Category: Projects

During the second year of my degree, I took a module called Writing After Beckett where we did our own creative writing which was initially inspired by Samuel Beckett. For our final performance, we created vignettes. Vignettes are short pieces of writing about an event. This was inspired by the work of Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information (2012) which is a series of vignettes that don’t follow on from each other and with no specific characters, or number of characters, but all under the theme of love and information. We decided to go with a theme of “Playground Politics” which allowed our pieces to be fun yet have a serious message behind them all. This module allowed me to be as creative as I wanted. Although we had a theme, all of our vignettes didn’t have to follow it. One of my favourite ones I created is called Birthday: 
                                          Happy Birthday!
                                          It’s not my birthday
                                          Is it not?
                                          No
I enjoyed writing this one as it was silly, completely out of my comfort zone at the time.  It allowed me to be creative and to fully understand that I don’t have one specific genre of writing. I could write whatever came into my head at the moment of writing, no matter the genre or the theme exploring. 

Bibliography
Churchill, C. (2012) Love and Information. Nick Hern Books, London. 

During the second year of my degree, I took a module called Children and Young People. Here, I went into a Primary School and helped run a drama after school club for 7-11 year olds, and then created a performance based off workshops we did with them and what we learnt. We worked around the theme of Moving On as a lot of the children seemed to be worried about moving to a new school, and growing up in general. This module allowed me to tell a story through acting and allowed the children to use their imagination. Children’s imaginations are wild, and we understood this and used it to our advantage by making rocket ships out of boxes and allowing them to help create our characters. We wanted them all to understand that moving on is okay. We had all just done that by moving to university and left our parents and we survived so they can survive moving to a new school. Storytelling was a huge part of this module as it’s easy for children to follow and stay interested. Learning about them through workshops allowed us to know what they did and didn’t like so we could adapt that into the performance to give them an enjoyable experience. 

 

During our third and final year of uni, one of the modules it included was Independent Project. Here, you work independently to create a performance of what you like and do research around it for your dissertation. My performance, From Normanton to Birmingham, explored letters. In February 2017, my Grandma sadly passed away and when my Father and his siblings were clearing out her bungalow, they came across three shoe boxes full of letters. When me and my family started reading these letters, I came to the conclusion that this was a story that needed to be heard. The way people met in 1957 was so differently to how people meet nowadays.  As Simon Garfield explains: “Letters have the power to grant us a larger life. They reveal motivation and deepen understanding.” (Garfield, 2015). You get to know a lot about a person through letters with how they write and their dialect. I never met my Grandad but reading these letters allowed me to get to know him the same way my Grandma did. Adapting these letters for stage was the main hurdle for the performance but after reading Love Letters, a play by A. R. Gurney (1989), I came to the realisation that little to no action helps the audience listen and fully understand the letters. I did add in a little action for as if we were reading and writing the letters themselves to try and show my Grandparents as to how they were, or might’ve reacted. Take a look at the first performance on the 12th March 2018 below.  

Bibliography:
Garfield, S. (2015) To The Letter [Internet] Available From http://www.simongarfield.com/pages/books/to_the_letter.htm [Accessed February 27th 2018]
Gurney, A. (1989) Love Letters. Dramatists Play Service, Inc.