Reflection Journal 7 (29/9/12)

Applied theater 

1st activity 
Continuing the troll activity (from previous lesson) through the use of conscience alley. This time, it is before the troll go to the bridge to guard and to defend the bridge from the goats. Post an fb post you would say to the person. As each person walks down the ale, the person standing in the rows will say out his/her post. This conscience alley gives him/her a clue of who each person(standing in the row) is impersonating as. Some were mother, gorlfriend, best friend Etc.  
We tried another round, this time with the troll being defeated by the goats. By impersonating characters, we are able to find out the personality of that character and post on the fb. We may even find similarities or likeness of ourselves with these characters. 

Conscience alley is a great activity for characterisation. As a person walks down the ale, he/she hear voices of the different characters in a story or a play. The person gets to know the emotions, thoughts and personality of the characters who are standing in the rows. So in a way, the person walking down the ale knows generally the personality of the characters in the play. The people standing in rows are in the form of their characters, hence characterisation is being employed. They imagine themselves as the characters and think how the characters will react to the person walking down the ale. 
Hotseatting each groups


We are allowed to use any characters relating to the troll or even using the troll itself to come up with an issue of statement. It is important that we come up with an objective and answer the journalists. We must abide by our stand. I impersonated the mother. I didn't understand that a soldier would be in his lowest rank if he has fit.  So I just blurted it out. It wasn't what we discussed but it turned the focus of the troll's mistakes to something else.  I wanted to use a medical condition that the troll has so that the journalists' attention will divert from the mistakes of the troll towards a medical fault that the troll cannot control. I wanted to gain their trust and understanding.

The objective behind hotseatting is to get the audience to ask more ques. Desired outcome? It depends on what we as characters in hotseatting want. It is improvised because we do not know what questions the audience will ask.  It is improvised because we do not know what questions the audience will ask. Sometimes we are not able to answer the question due to our lack of responsiveness or just plain don't-know-how-to-answer, so we have to improvise and think creatively how to answer. Ideas may not sound coherent but it diverts the focus to another subject. In this case, focus is shifted from blame of troll to maybe sickness, which is unavoidable. There are no easy answer that settles all questions, so it depends on what you want in order to achieve that outcome. It trains students to become more critical in thinking and examining set logic. But instead, hotseatting gets audience to think more than just believing what is presented or offered.  Should we then be someone who is contented with what the media or even government offered? Why r we not asking questions?? 

 It is improvised because we do not know what questions the audience will ask. Sometimes we are not able to answer the question due to our lack of responsiveness or just plain don't-know-how-to-answer, so we have to improvise and think creatively how to answer. Ideas may not sound coherent but it diverts the focus to another subject. In this case, focus is shifted from blame of troll to maybe sickness, which is unavoidable.

It also builds our problem-thinking skills. Because we don't know what the journalists will ask, the challenge is to think spontaneously and reasonably to come up with solutions with unexpected questions. Yes there is a script that we can write and do the expected things.  Conversation, conference, presentations or not, all have scripts. No doubt it helps us to speak fluently and organise things better in our heads, but scripts do limit our thinking and knowledge.  It hinders our thinking ability and responsiveness and alertness. How fast we can react to that. This is how ministers do their speeches in conferences.  There are too many possibilities. Even if we rely on our scripts, how far can we go?? Scripts kind of put boundaries to our thinking capacity and disables it.  Our creativity becomes handicapped. 

By listing down the issues of statements that the four groups we have presented, possibilities and topics are enlarged where teachers could make use of. Eg. one group did talk about violence and terrorism, so we can then expand our focus to violence and terrorism while exploring with the kids.

Hotseatting is a good activity for character study, scenario planning and training rehearsals. We get to know the characters in detail, like how they will feel, what they will do. The questions that journalists ask form our perceptions or perspectives that we have towards our own characters. Why, what, how helps us to understand about our characters better. Story becomes anchored because once we know our characters well, we are able to do scenes better with our perceptions and perspectives of our characters. 

Is there then a desired outcome out of hotseatting? It depends on what we as characters in hotseatting want. It is improvised because we do not know what questions the audience will ask. Sometimes we are not able to answer the question due to our lack of responsiveness or just plain don't-know-how-to-answer, so we have to improvise and think creatively how to answer. Ideas may not sound coherent but it diverts the focus to another subject. In this case, focus is shifted from blame of troll to maybe sickness, which is unavoidable.

