Arts

On the 9th of September Nexus hosted the renowned British theatre company 'Paper Birds' . The IGCSE and IB Drama & Theatre learners all took part in an all day devising workshop led by Paper Birds member Josie Dale-Jones.

Paper Birds is a devising theatre company, with a social and political agenda. They are recognised as UK leaders in verbatim theatre. Verbatim is a style of theatre that uses material from real world scenarios, often using verbatim or word for word dialogue.

We’re artists, investigators, entrepreneurs, educators. We pride ourselves on taking complex, multi-faceted subjects and making them accessible. We have an artistic programme and a creative learning programme and nurture both equally.

Josie led our learners in a couple of fun warm ups, helping the group to come together and develop trust, which is so essential when creating collaborative theatre. Many of our learners had never worked together before and it was brilliant to see them relaxing in each-others company and being able to play with movement and and space without feeling self conscious.

The theme for this workshop was climate change, and the learners looked at one of Greta Thunberg's speeches and discussed what climate change meant to them.

They then spent time creating material in a variety of different ways, such as interviewing each other and recording their responses verbatim; writing fairy stories about climate change, and creating advertisements. By selecting from this material and then adding movement to it, the groups were able to create a series of short abstract verbatim performances with a hard hitting message on climate change.

All our examined groups have to create a devised performance during their courses, so this workshop was a really valuable experience for our learners. They were able to learn collaboration skills, devising skills as well as learning a new style of theatre. For our IB learners, the opportunity to meet and get up close to a member of a theatre company that they have previously been researching about was a rare moment, and they were a little star struck!