Ribbon of Silver
£14.95
This article gives some background to the aims and objectives of Theatre Powys Company’s TIE programme, Ribbon of Silver. It then offers some approaches for the individual classroom teacher who wishes to further explore the material.
The elements of a participatory TIE programme (text, story, theatre image, dramatic action, role, carefully selected settings, objects, perhaps music) are combined with drama conventions to create the fictive context and the fictional world for the participants to enter and explore alongside the actor/teachers.
This process allows the complex interrelationships between human beings and the world in which we live to become tangible for the participants. That complexity then becomes available for exploration and the journey from curiosity, through empathy, imaginative insight and action, to new understanding can begin.
The children work together. They work collectively. They take action consciously and transform the fictional world they are exploring. They are free to exercise power and challenge authority. This exercising of power demands listening, communicating, negotiating, challenging and supporting one another. The actor/teachers provide a living, mediating bridge between the fiction we are co-creating and the real world that we and the students inhabit.
Learning objectives:
- To examine a classroom
- To define the class as a community
- To develop our ability to empathise and, technically, to explore combining narrative and significant action
- To consider the power of stillness and silence; to allow the space for the recipients’ imaginative engagement
- To further develop empathy
- To develop the use of ritual forms to slow down time and deepen understanding
- To further explore the power of theatre image
- To look at the concepts of unity and difference
- To further explore narrative and significant action
- To explore how objects are signifiers of meaning.
Number of lessons: 5
