We had a busy summer term here at Unblurred Lines Theatre Company! As we begin proposal writing for autumn/winter we wanted to reflect back on some of the exciting projects we completed before the schools broke up for their summer holidays.
NCS The Challenge
One project we really enjoyed was whilst working alongside Safe! Support for Young People Affected by Crime. Both our organisations were visited by a great group of young people from NCS The Challenge, a government run scheme that gives young people aged 15-17 a chance to work alongside charities and organisations to learn about their work and help them in any way required. During our weekend together, both ourselves and Safe ran a session that got the young people discussing topics such as sexual assault, sexual consent and rape. We then set the young people a task of developing us and Safe a joint promotional video that could be shown to schools head teachers to get them to understand the importance of healthy relationship work for all their young people. The young people set off on their challenge and developed three different videos with three innovative and creative ideas. We want to thank the young people at NCS for their artistic input. We at Unblurred Lines were highly impressed with the maturity and sensitivity that they handled these difficult topics with and we hope that through these young people, our message of the importance of healthy relationship education for all young people is spread a little further.
Schools Workshops
We also had a very busy but highly creative and interesting time working in a large state school in North London. We were contacted by the school and asked to run 13 sessions as part of their year 8 and 9 ‘health days’. The school specified that they would like two drama sessions developed. One covering healthy friendships to be taught to all of their year 8s and one covering consent to be taught to all of their year 9s.
Year 8s: We decided to use a literary theme during our healthy friendships workshop and developed our workshops with the theme of Harry Potter. After our ‘contract of behaviour’ and warm ups, the session covered discussions and drama games such as ‘what makes a good and bad wizard friend’. The young people then developed their very own frozen scenes that showed their audience characteristics that they’d discussed about being a ‘good friend’ to one another. Their scenes were creative and funny and we were happy to see these young people engaging with the healthy friendships topic so well. We decided to collect our data in a much more qualitative way during these sessions by asking the young people to feedback at the end some advice for ‘Harry Potter’ on how he can be a good friend. They wrote advice such as;
- To be trustworthy
- Don’t be disrespectful
- Loyal and fun as well as lovely
- Don’t talk behind their back
- Be friendly no matter what
- Don’t be rude to each other and be respectful to all of your friends
- Consider one’s thoughts before contradicting one’s opinions
- Don’t gossip
When asked something that they had achieved during the sessions, they expressed;
- Being nice to people, the line between banter and being rude
- The right and wrong in a relationship
- I made my ideas heard
- I have reflected upon different situations and moments in people’s lives, thus expanding my knowledge and understanding of the human race.
- Contributed
- Used variety of levels
- Doing freeze frames of good and bad friends
- I achieved to communicate with others
- Working with people that I don’t usually work with
- I achieved how to be nice
We at Unblurred Lines were really impressed that every single young person in all our sessions took part, engaged and stretched themselves to learn new things. With one young person even coming up to us and stating that what we really liked about the session was he ‘learnt what a real friend was’.
Year 9s: We focussed this session on sexual consent and effective communication. After our usual ‘contract of behaviour’ and warm ups we got the young people engaging in discussions and exercises around ‘recognising signs of consent’ as well as giving them some key learning on ‘freedom to consent and coercive control’. As their main task we asked the young people to create their very own rap song or advert using metaphors but with the theme of consent. We also used qualitative data to find out what they had learnt from the session. When asked to give some written advice on ‘how to engage in healthy relationships’ they expressed statements such as:
- Don’t force anyone to do anything
- Communication is key
- No means no!
- Don’t force your partner
- If they say no then no
- Never feel pressured to do something you do not feel comfortable doing
- Don’t do things that you don’t want to do
- Look after one another, respect each other’s views
- Don’t say yes if it is forced, say no if necessary
- Always make sure all parties know what they’re consenting to
- You always have a choice to do stuff, don’t get forced
When asked to write down something they had achieved in the session they expressed sentiments such as:
- Learnt about consent in more depth
- Performed in front of people
- Understand how consent work
- I understand that you shouldn’t force anyone to do what they don’t want to do
- Helped my team make an idea
- I said something in a performance
- I got over stage fright
- I wrote an entire poem alone
- I learnt that you can use simple examples to show the importance of consent
We were impressed that every young person took part in the songs/adverts as either an actor or director and were very impressed that they were happy to ask us lots of questions to clarify anything they still needed to understand.
Autumn/Winter 2017
We have recently put in two very exciting proposals for schools based projects and we will keep you updated on how these turn out! In the meantime if you think your young people can benefit from an education similar to the above then please do get in contact!