Thanks for purchasing our Digital Workshop Series! We at The Paper Birds have worked hard to ensure that all the exercises included in these sessions are broad enough to work with any stimulus, whilst ensuring that participants gain a detailed understanding of the techniques and processes that we use in the making of our original devised theatre.

There are 4 workshops spanning the key ingredients of our work:

1. Verbatim
2. Movement & Motif
3. Character & Narrative
4. Exposing the Method

INTRODUCTION

We have suggested that you might run an introductory session before playing out these workshop videos to participants, so that they gain a bit of insight into who we are and what we do.

This brief video introduces us and what our company aims are: Who are The Paper Birds?

You could use this PowerPoint and Intro Workshop to begin exploring our ideas: An Introduction to The Paper Birds

We also suggest that participants have a stimulus or ‘umbrella’ theme already in place that they are going to use for their devising process. They need to have conducted some research to use in the sessions, they need to have prepared;

• An interview – this can be found online, or can be conducted by themselves. The interview needs to be relevant to their theme. They need a transcript printed out of the original words to use in the session. This material will be used in Workshop 1: Verbatim.
• They need to bring with them a pair of socks for Workshop 1: Verbatim.
• A list of characters that they foresee will be in the piece – they may already have names and exact people in mind, or this list could be more generic, eg, main character, her mum, her best friend etc. This list will be used throughout All Workshops.
• Research around their theme – print off some statistics, facts and figures or other info they can find from the internet. This will be used in Workshop 3: Character & Narrative.

NEED TO KNOW

We have designed this pack so that you can see what the content of each workshop is, and included the slides from the video where we present each task. But we’ve also included a ‘Need to Know’ comment alongside some of the exercises – this is for you the facilitator, to help, encourage or assist participants in the room as they work.

TIMINGS

We have tried to include as much content as possible in each workshop – but, we recognise that some participants work through material quicker than others. The timings we have suggested for each task are based on how long we might give students to respond to an exercise if we were present in your school leading it – this is part of our general approach when we work in schools, encouraging participants to work quickly – BUT you know your students, and if you want to give them more or less time for each task, then please do so.

We also haven’t factored in time in the sessions for showing back work – so if you want to have groups perform any of the material they’ve developed in an exercise, you would need to add that in. (In short – even though it’s billed as an hour’s session – you could use just one video over several lessons.)

PAUSE

At the point that we set participants a task to work on, a slide will come up with instructions.

The slides will remain on screen for only 1 minute. The idea is that you pause the video here whilst participants work and respond to the task. You can then press play again for the next exercise when you are ready to move on.

HAPPY VIEWING!

LET US KNOW HOW IT GOES!

Digital Workshop Series

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