Not For Profit – Pluralising Personal Stories
12th March, 2012 - Posted by Gavin - 1 Comment
This week the Not For Profit group began to use personal stories to explore what issues were relevant to the group. After a rhythmic warm-up each member of the group was asked to think of a time when they were personally affected by the cuts. By doing this we made sure that we were thinking about how the cuts affect us rather than just how they would or could affect “other people”.
An image of personal experience of the cuts
However, with this being a drama group, we did not tell each other our stories but made images of them instead. In this way the details of people’s personal stories became less important than the images that were recurring again and again within the group.
An image combining three personal images
By asking the group to combine all their personal images into group images we began the process of pluralising personal stories into group stories. In this way we could begin to analyse the nature of the oppression rather than talking about the minute details of personal stories.
The image of the images!
Finally we made one single group image from all the personal images. We bought this to life in slow motion and began to try out different tactics to beat the oppression. Although we had some success we realised that many of our tactics did not stop the big axe from falling and that we need to keep this in mind when we create our pieces of Forum Theatre. How do we ensure that these pieces of theatre can really challenge the cuts at a political level rather than just exploring coping tactics? It is a big challenge but one that we are up for taking on!
1 Comment
sharon
March 12th, 2012 at 12:28 pm
Wow, really powerful images. Thanks everyone.
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