This is a first attempt at writing something about my experience over the weekend doing an exercise called Theatre Of You. I've allowed a few days to pass since I did the exercise. Because frankly, I was quite tired at the weekend. I did four different workshops, 90 minutes each, and I tried to catch up with other things and take a little bit of time out and I didn't have time to post all the time about what was going on. So I decided to let it settle in my mind and come back to it.
And I hope that what you hear will be useful to you in terms of how you might make up stories that don't have to be dramatised as you'll see and they don't have to be that private life. Although the examples I give you will be you could just as easily use these techniques for developing a story for working it up a bit on any area in your life. And just for the record, I'm doing this by speaking into one of the now proliferating apps that use AI to transcribe what I'm saying while I speak.
It was called The Life Game. And I was very happy to call my sessions The Life Game, but Joanne who runs and organises and founded the EA festival thought it would be good to call it theatre have you and I agree but I just want to acknowledge that I'm entirely indebted to Keith Johnstone for this. The late Keith Johnstone who died earlier this year, just after his 90th Birthday.
So picture this. You've got people in the room who might have expected a larger group and who actually said to me that they were hoping to sit at the back and just watch and not be participants. So I had to think about how to accept and acknowledge and respect that while also generating material from the audience. And as anyone who's ever facilitated can tell you the best way to get interaction and participation is to start with something very mild, very easy. And perhaps also to share something myself so I I shared some stories and then asked for some small things and I explained this game, the Life Game and the Theatre of You idea.
And I said that in the shows that Keith and Phelim put on they would choose a member of the audience every night and that person's life would become the story of the show that evening. And, as I understand it from what Keith told us, often the early things would be from an early part in that person's life.
So let me give you a couple of examples which we actually did in the castle in the keep three floors up at Hedingham in North Essex. The first of them is where I invited a participant. I should probably have mentioned that I did this session twice. So I'm going to blend my account using bits from both of those sessions. The first exercise is to ask one member of the audience just to show us around a bedroom from their childhood. I did this in both sessions. So I have two experiences.
In the first session, the man who volunteered stood up and with me we walked around as if we were in it. His childhood bedroom. We walked in through the door. He showed us what was on the right showed us what was on the left. He pointed out where the window was the Computer table in the bunk bed where he slept on top he thought and his brother slept below and elaborated along those lines. And one of the things that became interesting was that he noticed that there wasn't much else in the room. It was very blank. And what this led him to realise was that his family had moved a lot and not particularly put down roots. I think he said his family was originally from Sri Lanka. And he moved around. And maybe an element of this was that he he had a very undecorated room, as he then became aware by walking around his bedroom. So these are things that he pointed out. After he had done this, I mean he looked rather moved by it. I must say that's quite an important thing to say. And after he'd done it, I asked members of the audience that other people in the room, what they'd made of it and they found it touching and interesting and they confess I don't know why they confessed because it's a completely normal human reaction. They had a lot of curiosity about some of the little things that he hadn't particularly thought had significance but when he said something it sparked off a question in their mind. They had wondered about the spareness of the decoration. They'd wondered about looking at the window and what was out there. So the point that I tried to draw attention to in that audience, and to him, was that when people hear a story that endlessly finding new questions and those questions are either met by the story affirming what the listener is expecting, or by the story surprising listener. So I'll give you another example from the exercise the following day.
And this one, we weren't looking around the childhood bedroom. We restaged a breakfast from the real life person's childhood. I did this because when we sat down in the outdoors now, because it was so hot this weekend. We sat around a long table and this was quite near the other tables that were served by stalls selling cakes and coffee and so on. So there were other people around who weren't part of the workshop. And I sensed maybe rightly, maybe wrongly, I don't know. I sense that maybe the participants wouldn't particularly want to stand up and reenact things. And so I found to my great delight that actually the the exercises work okay, they worked really more than okay if you sit down and just say them. I prefer to walk around the childhood bedroom with someone and get down on the floor and feel the texture of it and so on. But on this occasion we did it just sitting around a table.
So I asked everyone who was already sitting around a table to play members of the family of the as it were real life person whose family breakfast we were reenacting. And she said that her mother would just sit there doing the crossword while her father busied himself making the breakfast that she was endlessly pestered by her younger brother who would still think of her plate and she would always turn to her father for support because her mother thought that the brother she said the sun shines out of his backside. So it was an interesting dynamic going on.
And when we were actually playing this - one woman was miming looking away at a crossword - it becomes slightly different than just saying it out loud like this, when you can physically see the bodies.
And at this point, one of the demonstrators, one of the participants, had the willingness to stand up and not just be sitting at the table so it happens to have been a woman and she was playing the father in the story - she got up, and as it were went to the cooker, and then came back with some food and put it in front of people.
And the person playing the mother said, Could I have some more? Something like that? So what we were seeing was a dynamic in which the Father did a lot of the work and the mother wasn't doing much work or paying much attention.
And this is because it was directed that way by the person who had been there in her own childhood. That's what she remembered. That's how she wanted to restage it, and she approved all of these things.
And my role was as a kind of a shadow, a bit like a journalist, as I have been for so many years, asking questions, like, what was it like in your childhood, that kind of question, but actually enacting it made such a huge difference? I wasn't just writing things down in shorthand in my notebook and then preparing to go off and pick and choose from those things in as they suited me and to write them up somewhere else. I was at the castle, with the human beings involved allowing them to make up the story allowing them to generate the material and correct it and we stage it, and that felt really good. I don't mind the journalism, I have nothing against it, it's really good in many ways, but this was different and special. But it was useful to be a journalist and to know what kinds of questions to ask. Now you don't need to be a journalist for a long time to know that I could ask things like 'what did you have for breakfast?' And that yielded some interesting answers.
