Here I am at Jumpstart - the Drama Victoria Mini-conference day at the glorious Abbotsford Convent. Drama educators here today are learning about vineblogs - they are also hearing about The climbers blog and many will be reading it. It has been great to read others. I’d like to encourage any visitors to our blog to leave a comment - Dramability folk will love to hear from you.
Back soon!
Jo
This is the first sprout of the Climbers Blog. At last it has begun! The seeds of a new life have been sown and the first shoots begin to emerge.
A bit about us
This blog is recording the Vine Project performance work of a community based drama and theatre group that meets in the theatre of a community arts centre on Wednesday evenings each week to work on drama skills and create theatre. The group is made up of some pretty seasoned performers as many members have been with the group since it started 9 years ago and some were even performing long before then. Most of the members of the group are adults with disabilities but we prefer to focus on the abilities and hence the group is called Dramability - there are some exceptional talents. My name is Jo and I am the Artistic Director for this project. There are also some talented and committed Deakin University students involved in the project.
Starting out
Last night we talked about The Vine Project. I brought in some long pieces of vine from my garden and we contemplated it for a while -thinking about how a vine grows - latching onto things and sprouting leaves and fruit and flowers along the way. We talked about The Vine Project being like that - connecting groups of performers up and being a growing, spreading, organic thing. People thought it was a good idea to be able to tell others about the drama work we do as well as reflect on our processes. We also thought it will be interesting to find out what other groups are doing too and may be have some kind of conversation with them.
We started to think about names for our vineblog. Andrew suggested Bob! There were lots of other inteesting ideas flying about but I think it was Pauline who suggested Climbers. She was thinking along the lines of types of vine but we thought Climbers was appropriate because it suggests going higher and there are lots of ambitious people in the group. Katrina said that was like the group - getting bigger and better every time. So we settled on Climbers for now. Some of us will take responsibility for writing the blog but everyone’s thoughts and ideas will be included.
Changing the World and other small matters!
We talked about the theme for the 2007 IDEA congress in Hong Kong -Planting IDEAS and the central quote as a starting point for The Vine Project - ‘With our thoughts we make the world’.
Then we considered ‘the world’. I asked everyone to close their eyes and listen carefully. After a while they had to open their eyes and tell us what they had heard. People heard sounds form inside the room to sounds in the streets outside. We talked about this as being or immediate world - the here and now, the people we are connected to, the community we live in etc. We then looked at a globe of the world and talked about the bigger world and all that it involved. Then we took the idea of ‘Changing the World’ - what would you want like to see changed in the world? Ideas were recorded on large sheets of paper. There were lots of ideas. Here are some things people wanted to see change: wars, rights for people with disabilities, discrimination (race, disability etc.), welfare, wellbeing, transport, the environment, homelessness, poverty.
We also did a lot of other work in the workshop involving movement, focus, music, bamboo sticks and stuff. So, where to from here? Tune in next week to find out what we are going to do next.
Cheerio for now! Jo