Applied Drama

This has been an amazing year, studying Applied Theatre (Drama in the Community and Drama Education) at the Central School of Speech and Drama.  Can’t wait to continue with work in The Netherlands. Will keep the blog updated as soon as I’m settled in again. Thank you for following so far! Suzanxx

In this blogpost I would like to share with you two examples of applied theatre practices that help children through drama. The post includes two videos that illustrate the practice.

Speech Bubbles by London Bubble

The first example is the Speech Bubbles programme of London Bubble Theatre Company. As part of my placement at London Bubble I got the opportunity to participate in a couple of Speech Bubbles sessions at primary schools in Southwark, South London.

Research (Bercow report 2008:13) shows that 50% of the children from ‘some socio- economically disadvantaged populations have speech and language skills that are significantly lower than those of other children of the same ageʼ. Intervention in the early years in children’s development of their communication skills can prevent behavioural issues, social and psychological difficulties and drop-out from the education system (Bercow report 2008:14).

This video shows (more…)

Midst of MA dissertation-stress a guest post by my amazing colleague and dear friend Alyssa Grace Sorresso. Alyssa is a writer and applied theatre practitioner hailing from the windy city of Chicago. She is currently finishing her Master in Applied Theatre at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. You can find more of her work on her website or follow her as tactless_grace on twitter.

I recently listened to a fantastic WNYC Radiolab podcast episode called Help! which showcased people devising creative ways to help themselves out of a bind.

A particularly interesting segment focused on an interview with Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love. Gilbert talks about bargaining with her muses. She references an interview she conducted with Tom Waits, a famous American singer-songwriter, in which he described openly conversing with his songs; bargaining, yelling, and cajoling them out of his brain and (more…)

In my previous blogpost I have introduced the thought from Giddens that we are ‘reflexive human beings’ engaged in ‘life politics’. With this I mean that we are reflecting on a daily basis on our lives and planning the future based on that reflection.

An illustration you might know is the daily planning all of us are involved in constantly; about our money, our savings, our retirement, our future career, our health, etc. All the planning we are preoccupied with today is planning in the now for the future.

One can question whether we experience the here and now at all, and thus as Harari (2009:174) says: ‘the ‘here and now’ is probably the most challenging quest of (theatrical) performance’.

In my personal experience – as a facilitator and as a participant –there is a point in almost every drama workshop where the here and now is the only thing (more…)

As part of my part of my MA in “Applied Theatre (Drama in the Community and Drama Education)” at the Central School of Speech and Drama I’ve conducted a research project with four classmates into the meaning of risk within education. In this blogpost I would like to share some of our theoretical findings about risk in education. In future posts, I will share about us researcher as risk-assesors, and the use of clowning in this research.

Growing up in our education system

What are the messages young people get exposed to about risk? Young people growing up in our education system today get different messages about risk, because there are different paradigms on risk in the socio – political context surrounding them. According to the NESTA REPORT of 2010 “learning to take risk, learning to succeed” there are two conflicting (more…)

As you can read in my previous post about term three, I am following the course “writing with communities” as part of my MA in “Applied Theatre (Drama in the Community and Drama Education)” at the Central School of Speech and Drama. My tutor for this course is Sara Clifford. She works as a play writer and drama practitioner in different community settings, such as educational, health and criminal justice settings. At the moment she is working on a site specific community theatre play for Newhaven Ferry, supported by the Arts Council

I enjoy following this course a lot.

Writing with communities is all about the different community settings (more…)

I’m not doing this master “Applied Theatre (Drama in the Community and Drama Education)” at the Central School of Speech and Drama by myself. I’m part of an amazing group of very ambitious and extremely talented people. Over the past weeks I’ve been stunned to see each of them getting involved in very challenging projects, either here in London, Ecuador, India or Mexico.

Term 3 started a few weeks ago and this term is entirely focused on practical work we do in projects we set up ourselves or we deliver at placements. This means that before our summer “joy” of dissertation starts, we are putting all our skills and knowledge gained so far in practice.

This blog is about us, about my future network. I’m extremely proud (more…)

If we include people in a community, do we automatically exclude others? And, is this bad? In this post I would like to share some thoughts about the community and some dilemma’s I’ve encountered as an applied theatre practitioner working within them.

Defining the community

To gather a diverse group of people in a community, around a common interest or locality (idea comes from Kershaw 1992) and to let them share their thoughts and feelings leading in some cases towards a performance is never a neutral process. There is no such thing as “performance neutrality” as Schechner (2002:2) calls it. By defining who is included in the community, we immediately define who is excluded from it.

I encounterd this in my own practice: do you say “NO” to a participant showing up at your workshop because he or she does not fully represent your target group profile? This participant has not experienced (more…)

As promised in my first post about drama and education, I have given the way we learn some more thought. I also expressed the hope that I soon could use drama as a practice for participatory and engaged learning. So I did, and I can conclude from my own experience now that using drama and creativity is an immense resource for learning.

The most important thing is that drama or creativity connects our minds with our bodies, and then connects us with the world we live in. Learning takes place because we have physical experiences, because we identify and explore the subject to be learned by actually doing it or acting it out (see if you want to learn more about this for instance “Out of our minds, learning to be creative” by Ken Robinson (2001)).

My personal experience is founded on research too. Cross-national European research (DICE 2010) shows that (more…)

As part of my course Applied Theatre at the Central School of Speech and Drama, I’ve seen a lot of theatre lately. I’m not referring to the mainstream classical theatre presented by Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre or the National Theatre. No, I’ve been visiting local (community) theatres, where different organizations from the field of applied theatre performed engaging, participatory theatre.

One of the shows had me – and the audience! –  dancing, singing and rocking on our chairs. It was a wonderful night: energetic, lively and full of anarchy and Rock ‘n Roll. It was called “Reasons to be Cheerful” performed by Graeae Theatre Company.

What is Graeae Theatre Company and their work like?

In order to get a good impression of the musical “Reasons to be Cheerful” please do watch this short movie;

“Out there they say disabled people can’t act, disabled people can’t do that, blablabla… Hello!! We are SO out there!”

Graeae is,

“a disabled-led theatre company that profiles the skills of actors, writers and directors with physical and sensory impairments.  The artistic approach (more…)