Education - character profile

In our devised piece we all play a teacher (each with different characteristics) for the meeting scenes and then we each play either a student or teacher in the classroom scenes. 

Teacher - in the meeting I play the teacher who leads and starts the meeting but she sometimes struggles to control the rest of her colleagues. She is quite well spoken and in her early thirties so has been a teacher for about ten years, so has a fair amount of experience.  She expects a certain amount of respect from the teachers but also thinks that they're in put into issues in the school are important, hence why she called the meeting to discuss education. As a teacher she is worried about the current state of education so brings up Michael Gove's statement to start a discussion to get their opinions and advice. 

I imagine her to dress much like this, with a smart pencil skirt and white shirt with a colourful cardigan to make it more casual. These are sensible work clothes and would be comfortable and smart for being in all day and allow her to move around the classroom. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Education - staging

We have decided to do our piece in traverse as it creates more of an atmosphere for the audience and allows them to get closer to what's going on. I think traverse will also make it more interesting as they are seeing things from different points of view, and in the classroom scenes feel more a part of what is going on. We spent quite a while decided whether to have the audience at the front and back of the hall or long ways but decided this way would give us more performance space and allow the audience to see more. 

For the first classroom scene which is based on a Victorian setting we originally set it with all of the desks uniformly facing the front, in a 2,1,2 formation with the teacher at the front. After trying it out in the actual performance space with the seating in place we decided the audience would see more if we had the students facing in towards each other apart from Kyle in the centre who would still face the teacher.  

In our last classroom scene which is supposed to represent what would happen if we brought stricter punishments into education. It is supposed to be a very formal set so we decided to have all of the desks facing forward and in orderly rows, so you can only see our profiles. This creates the tense atmosphere that we want for this scene and in forces the rigidity of the rules in the classroom. Removing the fifth desk from the centre of the classroom also gives us more room to manoeuvre around the desks and for Dan to eventually be tazered on to the floor. 

For the meeting scenes we have decided to keep the set the same so it is a constant thing to come back to, making it clear when time changes. We have decided to have the meeting held around a table which we use our desks to create to make it realistic. As we are doing our piece in traverse we thought it would be good to have a round table to that everyone could see at least three people's faces from where they were. Having the round table also meant we could all see each other and react to what each other was saying. 

Evaluation

On Tuesday 15th December we performed our devised piece that we had created around the topic of education.

During the devising process we were quite organised, I think this was partly due to the fact that one of our group members was going to be off for two weeks near the end of the process. Although this was frustrating in a way, not being able to properly rehearse for two weeks,  it did make us plan ahead. We managed to get all of our movement pieces done before he went away as we could not do them with a person missing. This left us with two weeks to work on and finish each of our scripts for the meeting scenes and perfect the details of our performance like costumes and transitions that we could do with Dan's input over the phone. So overall I think we cam to the performance day well prepared and ready to perform, just with some of our tech to perfect. 

The structure of our piece really worked with the topic of education, helping to break up the sections of actual school scenes and meetings so the performance did not become boring. As a topic I feel it had the potential to become slightly dull as it is something we encounter every day, but this was good as it challenged us to consciously think about making it interesting to watch and trying to portray it in a way that engaged the audience and made them think. I really like how we created our crept to discuss a possible outcome for education in the future, with different eventualities for each scene, which got us into each classroom scene which then created visually what we had just been talking about. This as well as helping with the transitions between scenes made it clear to the audience what was going on in each classroom scene and linked the meetings with them making the piece more of a whole range instead of two pieces just spliced together. 

Something I think we could have improved were the transitions between the classroom and meeting scenes. We did not give much thought to the transitions until we started doing full run throughs. As part of our piece we relied heavily on each having a desk and chair. These are then used to create all of the different classroom scenes and then a circular table for our meeting scenes. Moving both a desk and chair by yourself is not the easiest of things and does not happen very quickly, especially when they have to be set out in a certain way, therefore we decided on a few things to make the transitions more uniform and look more professional. Firstly we decided to move the desks before the chairs and then added a piece of music to be played while we moved everything to disguise the noise. I think the music was a very good idea as it removed any awkward silence when we were moving things, it also gave us more time to create the scenes as we did not have to rush. 

A part of our performance that I think went really well is the dialogue. We spent quite a lot of time going over and perfecting our scripts, asking various teachers for advice on how an actual meeting would go. I think this meant that our scripts were quite accurate as to how teachers would talk in a meeting. We  recreated the final scene quite a few times, thinking carefully about how a real argument would unfold, also tweaking parts of it to make it funny which I think we did in the end without it becoming too inappropriate.

