Thursday, 20 November 2008
Reminiscent Theatre
Today we had a lecture on reminiscent theatre, and i have to say, without a shadow of a doubt that this was the best lecture i have EVER been to! two elderly ladies came into our lecture and permitted us access to their memories and stories of youth, young adulthood and times of significant historical importance. Mary, the elder of the two told us stories of growing up in the war while Fiona told us stories of being a teenager in the 60's and 70's. after hearing these stories we separated into groups and created pieces out of our favourite bits of their stories. our group produced a montage sound scape out of Mary's experiences as a young child in the second world war. The work we created was then shown back to them. As we were creating the work i was very conscious of being sensitive to the stories and made an effort to do justice to them, and in the beginning i felt very nervous about not doing a straight play and retelling them with actions the way she had told them to us. but eventually after we created the piece i realised that if we handled the material with care and made sure that we didn't change or alter the meaning of what she had said, you would still get the effect of telling her story but in a modern and interesting way. i left the lecture with a strong feeling or respect and in a way, i think i felt a bit humbled and flattered that these wonderful women wanted to share their stories with us. and in the end i felt quite proud that my work had made Mary happy and proud that the work had been personal to her. it's made me reconsider my final piece as i felt this work was so rewarding, to the extent that i haven't felt with my other work. If i were to create a piece using reminiscent theatre i think i would have to choose a subject such as World War 2 and interview a lot of different people of the same age to find out their experiences and use a combination of all of them to make a more general piece, otherwise you're target audience would be incredibly small. something to think about...
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2 comments:
here, here!! yes it was lovely, and i too was worried about the material and making sure we were sensitive to it, but i fink we did a good job and made a great piece.
Im not sure if Fiona would like u referring to her as elderly tho, she shops in primark dont u know!!!
You're passionate about this work Emma and I think there is much more to discover should you decide to follow up with your own reminsicence project. The key to success is to find an interesting theme, that might yield some response that takes us away from the cliched idea of what it means to be 'old.' It was great when Mary started to talk about the suspender belt and how her husband sulked when she bought new fangled tights wasn't it? The joy of reminscence is to recognise that we've all been young. Life is full of celebration.
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