lunch time sessions.

Masks of older people, one taken in papier mache from the same mould as Frank, were used in sessions before the generations came together.

One particular participant with became particularly interested in the medium. He saw the relevance of the masks to the intergenerational theme and suggested ways of working with music and text. This led to a section in the performance that examines the 3 stages of existence.

 

The Michael Owen - Solzhenitsyn dilemma

Drawing on the pupils interest in celebrities, two photographs were cut out of a weekend newspaper to represent an old and a young person. The fact that they were in a newspaper indicated they were famous and indeed most of the group recognized Michael Owen but, unsurprisingly, failed to spot Solzhenitsyn. However, two people said the old man was an author, explaining that they construed this from seeing rows of books in the background. A scenario was constructed for the pupils to respond to.

The scenario: Michael Owen is walking out of Liverpool football ground on a cold rainy winter's afternoon and Alexander Solzhenitsyn recognizes him and waves. They both cross the street to meet each other but both get hit by a bus and both break a leg. Someone calls an ambulance but when it arrives it has only room for one. Other ambulances are busy.

A question was posed to the group of young people, Which one should go first? The subsequent discussion was very interesting. One participant said leave them both and walk away. One football fan said take Michael Owen now and leave the 'old gripper'. The majority said take the Solzhenitsyn bloke 'cos he's old' and Michael Owen 'is fit' so the footballer would last longer on the cold street than the old man. No one questioned the implied lack of adequate ambulance provision.

Building on your developing understanding of the interests of the participants, activities such as this can raise intergenerational issues in a way which reveals their attitudes and perceptions and enables them to explore and question their views.

 

Still Pictures

Still pictures are group body sculptures producing tableaux of frozen moments in time, useful for group analysis of situations portrayed. In small groups participants create a depiction of a situation. We used this technique at each stage of the project, as starter activities, to plan and evaluate the performance. In the following example of a starter activity we used the classroom as a starting point and the group created a scene with a teacher falling asleep, boys fighting and a girl concentrating on her work. A second picture, half an hour in the future, had the boys in the 'time out' or detention room. The third picture, ten years on, showed a young man (disruptive boy) homeless and begging from an old man (the teacher), a young woman (motivated girl) passes on her way to the airport for a holiday from her successful career. This depiction revealed the children's perceptions of the ways in which attitudes to school may influence life outcomes.

During the process of creating tableaux, observers can alter the picture by rearranging the relationship of whole figures, or subtler things such as the incline of a head or position of a hand. In this way new meanings or solutions to situations can be created. By animating the picture and moving forward and backwards in time different realities, causes and consequences are explored. In the photographs below the children use tableaux to evaluate their own performances.

 

Still pictures during participatory evaluation of good and bad things about the performances showed:

i) audience could not hear when there was fighting back stage

 ii) everyone concentrated when Karl performed the mask sequence iii) peeping round the set distracts from the action on stage

 

Moving Things On

Bringing the generations together

The amount of time spent in Starter Activities will vary. In this project we had four formal sessions with the older people, but we also spent a great deal of time chatting informally over cups of tea. Much more time was needed with the younger people to build their confidence and develop skills. It took time for them to establish a regular group who were able to work together productively. After about twenty sessions we felt the two groups were ready to work together.

An introductory meeting was set up and the young people performed a short sketch set in the local chip shop to a group of ten or so older people who were interested in the project. The older people were moved and horrified by the harsh reality of the situation portrayed of an old man being bullied by a gang of youths. While discussing the sketch, previously undiscovered common ground was revealed. Both generations felt under pressure from the gangs in Ely in different ways. Older people deplored the lack of respect, lawlessness and breakdown of community values. Young people felt both afraid and under pressure to join a gang and do things they knew were wrong as a form of protection.

An incident which had affected both groups was discussed. Flats close to the chip shop (reputedly frequented by hard drug users) had been set alight. The flats were subsequently demolished by the City Council. Some of the most fearful members of the HWW group live in the pensioners' flats opposite this site. This generated a discussion about vandalism. Some of the reasons given for the increase in vandalism were, "people think it is cool" "being arrested is fashionable" "the police are scared". It was generally agreed that " gang leaders are cowards because they have always got to have the protection of their gang". But "I got to join the boys and steal cars and stuff or I wouldn't survive five minutes living in Caerau".

The older people felt that trouble starts in the home and that parents were not bringing up children to have a sense of right and wrong. "When I was young my mother's word was LAW".

This demonstrates how attention to starter activities provides a strong foundation for subsequent work to take issues further. Both groups were ready to use the ideas generated through the starter activities to improvise and begin role-playing activities. They were assisted in these through a range of techniques.

Both groups were involved in devising scenes which included scripting, designing and making the sets and scenery. Gradually over a period of a school term the two groups worked to prepare for the Ely Festival performances. During this time training in theatre techniques such as voice work (manual of techniques) were employed to help the participants develop confidence and communication skills in preparation for performance.

The final play, Generation X was performed for the Ely Festival. To find out more move to performance.

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