For our meeting scenes we had to create a different teacher character for each member of our group. We tried to think of all of the different types of people you could have, for example bossy, young, arrogant, rude, lazy etc.  I think the different characters we decided on really complemented each other and also helped a lot when we were trying to creat the scenes as we could bounce off of each other. For example we had Dan as and older teacher who was arrogant and felt that he was superior to everyone else at the meeting which created a slight comedic feel which was nice to have as well as causing tension between the teachers which helped us build up to the end scene. Kyle’s character was a newly qualified, young teacher whose opinion was therefore not highly respected and so struggles to get his point across and becomes irritable which again adds to the tension. Lastly Ashley’s character who was one of the most important, although he only entered in the last scene, was the late teacher turning up at the end of the meeting. I think the creation of all these characters worked really well for our piece and helped to create a realistic atmosphere and make it entertaining to watch. 

We tried to keep our set basic as it was only there to set the scene initially and needed to be adaptable for the different scenes. We decided to use exam desks as these would clearly emulate a classroom as well as being easy to move around when we needed to change the scene. We did think about bigger desks but decided this would make it harder to change the layout of the classroom and may make the space look empty. Using the desks to then create a circle to give the impression of a circular meeting table, creating a realistic setting for the meeting. I am very happy with how our set actually turned out, I think the tables were very effective considering how simple it was. It worked very well to make it clear to the audience that the setting had changed although I think we could have thought of an easier way to move the desks and chairs together, like having extra people to help us move them. 

One thing I think we could have improved was our use of different medias. Although we did use a brief PowerPoint I think we could have used more videos and things on the projector to add to our piece. For example during the meetings scenes when Dan was speaking about the cane and discipline in Victorian schools we could have projected a short video about Victorian school while we were transitioning create the Victorian atmosphere and also give the audience more to watch. Also we had discussed having a virtual teacher during the futuristic strict school which I think was a good idea but we didn’t use it in the end. 

At the beginning of the process we came up with lots of different initial ideas that we wanted to explore. We really liked the idea of doing a piece related to drug use and so experimented creating a couple of short mainly movement pieces inspired by this. I think we could have done more to incorporate and adapt the things we created into our education piece as they would have fit well with the movement theme for the classroom scenes. 

Compared to our last devised piece I think it is a lot more mature and developed in the actual idea and execution. We spent more time looking into possibilities for what we could do and didn't get carried away with one idea, like our last devised piece, and then run out of ideas for creating. Our previous devising piece was very disorganised and our group got very distracted very quickly, where as this time we were organised and managed to create a piece we were all happy with. 

Education

After creating our first future scene we decided that maybe it was not showing the control element as clearly as we would have liked. So we went back to ideas and thought of featuring puppetry in this scene more. We created a sequence of each student controlling the teacher with different levels of contact and puppetry, starting with the teacher being physically moved and ending with just a click to move him. I liked the piece we created but I do not prefer it to our other one. It is quite simple and repetitive so I think it may become a bit boring. 

Education

This week we have been working on the scenes we have already done and talking about what we are going to do next with the piece. I am a bit worried that our piece may become boring if it has too many dialogue based scenes, so we are moving on to create another movement piece for the future education scene. We are thinking that we could have more than one outcome, so one where control has been lost and another where new punishments have been brought in and schools are really strict. 

We have started creating the version where the students are in control, a scene in which the teacher is overpowered and the students do what they want. When two of them get in a fight the teacher tries to break it up, restraining the girl who screams. He lets go in shock and the pupils all stare at him in disgust. I think this does very well to highlight the lack of control teachers have and how they feel they cannot physically do anything when in actual fact it is completely within their rights. 

Education

Ken Robinson is an inspirational speaker who gives talks about education and the problems that are within it. The first video is a talk he has given about creativity and how education is killing it, which is affecting the youth of today. 

The second video is about education and the main problems that he believes are apparent. He talks about the three main principle crucial for the human mind to flourish and how current education culture works against them. He uses comedy in subtle ways which I think we could incorporate into our meetings and tells us how to get out of the educational "death valley" we now face, and how to nurture our youngest generations with a climate of possibility.

