Last summer, we were commissioned by Slough Council's Child Sexual Exploitation team on a drama project from late autumn 2017 until March 2018. The project's aim was to educate young people in the area about Child Sexual Exploitation and Healthy Relationships. Our end goal was for the young people to then use their key learning with us to devise their own short play.
We worked with five Slough schools with Year 8 students over the course of two months. Each school participated in two workshops facilitated by our Artistic Directors - the first was workshop focussed on key learning and the second workshop guided the young people in creating their own performances by engaging them in different devised theatre activities.
Our first key learning workshop explored eight different models of Child Sexual Exploitation: Peer to Peer, Boyfriend/Girlfriend, Gang(s), Party, Online, Self-generated, Trafficking, and Commercial Sexual Exploitation. With each model, we developed and/or adapted a fun and engaging drama game that would bring awareness to these very serious issues and create critical debate. Using drama games to encourage safe conversation about social issues is one of the main points of our Artistic Directors’ M.A. Applied Theatre training and is at the core of the ethos of our company. With this particular project, we noticed that many of the school groups used these drama games as a basis to develop bits of their final drama pieces.
The second workshops focused on guiding the groups in devising their short performances. We were pleased that although every school participated in the same first workshop, they were creative and developed very different ideas with different storylines, characters, and concepts. One of the main aims of the second workshops was for each young person to create a very detailed character. We guided them in characterisation with activities such as writing diary entries as their character, thought-tracking as their character, and physicalising these characteristics with frozen images. It was really great for us to be able to see how the groups had clearly taken on board the key learning from session one, one teacher even expressing to us in an email;
“Thanks you once again, It’s been a fantastic project to be apart of so far and we look forward to the audition. You have both contributed so much value by explaining CSE & increasing awareness and understanding for our students.”- Staff member supporting one of the groups
Just a few short weeks after our second workshops within the schools, each group performed their final pieces in front of a panel of expert judges in early February 2018. Many of the teachers that worked with these students told us that the groups worked on their own to develop their short plays with very little help from the adults who were working with them. We saw five diverse and imaginative performances, packed with different and well-developed characters, interesting storylines, CSE facts and figures, physical theatre, spoken word, and music. We were very proud of what these young people created and the autonomy that they had over their work!
Two of the schools were chosen to perform at The Curve in Slough on 13 March for the council’s CSE Awareness Day event. Although only two schools were chosen to perform on this day, we believe that every single student learnt very important information, was able to be creative in an exciting way, and worked as a part of a team. Every school should be very proud of these amazing Year 8 students and their hard work!