Lauriston Lights ... Camera... Action!

August 2014. After a pause to recover and reflect on our amazing maiden voyage to Sri Lanka, and the success of the drama projects with both Tea Leaf Vision and Child Action Lanka, Tie Dye Drama were back and raring to go. This time: on home turf! We teamed up with the wonderful charity, Lauriston Lights, for an afternoon of high energy workshops with equally lively 11 year olds from the East end of London.

In its own words, ‘Lauriston Lights is a charity which aims to empower and inspire bright children from disadvantaged backgrounds to reach their full potential through communication and learning’.

We found that the guys there shared many of our core values and we were excited to incorporate our workshops into their amazing summer scheme, focusing on those important concepts of empowering and inspiring the children involved.Whereas our initial challenge as a company was in learning how to tailor our workshops to suit the needs of children and young people in Sri Lanka, this was a chance for us to bring our skills back to the UK and to think about how we would make our workshops relevant and useful for British children. The children involved in LL’s summer programme were year six leavers so, with this in mind, we focused the workshops on the theme of transition.

As always, Tie Dye’s main priority is to provide useful workshops, which explore the lives of its participants using drama as a tool. After some fast paced warm up exercises to get the energy pumping, we opened up a dialogue with the children as to what their thoughts and feelings were about making the jump from primary to secondary school.

Many of them said they were excited, but they also voiced some concerns and fears about this transition: What if I can’t find my way around the school? What if I don’t make any new friends? What if the work is too difficult? It became clear to us, and to the kids, that despite their vibrant personalities and enthusiasm, they all shared similar worries about what lay ahead.Having stimulated this discussion, we used our old favourite game ‘Islands of Importance’ to assort the children into random groups (dRaMa sKiLlz).

Now they were all warmed up and jumbled up, we were ready to take their ideas and put it into performance. The performance wasn’t focused on the problems per se, but rather how they would go about solving them, thus giving the task a positive focus. The concept? A mock youtube video aimed at next year’s leavers to show them how to tackle any similarly negative thoughts they might have. In aiming the videos at children younger than themselves, the task gave the kids a sense of maturity. By giving advice, we hoped that they would, in turn, feel a sense of empowerment that they had the tools to solve these problems for themselves. It also created a sense of community: everybody was facing the same transition and they were not alone in feeling apprehensive.So, why the youtube video idea? We thought rather than creating bog standard role plays, the kids might be excited by the idea of being filmed and playing up to the camera. They all use youtube in their everyday lives and so the idea appeared familiar, relevant and cool. After reassuring a couple of worried faces that we wouldn’t actually put these videos on the internet for the world to see, the kids got to work in their groups and thought about the ways they could tackle their given problems. We encouraged them to use their imagination and to play with different ways of presenting their ideas.

With limited time, they worked with a level of energy that surpassed anything we’d ever seen (!) and out of the madness came some really impressive performances, incorporating raps, dance and physical theatre. Not only was this an opportunity for them to showcase their (bloody brilliant!) performance skills to each other, it also showed each child how to overcome their fears.

By working together, they had come up with the ideas themselves of how to solve potential problems that may arise when they get to secondary school. This idea is reminiscent of (our Lord God) Augusto Boal’s idea that theatre is a ‘rehearsal for life’. Seeing the progress the kids made, from voicing their fears to brainstorming solutions to putting that into performance, these words certainly ring true.

We really hope that the children not only had a really fun, energetic afternoon of drama, but that the workshop gave them confidence in the knowledge that for every problem there is a solution and that as a result, they felt more prepared to journey into their next stage of their lives.We absolutely loved working with Lauriston Lights and thoroughly enjoyed facilitating the workshops for such energetic, bright and inspiring children. We couldn’t have hoped for a better response from them as they threw themselves head first into performance and came up with some absolutely amazing ideas.

We’ve since had some really encouraging feedback from Adam, the director of the charity, about the time we spent there, kindly remarking that we ‘were all very confident, component and professional’. However most important was the feedback he provided about the children’s responses, explaining how they ‘were made to feel at ease right away’ and that ‘many remarked afterwards how much they enjoyed themselves’. We can’t really ask for better than that!

So what’s next for Tie Dye? Working with the children at Lauriston Lights really left a lasting impression on us and we began to think about ways of extending these workshops to eleven year olds throughout the country, preparing them in their transition from primary to secondary schools. Mattie currently has a model for a project, and we are now looking to make links with primary schools to enable us to carry out workshops in a similar vein towards the end of the academic year.

And Sri Lanka? Oh we haven’t forgotten our paradise island! We are always bombarding each other with messages, photos and memories of how special it was and how proud we are to have been able to achieve the work we did. As much as we would love to go back and do it all again, we feel it is important to pass the baton and encourage emerging facilitators to take up where we left off. We hope to go back to Manchester University in the near future to give a talk on our project and look to recruit (hehe) new wide eyed soon-to-be-graduates who we can mentor and hopefully link up with the charities in Sri Lanka to build on what we began. So keep your eyes peeled because the best is yet to come!