Building Belief

This month’s drama idea

Building belief

For this month’s bite I am indebted to Dawn Bowden a drama practitioner with tons of experience working with learning difficulties and in main stream settings.  She sent me the story below after receiving June’s Bamboozle bite.  In it she describes some of the strategies she used to build belief in the drama she and her group were engaged in.  

“Thanks for the bite!  Thought I would share this with you…..

I have been working with a group of adults with Profound to Moderate Learning Difficulties at Countesthorpe College.

This year we created a story which we shared on Tuesday.

The group is quite hard to engage with as the levels of concentration and understanding are generally quite limited.

I told the group that we were going to create a story. I decided to start with a character for the story. Our first few sessions were about creating our central character. A prop session gave us a ‘Lady named Georgina’. We then drew around one of the group to get an outline of Georgina.  A session was spent thinking about her family, likes, dislikes, hopes and fears and who was closest to her.  Once we agreed on those details we filled in the physical details (design) of Georgina by painting and collaging her.  She looked great!  Then we got going on the story which grew out of the decisions they had made about her. Other characters were introduced which they were part of creating but not quite in the same way.

One of the group played Georgina at certain points of the sharing. We made a costume as a group which mirrored the design the group had decided on. We wrote a song about Georgina which reflected the ideas the group had offered when we created her character. I am so glad I chose to use this method. The investment the group had made in the central character at the start helped them to have a better understanding of what we were doing then it would have done if I had given them a character myself.  I believe it helped to keep them focused throughout the process because they cared about her and what was going to happen next.”

If you have a success story that you would like to be passed on to other bites readers then please send it to me at christopher@bamboozletheatre.co.uk