Power to the People? – The language of images
4th March, 2011 - Posted by Gavin - 2 Comments
We had another great turnout for Power to the People? last Wednesday evening. Following on from Alan’s session last week on the basics of Forum Theatre, this week the group began to explore the topic of Empowerment.
However with this being a drama workshop and not a discussion group, we conducted a lot of this conversation by making images with our bodies! The group were frequently given the instructions “no talking” or ” take your brain out of it for a minute and just do it”! Some people found this hard at first but began to see the benefits as the session progressed.
Group members play "Colombian Hypnosis" (Check out Karen's nails!)
We started with warm-up games and continued working in pairs with one person being a “sculptor” and the other being a “lump of clay”! Together we sculpted images of empowered and disempowered people. We also sculpted images of the reason that somebody could be disempowered. The group began to understand the power of working with images and began to bring these images alive with actions and sounds to create theatre! There was also a discussion at the end about the emotions and feelings that come from being in an image and how scary this can be. But we agreed that this is also a strength and that the group feels a safe and supportive place for this work to happen. Alan and I ended the evening in the pub where we were very upbeat about the session and already looking forward to next week!
2 Comments
Alan
March 4th, 2011 at 7:40 pm
Wednesday night was great, over the past three weeks I have been amazed at how the group have just thrown themselves into it!
I’m always amazed when working with images how differently they can be interpreted by the other group members. Makes me realise we are going to have some wildly different pieces of theatre coming out of this that we could never come up with without the new group members! Exciting!
Nick Cheales
March 4th, 2011 at 8:43 pm
Loved the work in 2nd March session on making images. Fascinating how, in changing from a ‘disempowered’ image to an ’empowered’ one to a count of ten, the pictures we made embodied all kinds of different strategies that we might use to try to achieve that change in real life.
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