VISITING ST GILES

This week we have visited St Giles School on Monday afternoon and Friday morning to get to know the students that we are going to be working with in their Arts week and run a few workshops with them to get a better understanding of the students that we are working with and what we are going to be doing.

In these sessions we learnt that as well as working on the “Paint It Black” number, we are also going to be working with the PMLD students on “The Happening” routine. Although this was a bit of a surprise to us and I personally felt a little out of my depth, the teachers and staff at the school were really supportive allowing us to get to know the students and think about what we might do for their performance. I also felt that all members of our group went into the session ready to work and to put themselves out there, which could have been harder as we didn’t know what were doing. Our openness and willingness to get involved in the session showed us to be really committed to the students and the work being produced. Even though we were unprepared to be working with PMLD student I think that this will push us and challenge us to create workshops that included all the students that we are working with and that we will be able to learn from this process and the teachers and students through this process as well as us sharing our skills with them.

In our other sessions when we are working on the “Paint It Black” number, we started to work through parts of our session planes with the students, however we only had a limited amount of time so we worked on getting to know the students through playing games and exercises. I think that this was really helpful and a useful thing to do in this session as it was only a short one so getting into the routine could have felt broken up and unfinished if we had to stop the routine and creation process half way through. By playing games to get to know the students and them getting to know us creates a feeling of mutual trust between us and the students so that they can trust us and want to work with us in the future lessons and so that they feel more comfortable. I think this is important as theatre and the process of the creation of theatre can be a scary and an exposing process for almost everyone at some point so by making sure that we have a strong bond between us and the students hopefully it will allow them to get more involved and open to the process.