We watched a play by Shakespeare.  It was difficult to understand because of the English language used.  It is probably their common verbal language of that day.  The everyday language used in that particular culture. It's fine because we have singlish and if it were to be transported to that time of that era, the people wouldn't even understand.  But I was impressed by how great their memory was. It was superb and their acting skills were so natural. They were so into their characters that there wasn't even any single moment where they are not in their characters. They may probably forget a few lines, but still it was amazing. 

Issues that I can find: 
- Girl likes guy/ guy likes girl.
- Guy has to bring his butler to somewhere else far away.
- Guy hates his brother.

Journal Reflection 6 (20/9/12)

1st Activity: Forum theatre

We forum the maid (Tutti) at home scene again. This time, CK wanted us to bring it to a climax where the tension escalates and the maid cannot take it anymore and decided to try to break free. We came up with possibilities of who the maid could turn to resolve the issue.

Objective of this scene
There must be this desire to change the situation into a better resolved situation. How to de-escalate the problem? What are the possibilities of resolving this situation? What are the options? Who could she call for help?

A person who does the replacing of character must be able to act it out and not say it within his or her comfort zone, which is in the case the audience perspective. Boal (1993) stated that 'Often a person is very revolutionary when in a public forum he envisages and advocates revolutionary and heroic acts; on the other hand, he often realizes that things are not so easy when he himself has to practice what he suggests.' (Pg 139) It is true because forum theater is a comfortable place to 'practice' and reflect on our social etiquette, make mistakes, reproducing what is seemingly 'moral' or 'right', critique, judge, make things better, etc. There is this desire to change the situation and circumstances while practicing forum theater. However, the real challenge is when we encounter the same thing on theater but in the real life. Do we really practice what we preach?

We decided to forum Aunt LiLi, to experiment ways to stop the tension from escalating and resolving the problem. Can Aunt LiLi change anything? We tried it out and it was quite successful in the way that there was a tension dissipation from the Maid towards Aunt LiLi and power shifting from Mum to Aunt LiLi. There was authority in Aunt Lili in this situation because she is the mum's good friend. The person who volunteers to make that change in this situation must embody the actor of Aunt LiLi. There should be no change of her work and things that she does, however, the character and personality may change.

2nd activity: Story Telling of Three Billy Goats Gruff by Oxford

With this story, we need to use our mother-tongue language or other languages to tell the story to the rest of the group members. I used Gibberish language because the rest used Mandarin to tell and my group was not a multi-racial one. One difficulty of doing this activity is that students in class do not have equal ratio of the four races, so it will be difficult to have all groups multi-racial. However, whether or not it is of equal ratio of different races, the main objective is to get the story and message across in a meaningful way. Even speaking in Gibberish has its own benefits. In a way, it helps in our psycho-motor skills, communication skills through non-verbal language, our expressions and gestures. Words are not the most important media of communication. Words are empty without expressions. They do not contain anything unless emotions play a part. Eg, an angry person will shout 'YOU!' but if no emotions are put into 'YOU!', it does not have any impact. But, without the use of words, it is even more difficult and we rely not on words anymore but on expressions and gestures to rely our message across.

I like the fact that we get to watch the youtube video before doing drama work on it.

3rd Activity: School Marketing

We then proceed to coming up with troll schools to market our schools to the parents (trolls also), who are scouting for troll schools for their children. I did the exact same activity for one of the presentations in my AED 105 class last year. Because our topic was about marketing strategies of the different schools in Singapore, I got the classmates in my AED class to come up with their own schools and sell them to the parents. We even got them monopoly money for them to invest in the school. It was a good activity where participants are involved in creating an imaginary school for their students. It gets them thinking and becoming a responsible principal, who cares for their students' welfare and growth. I also realise that as we think of skills and knowledge for our own 'schools', it is also what we want to acquire for ourselves. Similarly, it also helps us plan for the interests and welfare for others, taking into account what we want others to learn for their own benefit. It builds strategy-thinking, planning, creativity and teambuilding skills.

At the same time, this activity also gives student a voice of changing the social systems, whether is it the rigidity or the content of it. It gives students the imagined authority and stirs their desire for social change or even political change. Govan, nicholson and Norrminton (2007) stated in their article that 'because devised performance emphasises participatory working methods, it has often been regarded as an effective and flexible way to move from the individualism of autobiographical narratives to more collective forms of community participation and social identification' (Pg 73) They know their responsibility, identity and authority in society, therefore they have this desire to participate and witness change for the better for the society and people. For eg, the skills and knowledge that they come up with will help the future generation learn in a better and more effective manner.