Education

Today we on the scene that will come after the soundscape we have created. This ends by Dan (who is the teacher) making a very loud bang, taking us back into Victorian times. He starts by telling us to get our books out, then walks around the classroom in silence making comments to each student such as 'sit up straight'. We then decided we wanted some kind of repeated movement to show the control that the teachers had over the students and emphasize that everyone did the same. I had the idea that instead of having music we could just have the simple sound of a metronome so that it wasn't silent and we would all keep in time, it also represents the idea of time passing. Punishment is a big difference between school now and then, with the use of the cane and dunce hat Victorian times were much harsher. To add this to the scene I thought that we could have one of the students knock something off of their desk, followed by them being taken up to the front and hit with the cane. After trying different ways to make it look realistic we decided on using a sound effect and having the boy and teacher angled so you don't see the contact of the cane on him.

Victorian school research

What was a Victorian classroom like?

There were maps and perhaps pictures on the wall. There would be a globe for geography lessons, and an abacus to help with sums. Children sat in rows and the teacher sat at a desk facing the class. At the start of the Victorian age, most teachers were men, but later many women trained as teachers.

Children wrote on slates with chalk. They wiped the slate clean, by spitting on it and rubbing with their coat sleeve or their finger! Slates could be used over and over. For writing on paper, children used a pen with a metal nib, dipped into an ink well.

What subjects did children learn?

Girls and boys learned together in primary schools, but were separated in secondary schools. Both boys and girls learned reading, writing, arithmetic, spelling and drill (PE).

Boys learned technology: woodwork, maths and technical drawing, to help with work in factories, workshops or the army when they grew up.

Girls had lessons in cooking and sewing, to prepare them for housework and motherhood.

Children were often taught by copying and repeating what the teacher told them. Lessons included teaching in right and wrong, and the Christian religion.

How were children punished?

Discipline in schools was often strict. Children were beaten for even minor wrongdoings, with a cane, on the hand or bottom. A teacher could also punish a child by making them stand in the corner wearing a 'dunce's cap'. Another, very boring, punishment was writing 'lines'. This meant writing out the same sentence (such as 'Schooldays are the happiest days of my life' 100 times or more.

Rich boys and schools for girls

Boys from rich families were sent away to boarding school. Some 'public schools', like Eton and Harrow, set high standards.

Other schools were awful places, run to make profits for the owners. Boys in these bad schools were half-starved, ill-treated, and taught very little.

Girls sent away to be trained as governesses were not much better off, as you can learn from reading Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

Girls and young boys were taught at home by a male tutor or a female governess. The first good girls' schools were started in Victorian times, such as the North London Collegiate School (1850).

I also found a few short, very helpful videos on this website. 

Victorian school videos

I think the main difference between schools now and then is the amount of control that the teachers had over their students. Their ability to punish the students meant that behavior was much better than it is in modern schools. In our scene we discuss this and the differences, with Dan suggesting we bring back the cane and such.  

Education

We have spent two lessons writing the script for the scene that we have planned. We really want it to be realistic and emanate a normal school teachers meeting so we have spent a long time editing the language and order of things. We went through our finished script with one of our teachers to help us refine it and make sure it was all accurate, so he helped us to add in some things and slightly alter some of the lines. Within the script we have added in some facts and quotes about education that we have found online so that it is not all made up dialogue and we incorporate some real opinions.

Education

Today we moved on from the soundscape to create a scene that was based on quality dialogue. We decided to create a 'meeting' situation between teachers much like the play we went to see Future Conditional. I think this will be a good way to get across what we are trying to show by having the teachers discuss issues and developments in education that are current. We have created different characters for each teacher to try and show a realistic situation and show how different peoples reactions will be to comments and make the meeting as natural as possible, also making it more interesting as the different personalities may clash or disagree at times. 

Education

Today we started discussing an opening for our education idea. We thought we could start with a soundscape in a modern classroom, then as the noise builds up gradually the teacher will put in a cap and gown similar to a teacher from the past. The teacher will then make a loud noise, maybe with a can, and the classroom will go silent and we will now be in Victorian times. In doing this we will show the contrast between modern and olden day school and how the discipline and control has changed. We started to try and create a soundscape for the start but it started to become childish and messy quite quickly so we decided that we would just use noises and sound effects that we could overlap and make louder.

Contact improvisation

I found this video on contact improvisation which I thought would help us to get more into the feeling of it as I feel it would go well with a slavery piece. The constant connection at the center of gravity reflects how slaves were often chained together and how they had to rely on each other for a little bit of reassurance. I really like how the people in the video don't think about it, but manage to support and lift each other without holding them with their hands, just using their body weight and counteracting each other. 

Inspiration

This is a photo of how I imagine the Victorian classroom our scene is set in. This picture helped me to think of using the separate desks for the classroom scene which we could then move and incorporate into our meeting table. The very rigid and strict setting of this classroom emphasizes the control in Victorian times and shows the differences between now and then very well. They are all doing work and look completely focused which is the atmosphere we have created in our Victorian scene. I like the fact that this picture is black and white as I think it adds another clarity to the situation and highlights how much has changed, including technology now and then and maybe how that could be another factor influencing students behavior.

