Week 18: TIE (Primary School)

Finishing Chapter 1

In the first 2 hours of working on the piece, we decided to completely finish Chapter 1 and use the rest of our time to plan chapters 2 and 3 so that we could go straight into devising them next week with some starting points to use.

We decided that after my short paragraph about the "Little Fears" that I had we decided to show my first day in school so that they could see the resolutions that came out of it. We then clearly assign people parts for example I say "Caitlin can you be me and Charlotte and Connie, can you be my friends," so that each person is clearly labelled so that the audience can understand who is who in the scenes. We start of with the friends having a small discussion about what lesson they've got next and then we have the rest of the cast coming in from the sides showing the hustle and bustle of the corridors in school and we have "me" being separated from the rest of the friendship group, and therefore getting lost. I then narrate from the sides that I did get lost but it was okay because I found some other people that were lost as well and an older student helped me find where we need to be and "they aren't as scary as you think." We decided to involve all of the small fears that were addressed at the start and so I then say "and the teacher was really chill about us being late as well" showing that you won't get a detention for being late in the first few weeks. We then moved onto the first lesson which allowed us to explore the ideas about no equipment and the work being too hard. We decided that we could facilitate the options that I had about the work being too hard. For example, we thought they might say ask the person next to you, ask the teacher or try and work it out. So we decided that the majority of the group would say ask the teacher and so we made "me" ask the teacher for help so that the situation was resolved in a way that would be easy for them to put into a real life situation.

I then move onto saying "There are lots of things that people might be worried about; these are only a few examples. Now its your guys turn to think about what you're worried about. We're going to split you into some smaller groups and create some freeze frames." We decided that this would be a good time to start getting the group physically involved in the piece and so we decided to ask them to create a simple freeze frame as this is one of the easiest forms of drama yet it can be effective as they can clearly see what is happening. Because they won't know what a freeze frame is we got a person out of the cast to shout out "what's a freeze frame" and I would reply with "Here is an example." and the cats would jump into a freeze frame of a wedding. I would then continue to say "It's like when you pause the tv; there's no movement and no sound, you just use your face and your body. Can someone tell me what this is showing?" We would get answers from the audience to show them how easily they can be understood. We would follow this up with "so now you know what a freeze frame is, lets see if you can make some of your own." And the cast would then separate and take a few students to create their own. We would then show these to the rest of the audience and get them to guess what fear they were trying to show.

Planning Chapters 2 and 3

We then moved onto planning the next two chapters and we decided to call Chapter 2: friendship. This is due to there being so many different outcomes regarding friendships when moving to secondary school and we also have a range of different outcomes regarding people in the cast as well. For example, Alexis moved schools knowing no one and so she was with completely new people, Hannah came with the group of friends that she'd had since reception but then drifted away from them and made new friends, Caitlin didn't start making any friends until February and then Charlotte came and stayed with her group of friends from primary school and also made some new ones. using all of these stories gives us a wide range of options to explore. We decided that we should explore each of the stories through Alexis' as we can have all of the options coming into play throughout her story like she could join Charlotte's group of friends as a conclusion. The conclusion that we want to come to is that everyone can make friends no matter their friendship situation. We wanted to show that it is okay to talk to your family about your problems in school whether that's regarding friendships or anything to do with school and so we thought about having a scene between Alexis and her nan after school and her telling her nan how she feels. We would then build Alexis into what a good friend looks like with suggestions from the audience of what they think makes a good friend for example things like being helpful, confident, smile etc. We would then ask the audience to suggest places that we could let this "new" Alexis meet some new people and then we would put them in that situation and show the audience some of the ways that to approach someone and befriend them.

We would then move onto chapter 3 which we are going to call Bullying as we know that it happens in every secondary school and primary school and we want to tell the audience that it's okay to have that fear and it's okay to be worried about bullying as we know that it happens and we just want to tell them how to deal with it. We would start of with Harriet addressing the fact that we know it happens and we only want to give them some tips on how to avoid it or what to do if they see anyone being bullied. We could then use an anecdote in order to explain the situation and to have a deeper look into the situation and how it was caused. We want to avoid it being like an anti-bullying assembly as we know that all primary schools have many of those across the year and we want it to be different from that. We thought we could use a sliding scale with the different responses that we could have to bully and tie in the aspects of flight or fright as well as doing nothing.