It was an interesting lesson where we end off the session with a conscience alley of a post of Facebook to a kid going to the troll school.


Bibliography
Boal, A.(1993) Theatre of the Oppressed Chapter Summary & Analysis. U.S.A : Theatre Communications Group. 

Govan, E., Nicholson, H., Normington, K. (2007) Making a Performance: Devising Histories and Contemporary Practices. London & New York: Routledge.

Journal Reflection 5 (13/09/12)

Forum theatre

How many times do we watch a TV drama series, got affected by the scene due to disgust, and wanted to see justice done? Sometimes, when we see the wife being abused by husband in public on TV drama and wished a particular person at the scene to do something, but is not happening, we get upset. We cannot change anything because it is screened and filmed. However, Forum theatre allows us to do what we want. This then produces different effects and outcomes according to our responses.

Created by Augusto Boal, Brazilian theatre director, writer and politician. It is part of the Theatre of the Oppressed. Forum theatre allows the audience or facilitators (or Jokers) to stop the performance at any point, which usually is a short scene where conflict gets in the way, and then letting change happen. The audience can take on roles to change the outcomes of the scene. This is then employed for thorough educational purposes. 

Total of 5 groups, 5 scenes: 

- Hairstyling scene

- Classroom scene

- Home scene

- Principal room scene

- Police station scene

Each scene came up with target audience and objectives. Throughout the whole session, some groups did the forum theatre in a different way. We experimented and tried different ways to forum them. We came across some effective ways to forum these scenes.

Our Group's Discussion

Firstly, We decided on the focus of our subject, which is the treatment of the employers towards their maids. Our objective is to get the audience feel that harsh treatment or abuse(verbally, emotionally, physically) towards the maid is not humane and is cruel. Off course, we would not want violence in anyone's household. So the focus here is centered on the welfare of the maid. At the same time, we want the audience to know that how you treat your maid also reflects on how your kids will treat others. We decided to take out the dad because he is of no use and used Auntie LiLi, Mum's friend, to be the antagonist here. *Scene* From the start, the maid, Tutti, is already being oppressed by the boy and the mum. However, the situation is heightened when Auntie LiLi came, who insisted that the Tutti must undergo training. *Scene*

We act out the scene once and then re-act again so that the audience could pause and decide on who they would like to forum. They tried to forum Auntie Lili, then the maid. It was interesting because it opened up alot of possibilities. The maid wanted to commit suicide and at that moment, the mum, boy and aunt Lili needs to react to that situation. The outcomes were unexpected and different! 

It was interesting to see how forum theatre opened up alot of possibilities and different outcomes base on our responses.

What We Learn

Lloyd's group (police station scene) had all three characters to be replaced. They acted out the scene once and grouped the audiences into three groups (because three characters). The audience will have to talk about the various ways they could respond or react to either heighten up situation or turn the situation around so that it is more resolved or more at peace. The three actors become facilitators to facilitate the group's thinking. It was a good strategy because the facilitators are there to guide them through the thinking process and to come up with ideas. In this way, all the audience are actively taking part in throwing ideas on how to improve the situation. Facilitators help audience to gain understanding for their characters as well. However, we also found out that the antagonist group is the hardest to change because the conflict must be present so that the driving force is there, making it challenging for the protagonist to think of solutions. This strategy by Lloyd's group has a mixture of forum theatre and process drama.

Forum theatre should then present a precise scene with characters that are also clear in their stances and desires. Characters must know their desires, background and driving force and show these elements within that scene so that audience can understand clearly about the personality and their expectations of the characters. The scene must be presented once through so that there will be no disruptions and audience can watch clearly the characters on stage. If it is disrupted, the character's stance and phrasing is not clear and we do not know his/her desires. Also, the pauses in between will cause the actor to not adher to the personality of the character. For eg, the actor may seem cheerful but after the pause he became grumpy. The audience may be confused. Therefore, we cannot forum the characters because lack of understanding.

While doing forum theatre, we also aim to take the situation into greater heights so that when new levels are explored, the audience experiment further and enhance their way of thinking. For eg, in our scene the maid begins to attempt suicide and so we must think how do we prevent this from happening from each character point of view.

