Summer School

Today was the start of our 'Create Your Own Show' Summer School.  It was a loads of fun with a wide variety of young people of all ages taking part.  The idea is that we all meet on the Monday morning with nothing, and by the time we have got to Friday we will have created a brand new play from scratch.  Nobody - not even the tutors - know where the week will take us, and that's what makes it so fun!

We started with... sugar cubes! We watched how they melted and fell apart in a glass of water, then in groups we tried to show how it dissolved using our bodies.  This may sound crazy but it allowed us to create really interesting movement sections and, after watching each groups work, we started to get some ideas about where our story could take us.

Watching the sugar dissolve!

After a few more similar exercises we were getting some very interesting shapes and various themes were coming up again and again.  Zombies seemed to spring to mind every now and again as did evolution... we didn't know where this was going, but it was something!  We then looked at a quote from the Tempest by William Shakespeare, here it is:

Each group selected their favourite line and then created a movement out of that, this then led to more interesting suggestions.  Things like super-heroes and coming up from the depths, were mentioned a few times.

So we moved on and tried to expand on these themes, we looked at how we could show zombies coming out of the depths and what kind of superhero we could have:

At first we tried frozen pictures but quickly moved on to pieces that moved:

We then added some text and, by the end of a hard day, we had got a story together that combined all the different elements.  It's all about a girl who turns into a zombie and raises a zombie army and there's an old Voodoo lady, an angel from a graveyard and a girl with lasers in her eyes... The rest of the week will be about creating a story out of this, that most people (if not everyone!) will be able to understand!