Creative Arts Theatre Workshop on Dartmoor
On the 7th of May MA Creative Arts students went on an organised trip to Moretonhampstead on Dartmoor to complete a Drama workshop with MED theatre. This was an all-day workshop that began with us getting a bus to the town and being allowed to explore a bit and chat to the locals.
Following our wanderings, the workshop began with an explanation of who MED theatre are and what they do. This amazing charity is a community theatre organisation with a focus on multigenerational work that are relevant to local residents and the surrounding areas ecology and folklore.
We discussed what is important to the organisation, and their various areas of interest such as locality, coming together and the environment
Following this we went on a walk to see some of the surrounding areas flora and fauna where we explored one of the stories they use within their work, and how this can be adapted and used. We looked at how stories can be used to explore characters’ feelings as a way to help students work through their own feelings without experiencing that they are giving too much of themselves away. This section was particularly interactive with all of us volunteering to play various characters and get involved to bring the activity to life.
The next activity saw us discussing how charades can be used as a learning activity with students acting out facts or words from the curriculum to help get students involved in some active learning and creativity before we returned for lunch.
Following lunch, we discussed things we felt were important to each of us and what we would wish to incorporate were we involved with MED theatre before splitting into groups to plan ideas around activites and workshops we would run on those respective topics. There was a huge range of links people found with collaborating across the arts, an environmental focus, and more. My group chose to focus on the idea of locality and how we could apply it to different places, incorporating the local mythology and folklore of the region the workshops would run.
After considering the folklore that was important to individual members of the group and each member’s diverse upbringing; Ireland, South Africa, and China; we decided on a workshop on Irish folklore. We were asked to consider who this workshop would run for and where, how would we recruit or find students, how we would link locality and finally any barriers we may face.
We focused on KS2 students in Northern Irish primary schools offering it as an after-school workshop that students could opt into. This would make recruiting easier as we would use the students of the school, as well as eradicate barriers to inclusion such as transport and a space to put the workshop on.
We focused particularly on the story of Finn MacCool and the Giants Causeway. We chose this story as it is one most if not all children in Ireland know of so they could get involved with the storytelling and allowed the opportunity for a number of other discussions around the science and geography of the formation of this landscape.
We thought about how we could use the activities we had learnt about throughout the day as well as linking other key themes we had learnt about in our MA Creative Arts course to put on activities for the students. We linked student inclusion and fluid teaching moments with getting students to help us tell the tale . This was followed by ideas of Possibility Thinking to create an alternate version of the tale – what else could have caused this landscape? Games like Busy Bees are ideal for the younger students to get them acting out actions from the story before we could move on to thinking about what emotions the characters may have felt and how to show that. Should we want to include more geographical knowledge with the slightly older students we could play charades with key terms, such as columnar jointing and basalt, having learnt about how the hexagonal rocks formed.
In the end this was an exceptionally helpful workshop for thinking about how we could put what we have learnt into practice. Whilst this workshop took place in a drama setting a large portion of the skills ad games we used were really transferable for considering active learning and how to get students engaged and teaching and being taught creatively.