What I Learn 

Forum theatre develops empathy and raises awareness and consciousness in everyone. It is a useful and value-added pedagogical tool to not only educate kids but also to educate them from the inside out. It deals with the inner being, then conceptualizing ideas and experimenting ways to eliminate oppression in a situation. The audience is no longer a passive one but an interactive one, creating passionate people who wants to create a dynamic change of the world. According to Boal (2000), instead being a witness, he then 'assumes the protagonic role, changes the dramatic action, tries out solutions, discusses plans for change - in short, trains himself for real action.' (Pg122). The protagonist, previously an audience, now becomes free to experiment his ideas and bring a revolution.

Forum theatre also develops creativity through imagination. Imagination brings to mind the people, events, experience and emotions on stage. It creates possibilities and pushes the boundaries of reality. Robinson, K.() stated that 'whatever the task, creativity is not just an internal mental process: it involves action.' (Pg) Without creative imagination, students will become lazy and their mental capabilities will become handicap.

Additionally, forum theatre encourages the students to explore their emotions and body, how the body moves in a certain way in response to a particular situation. Boal (2000) stated that 'to control the means of theatrical production, man must, first of all, control his own body, know his own body, in order to be capable of making it more expressive.' (Pg 125) This raises self-confidence, self-awareness and self-consciousness of our own bodies. It develops the expressivity of the body. Because of our current technology, we are becoming more and more lazy, using less of ourselves and more of the right side of our brains.  Drama then becomes a tool to bring the body to life.

Bibliography

Boal, A. (2002) Theatre of the Oppressed: New Edition. London: Pluto Press

Reflection Journal 3 (30/8/12)

Applied Theatre

In applied theatre, there are categories of theatre. Eg. Popular theatre, Theatre of the Oppressed, Theatre for development, etc. So I will be focusing on Theatre of the Oppressed, by Boal, because it is significant and can help change the world into a better place to live in through dialogue, action and reflection. They are essential in schools to educate students into being people that loves and liberates others from oppression.

Applied theatre is then a medium where we make sense in, make links and connections between and using the given authority to change and help make the world a better place to live in. Identifying problems, reflect and reconstruct ideas. In a sense, it renews one's mind, not just cleanse, but to transform the mind into a more considerate, respectful, empathetic and concerned mind.

Usually applied theatre occur in unprepared or rather informal places such as an open field, or even a space in a shopping center. The audiences could range, it depends on how interested they are. Prendergast & Saxton (2010) stated that 'Applied theatre works overtly either to reassert or to undermine socio-political norms, as its intent is to reveal more clearly the way the world is working.' (Pg 8) It seeks to find the roots of the problems and to remove them with a tool (in this case Applied Theatre conventions), then replacing it with new ideas and perspectives. It cause us to step back, re-examine the world and be engaged in social change. Afterall, we all play a part in changing the world.

Theatre of the Oppressed

Dialogue is a crucial need in the transformation of the world. Words are powerful tools that are not empty, they mean something and has power to give blessings, embrace, hurt or to curse. However, in the case of dialogue, it is always creating and recreating, never degrading and hostile. It is, as what Freire (1970) described, 'naming of the world' (Pg 70). Additionally he goes on to say 'Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people.' (Pg70). This love drives the act of creation forward. It liberates people from oppression.

'Love is what makes faith works' (Raiborde, 2011, Pg 68). Even Freire stated that 'Dialogue further requires an intense faith in humankind, faith in their power to make and remake, create and re-create, faith in their vocatio...' (Pg 71) We need to have this faith to make things possible for change, and this requires huge amount of real love. I feel that we have to have this heart of empathy for the people and the heart that wants to see justice done and people living righteously. And when we have the faith, we do not fear and doubt the power for change to happen. We believe and do it out of love for the people. If this is the cry of our hearts, we will definitely see change happen through applied theatre.

What I hope to achieve
I hope that through Applied Theatre, faith and love will manifest and there will be this desire to see change to happen. Change for the good and better. I want to learn how to engage people and use drama to arouse their emotions, stir up a passion inside them. Not just to ignite a fire in them but to also cause them to want to do something to stop oppression and things that defile the world and make that change for the better. So that the world will be in harmony.

Bibliography
Prendergast, M. & Saxton, J. Ed. (2010). Applied Theatre: International Case Studies and Challenges for Practice. USA: Intellect.

Raiborde, N. (2011). Do the Impossible. USA: Furrow Press.

Freire, P (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Englang: Penguin Books.

Reflection Journal 4 (6/9/12)

1st Activity

We did story making today. A story will be started by one of us and each of us will have to continue the story by giving a sentence. Then, by adding one layer, we had to make the story go bizarre and weird. And when we did that, we felt weird and confused. It was not coherent and we were confused because the direction was not clear. I felt like it went this way, but it went that way. So when it comes to my turn, I was lost. The flow was not there. It was 'un' logical.