In this case, the father was concerned to make sure that children ate healthily so he would blend dried fruits, roll them up into a little ball and dust them with icing sugar and give them to the children so that they would eat something healthy. I also asked what's outside the window?
And at this point, I want to come back to the thing I said earlier about how a story either rewards or surprises the expectations of the listener. Because I suppose that all of us sitting around that table - in the shade cast by the castle on this afternoon in North Essex, East Anglia EA festival - I suppose we all probably assumed that the breakfast in childhood had taken place somewhere relatively nearby. When I said What can you see out of the window?, the real life person, this woman said oh, a bombed out church in Kings Cross.
And that was really interesting not just because it was a bombed out church in Kings Cross. It could have been anything. But what was interesting about it was that it had tweaked us away from our previous assumptions about this story, and led us to contemplate it in a new light.
So for a start, there was a bombed out church. Secondly, there was King's Cross, which if you know much about London is a part that has been utterly transformed by regeneration whether that's good or bad thing I'm not I'm not making a comment about that. But one was it was bombed out. One was that it was a church and one was it Kings Cross each of those three facts bring up a whole extraordinarily fascinating new possibility.
So as far as it goes, I've given you some descriptions of two exercises that we did in Theatre Of You that, as it were, "coloured in" a scene but it was a fairly still, fairly static scene. Even if the mother was asking for some more food and the father was rolling up some blended dried fruit balls. Mostly the scene was fairly still there wasn't much dynamic or action or narrative and it could more or less be captured by one image.
So the point that I'm making now is that we moved on from there towards trying to think about how to turn this, this image, this visual into a story.
And one thing that I did next was to ask everyone, what were the questions in your mind? What did you want to know more about? What were the things that made you curious? And as it happened, there was quite a lot of interest in this fact that it was in Kings Cross and it had been bombed out.
So I asked, Did you ever go back and see your childhood home now that it's been redeveloped? Why is it still there? I asked that question.
And she said that she had gone back once, and that opened up a whole fascinating possibility for a story.
And I asked for some more detail and In summary, this is more or less what she said. She was going to meet a friend at Kings Cross station so that the friend's child could visit the Harry Potter platform and she said it was really crowded. And her friend was typically running late. And so she realised that she had time to go outside the station and look for her old childhood home and she caught there and she said by an extraordinary coincidence, to mom came out who actually lived in that top floor. I think she said top floor flat. And she had a chat with a woman who explained that she had lived there. And it turned out that the woman wasn't enormously interested.
That's all we heard, more or less.
But if your brain works like mine, then you would notice a certain number of things that can be played with and turned into stories and the things that make it exciting.
And one of the things that I do next is look for where are the emotions? What are the emotional points and so I suppose in the story of someone being frustrated by being in this crowd at Kings Cross and although she was very nice about her friend, probably a bit frustrated by her friend being late. I thought that there's a lot of frustration at the beginning. And then there's a kind of a, an openness and a sort of yearning to go to this place that means so much to her, to go back, a certain amount of possibly thrilling expectation, but also perhaps dread. Is it still going to be there?, she said. Has it gone? A sort of pre-sadness in case it's gone. And then when she got there the extraordinary surprise of someone actually coming out, then maybe the disappointment of the person not being enormously interested.
I did ask if she was allowed to go - if she asked to go - inside the building and she said she hadn't done that she's not. She didn't say pushy, but she said she's not that kind of demanding or whatever. So she didn't do that. Which slightly disappointed me as a listener to this story.
So anyway, that story then has frustration, yearning, excitement, pre sadness, surprise, disappointment. That's quite a good range of emotions to go through and they can certainly be pumped up. The next thing that I wanted to do was to think about how you can turn those into a story that has real dynamic and flow and drama and cliffhangers and I think it should be fairly obvious to anyone who's bothering to listen to this and to read it, where the cliffhangers could go, now that I've pulled out the emotions and that more or less is how the session works.
When I'm teaching storytelling, on residential courses here, and there, at the Arvon Foundation, and so on. I really ask people when they're doing that, that first bit - the still image scene, the childhood, bedroom or breakfast around the kitchen table - I ask everyone to think very hard about all five senses. What does it taste like? What does it look like? What can you see? What can you hear? What's the table feel like or the carpet? So once you've put in all of the senses, it really helps your audience to immerse themselves in it.
So going back to the story that we eventually developed out of these fragments about going back to visit a childhood home, I would probably ask the woman to go into more detail about all the senses all the way through. Did she put her hand on the door that she had once gone through as a child? What did it feel like? Is there a particular smell in Kings Cross? What was the noise of the crowd in in the station? What did it feel like being jostled by by them? All of those things.
So that essentially is how I used this session twice, to create a story that could then be told in any number of different ways. And in summary, I suppose what I'm saying is, it starts by finding some kind of image that isn't going anywhere. And then going further and further into the image by looking around, smelling, tasting, doing all of those things, and finding the little details that generate questions in your audience's mind. Sometimes your audience is just used so you have to be able to listen to it again. With curiosity and think, gosh, yes, I'm really interested in why was there a bombed out church in Kings Cross and sometimes you have the benefit of, of an external audience, you can reflect those things back to you. And then to explode that tiny bit of narrative into something much more prolonged using speedy bits of narrative and slowing things down occasionally to highlight the bits that you're most interested in.
Now, I don't even know because I've done this whole thing with my eyes shut. I don't know how long I've been going on. I hope otter.ai has transcribed it all. And I'm going to stop now.
