Hi, my name is Ruth Jones a second year student at Oldham college studying performing arts on a University of the arts London course. Over the past ten weeks I've been apart of a theatre in education project to tour around local schools in the Oldham area. I t hasn't been an easy journey but I'm proud of the end product and I'm going to tell you the process of how the performance 'Choices' came to be.
Project proposal and initial ideas.
At the beginning of this 10 week project we stared as a large class group of 11, we decided we wanted to work together. After brainstorming ideas for a few hours our final decision on what the theme of the piece should be ended up being Technology and how we as a society have become increasingly addicted to our phones. We also wanted to focus on the government ,the way they are spying on us and conspiracies. We stuck with this idea for about 3 weeks, struggling to actually produce any practical work. When we finally did there was conflict in which direction we wanted the performance to go. Whether or not we wanted naturalism using Stanislavski's methods, or go down the rout of being more abstract using Brecht's methods.
After weeks of deliberating we finally had a new plan. Last year myself and another member of the group created a piece about consent, it was am excellent piece that could easily be converted into a Tie piece. The base of this production was set around a house party, there were drugs at this party and a girl sadly is sexually assaulted. We had saved all of the work and research including the script we wrote. So with a few changes and new ideas we created a almost sequel like performance to last years Fmp.
Project proposal and initial ideas.
At the beginning of this 10 week project we stared as a large class group of 11, we decided we wanted to work together. After brainstorming ideas for a few hours our final decision on what the theme of the piece should be ended up being Technology and how we as a society have become increasingly addicted to our phones. We also wanted to focus on the government ,the way they are spying on us and conspiracies. We stuck with this idea for about 3 weeks, struggling to actually produce any practical work. When we finally did there was conflict in which direction we wanted the performance to go. Whether or not we wanted naturalism using Stanislavski's methods, or go down the rout of being more abstract using Brecht's methods.
After a class discussion we collectively decided to split into two groups, one group deciding to focus on Loneliness (one of the ideas from the brainstorming) and my group which to begin with wanted to focus on Homelessness. However this still didn't work for my particular group, we were still conflicted on how we wanted the performance to be done. As a group we knew we wanted to do something different and abstract as its something we don't get the chance to do a lot in college. Even though we came up with many ideas we couldn't actually produce any content, we spoke about using eviction letters thrown around the room, having painted hands and printing them onto one another showing the abuse of the homeless and even having the audience be apart of the piece in a youth hostel . Non of these ideas worked. Every time we thought we had something we would a block, it was so frustrating for all of us especially as three of us including my self were working on a project outside of college for O2 go think big project.
After weeks of deliberating we finally had a new plan. Last year myself and another member of the group created a piece about consent, it was am excellent piece that could easily be converted into a Tie piece. The base of this production was set around a house party, there were drugs at this party and a girl sadly is sexually assaulted. We had saved all of the work and research including the script we wrote. So with a few changes and new ideas we created a almost sequel like performance to last years Fmp. 
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