Drama Workshop

Each day on the VBS program I was given around 45 minutes to do a drama workshop with about 50 or so kids. I had originally thought of playing some drama based games and then working through some Christian sketches that I had brought with me.
I quickly became aware that these kids were of very different levels of confidence and ability when it came to performance. From playing a few simple games on the first day’s session I knew that splitting them into groups and giving them scripts to learn might be too much of a task for some of them.
From watching some sketches being performed in the church already it seemed that people didn’t seem to speak a lot but instead perform to music including voice-overs. They were very affective pieces but it’s a shame that when they did speak they had to use microphones. Whatever happened to projecting your voice? I suppose coming from a performing arts background based in theatre it’s just in-grained in me.
So I spent the first few session just introducing new drama games to try and bring them out of their shells and to also see who the natural leaders were in the group so that I could use them later in separate group work.
I found that even games like ‘wink murder’ and ‘follow the leader’ were new to them and most of them seemed very shy when it came to doing things outside of their comfort zones. For example, acting out a death in ‘wink murder’ would come second nature to me but most of them just sort of sat down without a sound when it came to dying, possibly because they didn’t want to look stupid and possibly because they weren’t used to acting in front of strangers.
After the first sessions of simple games and different exercises I split them into six groups and worked on some improvisation exercises. One of these exercises was to, in groups, think of a story from the bible and act it out to the rest of the group without any speech (mime basically, but without the makeup). The rest of the groups then had to try and guess what the story was. This was a very simple exercise which a lot the groups found quite easy, but I think that it got the kids thinking for themselves in terms of how to act and it also got them used to acting in front of a small audience. During this exercise Anita and I would wander from group to group to see how everyone was getting on with the task and giving any advice, help and encouragement where needed.
I was informed on the Wednesday that the teens would be doing a skit competition on the Friday afternoon after all of the classes. This was a perfect example of lack of communication. I would have loved to have known this earlier and even possibly a week before just so I could have made the drama sessions more structured towards this goal.
There were two things I could think of doing with them in such short notice:
1) Give them scripts to learn in the their groups
2) Give them a theme to work on so they can come up with their own sketches
I went for the second option because not only did I not have 6 different scripts for large groups, but I also think expecting them to learn a script in two days was a bit outrageous. Also doing things this way gave them more freedom in terms of what they could do.
Because the group was already split into 2 groups, I made to two groups into 3 smaller groups each, making 6 groups. I mixed the abilities and ages of the groups to make things fairer and elected an older leader for each group, just to keep things a little more organised. I gave each of the groups a different theme to work on and gave them the Thursday and Friday session to come up with and prepare short 3 minute sketches. These themes were connecting to the work we had been doing throughout the week;
- Who am I?
- How should I live?
- What help do I have?
At first some of the groups struggled with coming up with ideas and those who weren’t that interested struggled with motivation. I, Anita and Paul were constantly going from group to group to give suggestions and ideas jus to keep things flowing. A couple of groups came up with some great ideas straight away and I have to say these were mainly groups with girls as leaders where as the boys were very distracted and unmotivated. At the end of Friday’s session the groups would be performing their sketched to the rest of VBS (teachers and younger groups) and they would be judged to see which sketches would be performed on the presentation evening. I don’t think the reality that they would be performing in front of 200 people had become reality to them. I felt a bit sorry for the groups that weren’t that confident because, just like me, they had been thrown into the deep end without much preparation time.
The performances didn’t really go too well I feel due to the unorganised mess of the whole group. Trying to keep 50 kids, who have never really done drama before, back stage, quite and where they are supposed to be in order of performance is a hard thing to do. My stress levels were quite high because I was keen to keep the six performances flowing and off and on quickly, and when you have kids messing around, not listening and disappearing on you when they’re supposed to be performing, I couldn’t really wait for the whole thing to be over.