Another reason why it did not have any flow was because it lacked structure. CK taught us that our story needed a structure, which has a nice beginning, a climax and nice ending. This can be useful to be taught in English lesson, Essay writing. Some sentences for us to have a nice structure:
1. Once upon a time, (Setting: Who, Where, When)
2. Everyday... (Routine)
3. One Day... (Conflict)
4. Because...
5. Because of this...
6. Happy ending

We tried it again and we could do a nice ending to it, where initially we could not.

Adding another layer, a new challenge. This time round, we had to talk in Gibberish language to communicate, try continuing the storyline by making the next person understand. A genre was given as well. We did not know how but I used symbols, signs and expressions to do it. It was successful. It was really funny to watch how people respond and react to it and how they try their best to convey the message.


Strengths and Weaknesses
This story making activity opens up the possibilities where we can let our imagination be activated and create something on the spot. It is somewhat improvisation where we spontaneously think and make meaning to the story. One bad side to it is when our imagination runs wild and goes to the wilder side, eg, sexual stuff or vulgarity, which we do not want our students to think about. So I think it is very important that we should enforce some rules like, 'No vulgarities', etc. Apparently, we encountered a condom in this storymaking and we did not know how to continue the story, hence, the flow was affected. It may create awkwardness and also lead other students to think towards that direction, which we teachers do not want in Drama classes.

Gibberish language was a great way that pushes boundaries. Communication can be classified into verbal and nonverbal communication. Besides speaking in a language that we can understand, we find other means to communicate our ideas with each other, for eg. facial, gestures etc. However, Mead stated(as cited in Jones & LeBaron) that 'members of cultures derive meaning from facial expressions by relating them to the context in which they occur, including both verbal and non- verbal behaviors' (Pg 500). Hence, it might be difficult to understand one's nonverbal gestures as one gesture might mean something but might mean something else to another. Different cultural or home upbringing will affect our understanding of nonverbal communication. But this is where it gets interesting when students find the challenge to make others understand by trying different sorts of gestures and expressions. Their vocabulary of expressions will expand.

We went on to do construct a workshop for forum theatre in our scenes that we worked with. 

2nd Activity - Workshop Constructing
We discussed issues that arises from our scenes. We thought about what issues we can bring out, characters that we want to focus, message that we want to bring across and then devise these issues again through forum theatre. 

Forum theatre creates a safe space for us educators and students to express these issues out into the open without any feeling of discomfort, awkwardness or even with a sense of guilt. It brings the issues up front and allows us to deal with it in a sensible, intellectual and sensitive way. Osterman and Kottkamp (1993) describe reflective practice as a learning process where now that they (students) are 'motivated by an awareness of a problem, the learner uses new information to develop alternate theories that are more useful in explaining the relationship between actions and outcomes and to begin the search for strategies that are more consistent with espoused theories and more effective in acheiving intended outcomes.' (Pg 3) It is through forum theatre that reflective practice can occur, where issues that are identified are brought forward and allowed to be dealt with through re-enacting, devising our ideas and transmitting our thoughts across the media (drama conventions).

Our scene : Home scene with parents, Boy and maid.
Decided to focus on the issue on how employers treat their maids. Then we present maid being abuse by the mum. We decided to take out dad because it is no use if he supports the antagonist. It would be good if we introduce a third party, which is outside of this family. So we decided to replace the dad with Mum's friend. She would then be the person, who the audience might want to re-enact, to negotiate and change the situation at home. We had to find a pivotal point in our scene which we can freeze and allow audience to be involve. So we made a conflict where the mum abuses the maid for not taking care of her boy.

What would the mum's friend do? Should she do something to prevent the abuse? If she does agree to the abuse, how do the situation go from there? As facilitators, we had to think on the spot as well and see how it goes.

Through this, forum theatre opens up a variety of possibilities where we experiment and learn through experience.



Bibliography
Jones, S. & LeBaron, D.(2002). Research on the Relationship Between Verbal and Nonverbal Communication: Emerging Integrations. Journal of Communication. Retrieved from http://talkbank.org/media/PDF/JOC-PDF/1-Jones%20%26%20LeBaron.pdf 

Osterman, K. & Kottkamp, R. (1993) Reflective Practice for Educators: Improving Schooling Through Professional Development. California: Corwin Press.