EDUCATION
Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester
In 2006 the Royal Exchange in Manchester commissioned by One to One Children’s Fund, established its own young people’s theatre group made up of Muslim and Jewish students and they produced their own show, 24 Hour City. This piece was devised under the stewardship of Janine Waters, the Royal Exchange Community Partnerships Coordinator, and a Muslim outreach worker.
The play was an entertaining exploration of what it means to live in Manchester, stories of the actors’ families’ immigration to Britain, and a sequence in which they all lived together in a Big Brother-style house.
The group was brought together again in December 2007 for a special schools performance as the culmination of the first phase of the second year of work. In the audience were Key Stage 4 students from the two local schools involved in the play, Whalley Range High School for Girls, and Chorlton High School. Both schools have a number of Muslim and Jewish pupils.
As it turned out, girls from the two schools expressed hostility towards each other when visiting the Royal Exchange at the December 2007 performance of 24 Hour City which brewed into a genuine conflict. It looked like it would be a challenge to work with the students, even with the support of a citizenship teacher at one of the schools and North West Citizenship Coordinator.
Very skilfully, these attitudes and feelings were converted into the basis for an improvised play which the young people worked on with the RE Theatre in three separate sessions at each school during the spring term. The 14 March 2008 performance of the play Purple and Black was the first time the two groups were on stage together running through the whole script.
The piece took them on a journey from antagonistic behaviour with the two groups glowering at each other from opposite sides of the stage, asking “What’s it got to do with me?” Almost all asserted that the conflict had nothing to do with them. They gradually came to realise that political conflict, though far away geographically, could indeed affect them. The central image of the piece they created was about an earthquake earlier that month in Lincolnshire which sent tremors that could be felt as far away as Lancashire. They ended the play being able to approach each other, see others as people too and symbolically swapping school blazers, purple and black.
In Manchester, live work with school pupils in classroom sessions and a performance at the theatre has actively encouraged dialogue, co-existence and understanding of conflict resolution by pupils immersed in a creative endeavour.
The work during the summer term was centred on working with the schools to devise a resource for teachers which will enable the learning and results of the two years’ work to be widened to many more schools and students in the region. Janine Waters and Richard Demby developed a workshop to demonstrate the use of drama in Citizenship teaching in schools and organised an INSET day on 27 June 2008.
This INSET day for secondary and FE teachers at the Royal Exchange focused on using drama as a vehicle to explore themes and issues of conflict and conflict resolution, which are key themes in the Citizenship National Curriculum. It was an extremely positive day (attended by 2 representatives from One to One Children’s Fund) and many of the 20+ educators who were there expressed a keen interest in ongoing involvement in this area and exploring the possibility of piloting the education resource produced by One to One Children’s Fund.
see our work in action