Bare Bones Drama is a drama group for children to young adults. It's a great group that focuses on making drama fun and devising the plays with the children. Around Easter they have a week-long workshop for 5 – 12 year olds called Drama in the Woods, which happens not exactly in the woods but close enough for London standards. I have worked with Bare Bones before as a lighting operator and programmer, this time around I was offered the position of an assistant.
Assistant entailed working directly with the children and helping to facilitate and be take part in activities. I chose to do some of my placement with Bare Bones for several reasons. Firstly, communication. I feel like I could do with more practice talking to people who see the world differently or don't have any idea about theatre terminology. Secondly, I need more experience working in high stress situations. In theatre things can go wrong very quickly and I need to be able to think on my feet when that happens and react appropriately. For me there is nothing more high stress than children. This is where point number 3 comes in; Adaptability. I need to be able to adapt to almost any situation and could always do more practice with that.
Working with Bare Bones was a great experience; the project was a sizeable undertaking and the children were a handful and always interesting to work with. At the very beginning I was told by the leaders that I should engage with the children at every opportunity and engage in all the activities so that the children would feel more comfortable around me and so that we could build trust and respect. This worked well to a point, that point being that I was still an assistant and went along with what the leaders had planned rather than what certain children wanted to do. I was mostly placed with the youngest group which gave me the chance to practice my creative negotiation skills. For instance, if a child didn’t want to partake in an activity I would try find different angles of approach to the activity in order to help them connect to it. Which worked most of the time
During the beginning of my second day I had a rather bad trip, which left me with a sprained wrist and unable to bend my right leg for 8 days. I had to find ways of working around my injuries. Something I ended up doing was choosing to help in activities that would enable me to still be a part of the activities but also gave me the opportunity to supervise smaller groups of children on my own or with reduced supervision. I still wanted to be a part of the activities and creative processes while adhering to my new physical limitations.
I was also given the opportunity to rehearse a small group on my own. While the scene had already been blocked I worked with the group on timing and lines. It gave me the chance to find out how the children responded to different ways of rehearsing the scene. The exercise I used didn’t go over too well, maybe I didn't explain it well enough.
Something else I dealt with was crisis management. In one instance a girl thought her mother hadn’t turned up for the performance, it transpired that the mother had been with a different group. I made the call to invite the mother to stay in that particular performance area, so she could see her daughter’s second scene. The daughter was still distraught but in my opinion, it could have been a lot worse if her mother hadn’t stayed for the second scene.
Commentaires