Day 2

On day two we used some simple interactive games to wake us and get the group engaged. The body part game and jump, clap, stop. 

We then were given an article and had to bring it to life using performance. The article was about women in employment. We had to use the facts and we had to be creative. In my group we used the facts and transformed them into a poem, which was acted out by another girl in my group to explain the story. The use of poetry allows the audience to become more engaged, rather than using spoken word, rhyming the sentences is more intising. The reason for this was to introduce us to the idea of the living newspaper which was explained to us later on that day.

After watching everyone's interpretations of how to express facts and news reports creatively, Paul placed sheets of paper down for us to write all our dislikes, hates and things that annoy us. By doing this we started a short debate about the opinions that had been written down. This was so to give us some idea about what we could use for our maps as a theme or even a theme for our living newspaper. Here is a photo of what we had written down.

 "The theatre must face problems of the time" The living news paper. 

Living news paper are not CnTs invention it's a theatre form that roots in the USA. American governments invested in the theatre and the concept of" new deal". This was set up to get the economy moving by investing in public projects after the Great Depression. One of the projects set up was the federal theatre project it allowed lots of groups that were networked to share their practice with one another, as part of this project they created the living news paper. They used unemployed journalists to collect news so they could turn them into performances using huge cast and huge stages. They Stood up for the "little man" people who were affected by the Great Depression. It's been mentioned that there performances were very Brechtian with the use of Satire. They spread across to the UK in 1934 with one project which was called Bus man. This was performed when London bus drivers were on strike, they would turn up to the theatre and watch what was going on in the dispute. It's basically watching the news, live on stage. That was generally speaking the end of it.

C and T use this the living news paper for children to explore and research news articles. They created a website to use as a starting point to create your own living newspaper and to share them to people over the Internet. To allow children's view points to be heard and understood. To put it simply it is a documentary play to change things and opinions on the world.

On the C&T's website their are 3 people showing tutorials on how you can create your own living newspaper.

Rule 1- be funny , slapstick, weird stuff, it makes it more interesting.

Rule 2 - be direct, talk to the audience, such as a fact or poem don't be afraid to look them in the eye. 

Rule 3- Juxtapose ... Put different things together. Serious- funny, Makes it more interesting.

Rule 4- agitate ... get under people's skin. Get people to react!!! 

Rule 5- let the facts speak for themselves - they are interesting. People want facts back yourself up ... Illustrate them.... Put them at the centre of what you do!! 

After this we then had a go by ourselves to create our own living newspapers. My group decided to use the theme history of hauntings in Northampton. After deciding on our theme we found an app called Ghost Lens.

It allows users to create ghost pictures by fading objects and people In and out of shot. It took a while for my group to figure out how to use the app. After two hours of playing around with it we managed to create some great shots and videos of different historic Hauntings in Northampton and we was then able to pin them on to our maps. 

This was taking in the Royal and Derngate. A recreation photo using the app, of the ghost that haunts there. The grey lady. 

Before leaving Paul introduced the idea of Camera voice. We used our phones to take pictures on our journey home. The methodology behind this is to personify the camera. We used the camera as a witness to events and if it could say what it seen, what would it say? The camera voice is a great method to capture life in still shots and get to the heart of what the meaning is. Here is a short example I have pinned on my map.