Education

A big inspiration to our education piece is the new play 'Future Conditional'. Here is a clip of Rob Brydon talking about the show. The ideas explored in the play are what gave us the idea of doing education. Seeing the school word on stage made it clear that there are obvious flaws in the system that aren't being fixed, one of them being behavior. We decided to focus on this and the lack of control teachers now have, compared to different times in history. 

Contemporary duet

I absolutely love this dance. It has such a clear story line and shows how you can use movement effectively to create a piece, without using dialogue. I love the naturalistic movements and contact between the couple, including the simple yet really effective lifts. We could use some of the control elements where the man is manipulating and moving her into different positions, also their conflict can very easily be related to many topics. 

Initial idea

Today we were brainstorming ideas again, looking at our options and what we could do. While discussing the theme 'Humanity in Crisis' we got onto the topic of education. We had recently been on a trip to see a new play called 'Future Conditional' which was all about education and has inspired us to look more into it. As we are all in the education system it is something that we all have ideas for and have an opinion on. We had an idea that we could show how different school is, especially the behavior and the pupil-teacher relationship, in the present compared to the past then maybe a look into how it will be in the future.

Inspiration

I really like this photograph. It shows a group of children ready to be taken away from their home during Kindertansport. I like the fact that it is an actual photograph because it highlights the realness of it all. All of the children in the picture are different, different ages, sizes and gender. I like the idea of telling different stories, real stories of children who have been through Kindertransport. For example the little boy with the violin or what like a little brother and older sister, making it more like following personal journeys instead of it just being a sort of documentary about Kindertransport.

Contact improvisation - drugs

In this lesson we had to chose another idea from our mind map to create using one of the techniques. We chose to do slavery as we were pretty sure we would not choose it as our main idea but thought it would be a good theme to workshop as it has lots of scope for pieces that we could incorporate 'control' into. We decided to start on the floor, holding hands (to represent being chained together) as if in a boat after being shipped to a foreign country to be sold and used as slaves. After some contact improvisation between the masters and the slaves I had the idea that the slaves should also do some contact together. I think this would help to emphasize the control that the slaves were under and how there was still hierarchy  between the slaves with women being more badly treated than the men. This video shows the short piece of movement we created.

Research - Kindertransport

KINDERTRANSPORT, 1938–1940

Kindertransport (Children's Transport) was the informal name of a series of rescue efforts which brought thousands of refugee Jewish children to Great Britain from Nazi Germany between 1938 and 1940.

Background

Nazi authorities staged a violent pogrom upon Jews in Germany on November 9–10, 1938, known asKristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass). After the pogrom, the British government eased immigration restrictions for certain categories of Jewish refugees. British authorities agreed to allow an unspecified number of children under the age of 17 to enter Great Britain from Germany and German-annexed territories (that is, Austria and the Czech lands). They were spurred by British public opinion and the persistent efforts of refugee aid committees. Notable among the refugee aid committees were the British Committee for the Jews of Germany and the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany.

The Transports

The first Kindertransport arrived in Harwich, Great Britain, on December 2, 1938. It brought some 200 children from a Jewish orphanage in Berlin which had been destroyed in the Kristallnachtpogrom. Most transports left by train from Berlin, Vienna, Prague, and other major cities in central Europe. Children from smaller towns and villages traveled from their homes to these collection points in order to join the transports.

Jewish organizations inside the Greater German Reich planned the transports. These organizations were the Reich Representation of Jews in Germany, headquartered in Berlin; after early 1939, its successor organization the Reich Association of Jews in Germany; and the Jewish Community Organization (Kultusgemeinde) in Vienna. They generally favored children whose emigration was urgent because their parents were in concentration camps or were no longer able to support them. They also gave priority to homeless children and orphans.

Children chosen for a Kindertransport convoy traveled by train to ports in Belgium and the Netherlands, from where they sailed to Harwich. At least one of the early transports left from the port of Hamburg in Germany. Some children from Czechoslovakia were flown by plane directly to Britain. The last transport from Germany left on September 1, 1939, just as World War II began. The last transport from the Netherlands left for Britain on May 14, 1940, the same day that the Dutch army surrendered to German forces.

After the War

Many children from the children's transport program became citizens of Great Britain, or emigrated to Israel, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Most of them would never again see their parents, who were murdered during the Holocaust.

