Fistful of Words Overall Evaluation
 I feel the project was a success, because we accomplished what we set out to do, which was devise our own forty five minute performance with the goal of educating school children about bullying. The most successful part about the whole process was, in my eyes, the final show to the Miskin, The atmosphere was electric and the audience’s reaction was very positive. The whole thing seemed to flow and work, such as the end song, which had a lot of us panicked beforehand.
    However with every process there are highs and lows, and this one was no exception. Although there wasn’t many, one that sticks out in my mind was the initial breakdown of the company when dealing with the devising of the ‘stylized moment’. There was a clash with ideas; it had been a long day and tension started to rise, with people becoming impatient and rude. One of the biggest clashes in the room was between me and John Siggers, the writer and the director. Luckily Bronagh was there and to defuse the tension she spoke to us about the various different rights and authority we had over the piece due to our title and connection with it. I thought this was rather effective way to enlighten us of how things work in the industry, as well as also introducing us to the idea of a hierarchy of roles within a theatre company.
    If I had more time I would change so many things, mostly surrounding the writing of the piece. Given more time I would have really thought about some of the things that didn’t make sense and possibly looked more at parental influence on the children. I would have also seen if we could have had a mock workshop with participants other than the HND actors filling in for the children so we would have of been able to really see what did and didn’t work from the outsider perspective, which as a result may of shaped the workshop plans differently.
     The beginning devising stages within this process consisted of various workshops, looking at what it felt like to be isolated from the group, as well as for casting benefits. The workshops were led by John and myself as we both wanted to see what the others were capable of, and we did improvisations, with one person acting as the bully, another as an onlooker and finally someone portraying the victim. We did this several times to make sure that each person had the opportunity to be more than one of the three. These techniques were exceedingly helpful as we were able to cast the piece from observations made involving these workshops. All in all I felt the entire devising process was effective as well as I got so much done in so little time, and scenes were fully blocked within then first week or so having the script, it was just finalizing the blocking, and making sure everything worked together rather than a separate entity such as the song, the music, the transitions etc, was the majority of the process. Being the writer of the piece, during the devising process I was a lot more vigilant and aware of mistakes within the piece. It is this keen eye on the imperfections and such which I feel helped the piece reach its potential, as well as also developing my skills within devising. What helped the whole devising process was my determination to get the best out of the rehearsals and use my time wisely, as well wanting my first ever written piece to be a success. In addition to this, the company all pulled their weight evenly all excelling beyond their capability and really knuckling down and getting what needed to be done, done. That was one of our main strengths, our determination, and I would have to say my main strength was my vigilance. I also feel I really came out of my shell this process and was open to both suggested ideas, as well as to suggest ideas.
     This was the first time I had done a performance tailored to the audiences needs, as appose to what we do beforehand, which is make a piece and invite the general public to be our audience. This way however changes a lot of things, despite you ultimately having the same goal which is to devise a brand new piece of theatre, you have to tackle certain obstacles differently and face new challenges. One of the challenges we faced was the whole theme of racial conduct. Because we are all British Caucasian we initially were stumped as to how to tackle this issue, but we resolved it by saying that Chelsea was half Polish, but born in this country, so she hasn’t developed the accent. This was an easy way to incorporate the theme racism within bullying, whilst also eliminating the possible use of an accent, which I think in turn made the actor comfortable when delivering dialogue. It is for these reasons that I feel we, the company, successfully devised a piece for a commissioned group. The feedback from the audience was for the most part positive with Alice from Heronsgate, the school located in Thamesmead saying ‘I would love to work with you and your students in the future’. One note of criticism I did get from an audience member was that they felt the stylized moment was a little bit like ‘GCSE drama’. They understood it couldn’t be too scary for the kid’s sake, but they still felt it still lacked that professional edge, which I felt was a fair comment.
     Like every project we do you can’t expect to dive in and get the piece on its feet, without having done some research and ground work first, and ‘Fistful of Words’ was certainly no exception. The first initial sort of ground work I did involved Theatre in Education itself, such as where it originated from, several t.i.e groups such as Big Foot, Altru Drama Group etc. This helped me to gain an understanding of how t.i,e projects work and why the set up, i.e what is the companies main aim and what do they want to achieve. I also researched the funding issues t.i.e’s face due to only 8% of companies being giving money from the arts council, as the rest ends up going to a lot bigger companies and groups. Locally there is a struggle due to a lack of work being commissioned also. I then researched several things about our target audience, such as what they might watch or do for hobbies, which led me to researching about t.v programmes such as Scooby-Doo, The Flintstones and The Simpsons. I then finally researched bullying, by looking at facts and statistics taken from recent surveys as well as stories from celebrities who recall the times when they were discriminated against for whatever reason. All this ground work I feel really helped influence the script, as it incorporated ‘Scooby - Doo’, some techniques used by other companies, such as audience interaction, as well as the theme of racial conduct (as previously already mentioned).
     When it came to the workshops we made sure to have a balance between things that were fun, and things that were informative about bullying. One activity we did, which was only used in the last workshop, was we repeated one of the crucial scenes within the piece (the scene where Chelsea gets attacked). We would then freeze it at certain moments and ask the kids questions on it. This was a very effective way to keep then entertain as well as informed whilst letting them interact and speak about the situation from their point of view. In all I think the workshops were really effective as we got the message we wanted across, in a fun laid back way, with the kids joining in and enjoying themselves. One of the things that worked most was the ‘freeze game’, as it was a fun little game that we used as a device to control the kids when they were getting out of hand, this only worked however if the timescales were accurate, allowing them to buy into the game.
