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You will need to work with each generation separately so that each can reveal their perceptions of the other. Whatever activities you choose to facilitate this, starter activities need to establish relationships between you and the participants and help create the safe environment essential for success in participatory work.
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If you have the skills to make and manipulate puppets they can be effectively used to represent the other generation in order to stimulate discussion. You can be both puppeteer and group facilitator or work with a partner. Go here for information on puppet making resources. You will need two puppets representing the different generations. They do not have to be lifesized full body puppets, simpler ones can be just as effective if manipulated well. Initially it is easiest to work with a group of no more than twenty participants sitting in a circle. The puppet introduces itself for example “I am Frank and I’m not feeling too good”. As facilitator you ask the group to suggest reasons why that is the case and the puppet character then becomes the focus of their thoughts about the other generation. Your role and that of the puppet character is to keep the discussion passing round the circle by asking open questions either as yourself or the puppet character. In our experience these sessions tend to run out of time rather than things to discuss.
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Different members of the group can sit in the ‘hot seat’ and manipulate the puppet. The group are invited to ask questions of the puppet character who responds in the role of that character. A lot of information about how the group feels about the old or young person represented by the puppet will begin to emerge. It is useful to take notes or record these early sessions to see how perceptions change as the project progresses.
This works particularly well as a group exercise with older people. You will need felt pens for everyone and sheets of paper taped together to make one long piece.
Stretch the paper across the room, draw a river winding through the centre of it. Divide the paper into three by drawing two bridges, you can all discuss where to put them as they represent points of change.
Birth to Bridge One - ask participants to write about being a child and how they perceived adults.
Bridge One to Two - write about themselves when they became an adult and how they then perceived young people.
Bridge Three Onwards - write about retirement, their feelings about getting older and their attitude to young people.
This usually generates a lot of discussion and laughter round the paper. To take things further they may like to elect a spokesperson to tell the story of their collective ‘river of life’.
This can also be done as an individual exercise with participants drawing a river of their own life.
Molecules is a good introduction to ‘still pictures’, a technique which can be used to express perceptions, devise a play and evaluate experiences.
Ask the group to move around the room constantly filling empty spaces, not touching each other. ( The penalty for collision is for the culprits to freeze for 3 seconds.) Call out ‘freeze’ , everyone freezes and you point out any empty spaces. You can repeat this a few times adding suggestions such as ‘faster’, you are caught in a storm’ and so on, still filling the spaces.
Next ask participants to constantly seek eye contact with different people in the group. When they freeze select 2 or 3 people who have frozen in a pose where they seem to be interacting in some way. ‘Unfreeze’ the rest of the group and ask them to describe what is happening in this ‘still picture’. There will probably be several different interpretations.
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Still pictures are group body sculptures producing tableaux of frozen moments in time. Ask half the participants to make a ‘picture’ of for example, the other generation, or of old and young people interacting. Then you describe what you see simply without interpretation for example ‘I see a man, his head is down, a woman is standing with her arm out’ and so on. Then encourage the other observers to interpret what they see. Observers can become part of, or change the picture to make a meaning clearer, or to change the meaning. The scene two minutes before or after can also be created. Different solutions to problems or conflicts can be explored and situations analysed by the group in this way. This exercise offers many possibilities. The group could join several pictures to make a story. First making the separate ‘still pictures’, then showing what happens in between. At this point participants can begin to add dialogue. Limiting each character to short pieces of dialogue helps keep the improvisation clear. |
Masks impose a discipline which requires the wearer to find ways of expressing emotions through subtle body movements rather than with dialogue and facial expression. This is particularly useful for young people as it helps them to concentrate.
You will need two neutral masks*. Each participant in turn stands facing away from the group, puts on the mask, then turns back to face them. Repeat the process but ask the wearer to express an emotion, the group guesses what it is. It soon becomes clear that obvious caricature doesn’t work and concentration does. Experiment with making the same mask seem old or young, two masks inter-relating, adding hats, scarves and other ideas you may have.
This is a quiet, thoughtful activity which works best with a small group.
Go here for a mask supplier.
Collage - Select some magazines which contain pictures of young and older people. Ask groups of five or so to cut images out of the magazines including images of, and associated with, young and older people. Each group then creates their own story by arranging the pictures and elects a narrator to tell their story to the others. Then the whole group discuss similarities and differences between the stories and then make one composite story.
Ball Of Wool - Participants sit in a circle. Holding a ball of wool you begin a story featuring a young and older person. Stop, hold on to one end of the wool and throw the ball to another person in the circle. They add to the story then hold their bit of wool and throw the ball to another person and so on. Eventually the path the story has taken is represented by a web of wool, each part of the story owned by a teller.
By now some key issues will have emerged which are of concern to the two separate generations. Each group now chooses one issue as the basis for a drama improvisation. Improvise a short sketch, three to five minutes long to demonstrate the concerns of each generation to the other. To simplify the process you can use ‘still pictures’ for each section, then join them with brief dialogue.
These sketches will be discussed in the next session that brings the generations together for the first time. (If a group of older people wanting to perform has not yet emerged, a sketch from the young people will suffice as a stimulus to discussion.)
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