Scripted scene

Today we were given a short scene from a play to perform to help us to work on our dialogue skills. I think creating dialogue is our weakest skill and so this will help us, being a good example of published dialogue. The play was meant to be performed in south african accents, which is another technique we could think about in our devising, but south african is a hard accent that many of us are not great at. I thought the scene was okay although without the rest of the play it was slightly uneventful as it was just people talking/arguing in a living room.  

Slavery video

This video is a piece about slavery that the Northeast Ballet has created for their 'Stories that Dance' program. Stories that Dance was an educational program organized by Proctor's Theatre in Schenectady NY which sent members of the non-profit Northeast Ballet Company and resident company at Proctor's to elementary schools. Each class involved wrote a story, and dancers worked with the students to make those stories come to life on stage. This is a really good example of movement and I think we can incorporate some of the steps and ideas in our slavery piece. I also like the way they have used a silhouetted lighting which makes you focus more on what is actually going on rather than the characters. It makes the whole piece non personal, and should detach the audience from the people and get the message across, a bit like Brechterian style pieces. 

Kinder transport mind map

These are the ideas I have come up with to start our piece on Kinder transport. The main thing I want to achieve is to involve the audience in the piece and take them back to the time when it actually happened. I think using music from the era will be a good way to create an atmosphere of the time period and help make the audience feel part of it.

Slavery mind map

I created this mind map of ideas I had about one of our ideas that came from 'Humanity in Crisis', slavery. I imagine this piece to include lots of different techniques to make it interesting, with more movement than dialogue to stop the piece from becoming too cliche.

Voice

Today we were working on using just voice, so no movement at all. Again, using one of the ideas from  our initial brainstorm, we were to create a short piece using this technique. We chose to do the Hillsborough disaster as we didn't think we would use it for our actual piece as there is not much you can do with it, but thought it would be a nice one to workshop. 
Someone suggested using our own footsteps, building up to imitate the stampede and using repeating phrases that may have come from the crowd as it was happening. After building up this repetition, letting it escalate and get louder, I thought of having just a single scream as a climax. Using the scream to silence all of the other noises worked well and then I had the idea of saying facts like the number of deaths and about the game etc. These facts were to represent the after effects and all of the news reports that would have gone on after the disaster. I think this all worked really well just using voice and was an effective way to create the atmosphere without acting it out which would not have been very realistic. 

Tuesday 15th September

We have been working on our physical theatre and contact improvisation, so we were given the task of creating a shirt piece based on one of the ideas from our brainstorm incorporating these techniques. Our group chose to do slavery as we thought this was a more general idea that would be good to workshop. We started by imitating the conditions they were kept in in the ships they were carried in, all squashed together, chained so they could not escape. 

We tried to focus on the mistreatment of them, and how little control the slaves had over each other by having two 'masters' controlling and pushing the slaves around. For the last section we thought we would use some contact improvisation. I thought we could separate off into pairs as it is easier and more effective to do contact improvisation in this way. Also I thought it would be good to show how the 'masters' could influence the other slaves and really emphasize their power even when it is not directly them doing by having the one of the slaves dominate the other in the pairs, highlighting the male power over females in that time. 

Contact improvisation

In today's lesson we were looking at contact improvisation as it is a useful technique that we may want to include in our devised piece. We started by watching a short video of a man and women doing a contemporary dance. This was to give us an example of some of the sort of steps and connections that we could use, although obviously this was more dance-like and fully choreographed. 
We got into pairs and were given a few minutes to choreograph a short piece of contact improvisation that had a story. Ellie and I decided to do a car crash, so we were almost reaching to each other at the same time as being pushed away from each other, like you would in an accident. After watching everyone's we went back and tried to add in some kind of weight transference where one person was supporting the other. 
I think after this we would find it easier to create a piece of contact improvisation although I'm not sure how good we would be at fully improvising as we are not completely confident with this skill yet. 

Contact improvisation - slavery

Tuesday 8th September

Year 13

Today we started our devising unit, starting by deciding our groups by pulling names out of a hat. This worked well as now we are with some of the people we didn't work with on the last devising unit, so hopefully we will have more ideas and get experience with working with a different group of people. 
We were given the title 'Humanity in Crisis', which is our theme for this piece. As a starter in our groups we brainstormed everything that we could think of relating to this title. 

As a group I think we came up with lots of ideas and everyone seemed to make an input which is good. Although quite a few of our ideas are to do with war or similar situations I think we should steer away from doing  war piece as it is very common and may be hard to devise, and won't look good unless it is done effectively. Now we just need to research into our initial ideas, look at them in more detail, and see if we get any further inspiration from them.