After a week of introducing drama to these amazing kids, they were pretty sold on the idea of continuing with the program over their summer holidays. Not only to develop a performance for their communities, but also a strong supportive group amongst themselves, have fun developing drama and life skills, and challenge themselves to fulfill their potential. We have established our two groups. In Hai Tien village we have 27 kids, and in in Phuong Dien village we have 16 kids participating in the project. Exciting, exciting!!
Week 2 has taken us on a journey from blindfold trust activities to expressing different emotions through subtle expressions or large exaggerations, playing out scenarios with emotional catalysts, challenging our right brain and left brain through movement, hypnotising each other in lead/ follow exercises, creating beautiful movements and team work as schools of fish, to expressing conflicts from our own lives, and trying to find solutions through play. It feels like I have known these kids for months! The determination of these children to improve their acting skills, life skills and discover new ways of thinking and applying lessons to their lives through drama is incredible.
I have learnt a lot about the children's lives through the conflicts they acted out this week. Some of the children took big risks in acting out some very personal issues in their famlies. The two that stick in my mind and heart both involve alcoholic fathers. And in both situations, the children of these fathers acted as their fathers. This was a very brave step, there were a lot of whispers amongst the audience, identifying the real people behind the characters. But there was also group support and solidarity for the kids whose experience this was.
Through this process, most of the children were relieved to express their problems and realise that there was conflict in everyone's families, between parents, and also amongst siblings. This created a sense of normalisation of the problems, creating a safe base for us to continue delving into the issues in these kids lives. This workshop was very emotional for us as this was the first insight into the reality of these kids lives, besides the data recorded on paper. It is moments like these that makes us want to love them more and more. And its moments like these that inspire us as facilitators to be the best we can be in facilitating this program so the children can exceed their potential.
I'd like to share some of the kids feedback to give you more of a sense of who they are...
I found emotions difficult to express, because if I am feeling very happy and I must act out sadness it is hard to change from my real emotion. Also expressing loneliness was difficult for me
It is easy to distinguish emotions one by one but sometimes, they blend together and are very similar
It was easier to act out real conflicts than situations we are not familiar with
People have different opinions and in life not every conflict can be solved, but by acting out the conflict and then finding a solution, I will be able to use this in life
I was not happy with our performance because we weren’t able to find a solution.
If we look at our own lives we can see many conflicts amongst our siblings and in our families. So in life, I can try to solve these problems
I learnt a lesson from todays performances – Don’t play football on the street, because it is dangerous for pedestrians walking by
I liked the way we gave the solution, by explaining in a soft way to the people in the conflict
I couldn’t act well because in my group people were laughing and couldn’t play the characters seriously
It was easier to perform our own conflicts because we were able to bring the real emotion to the drama
There are lots of problems in life, many are complicated. Some problems can be solved easily but sometimes you have to call the police to help. It is difficult with boys fighting each other because you can’t resolve the problem by talking
It was easier to play our own characters in our real conflicts
The conflict we performed was from my experience, at the time I felt very scared as I was being falsely accused, and I was afraid that people wouldn’t believe me. In the real situation I cried and waited quietly until they found the person who had stolen the thing
When I was acting as a thief I was afraid of being accused by the police man
I was very happy when I can act for 20 mins from real life experience. We performed a conflict we saw last night on the beach. By acting it out we saw the value of friendship, and that if we face our difficulties we will become very tight friends
Its very difficult to control a hot temper in real life, but also in acting it was difficult to control because it felt that we could easily get swept away with the fighting
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